Signed the Contract
Yesterday I signed the contract for the novel I wrote about lonely prospectors wandering through Nevada looking for bonanzas. The publishers would like me to work on another western for them.
About a third of my eighty novels have dealt with the mining west, a field I enjoy and largely have to myself. Some of these, like Goldfield, Cashbox, Sun Mountain, and The Richest Hill on Earth, are large-scale historical novels.
The field was originally popularized by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and has been a part of western fiction almost from its inception, although the bulk of western stories are agricultural in nature, or involve outlaws and lawmen.
Oddly, no other contemporary novelist of the west has done much with the field, so it is all mine. A lot of drama took place in mining towns, but it doesn't excite most western novelists, and not many publishers, either.
For me, it has meant writing about the actual west, where epic struggles to find and control and monopolize gold and silver and other metals played out in the late 19th century and early 20th.
It sure beats writing the usual gunfighter or lawman stories that have poisoned western fiction for decades. In those stories killing substitutes for plot, and revolvers substitute for character, so the stories are stupefying at best, and idiotic at worst. There are plenty of those on the mass-market racks so I suppose some people actually like that stuff.
But I got lucky, and found my niche writing about the mining-town west.
About a third of my eighty novels have dealt with the mining west, a field I enjoy and largely have to myself. Some of these, like Goldfield, Cashbox, Sun Mountain, and The Richest Hill on Earth, are large-scale historical novels.
The field was originally popularized by Mark Twain and Bret Harte, and has been a part of western fiction almost from its inception, although the bulk of western stories are agricultural in nature, or involve outlaws and lawmen.
Oddly, no other contemporary novelist of the west has done much with the field, so it is all mine. A lot of drama took place in mining towns, but it doesn't excite most western novelists, and not many publishers, either.
For me, it has meant writing about the actual west, where epic struggles to find and control and monopolize gold and silver and other metals played out in the late 19th century and early 20th.
It sure beats writing the usual gunfighter or lawman stories that have poisoned western fiction for decades. In those stories killing substitutes for plot, and revolvers substitute for character, so the stories are stupefying at best, and idiotic at worst. There are plenty of those on the mass-market racks so I suppose some people actually like that stuff.
But I got lucky, and found my niche writing about the mining-town west.
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