June is bustin’ out all over!
Or
maybe it isn’t. Busting or not, it’s sure hot here in SE New Mexico. May’s blog
was sort of a downer (actually, it was a major downer), and I apologize for
that. Nothing much has changed in my world, which means my niece still has
scleroderma, although there’s been no biopsy to confirm the synovial carcinoma
thing, and that’s good. Probably. I still can’t hear out of my right ear, and
I’m peeved about it. But enough of that!
To
start with, Bam-Bam, my winner-picking wiener dog, has selected people’s names,
and the winners of May’s contest are:
SPIRITS
ONSTAGE: Annie Amos and Virginia Winfield
UNSETTLED
SPIRITS: Diana Smith and Johnna Smith (I don’t believe these two ladies are
related. For that matter, I don’t know if they’re ladies, but I’m pretty sure
they are).
Believe
it or not, something not merely good, but exceptionally
good, happened to me in May. I’ve had more than sixty books published since
1994, and I used to be incredibly single-minded and gung-ho about writing.
After all, writing books was the only thing I ever really wanted to do. And
puh-leeze don’t give me that “Writers write” nonsense. I was a single mother
with no money other than my crummy earnings as a secretary (a job I hated, if
anyone cares). My kids’ father didn’t see any need to pay child support, so I
worked one and sometimes two jobs in order to make ends meet. Rearing two
daughters alone, working full tim, and taking care of everything by myself ate
up all my time. There wasn’t any time for this writer to write, dad-gum it!
Every time I hear some snobby person say, “Writers write,” meaning, of course,
that no matter what, you’re supposed to be writing, I want to strangle that
person. It’s probably a good thing the arthritis in my hands is so bad, I can’t.
But honestly, do the “writers write” folks not care if their kids starve to
death? I did, and if that was wrong of me, so be it.
Oh,
dear, I’ve done it again, haven’t I? I didn’t mean to sink into negativity. Ahem.
Let’s
get back to the exceptionally good thing that happened to me in May. After
being published for so many years, earning so little money for my efforts
pretty much sapped my writing energy. It wasn’t fun any longer, and I had
trouble thinking up plots. It takes a long, long time to write a book that can
be read in hours, and if the author isn’t making any money doing it, why do it,
y’know? Fortunately for me, all those books having been published led some
folks to think I knew what I was doing. Therefore, I was offered an editing job
by a publisher. Which means, of course, I actually was making through my writing, although not precisely the way I’d imagined
it would happen.
Anyhow,
I began editing books written by Peter Brandvold. Mean Pete (he calls himself
that; I’m not being unkind) writes really, really good westerns. His books are
full to the brim with action, violence and sex. He has several ongoing series
featuring people like Bear Haskell, Deputy US Marshal; Yakima Henry, a
half-breed wandering law officer (he does other stuff, too); Mike Sartain, a
Cajun who takes it upon himself to enact justice on people who would otherwise
get away with their fell deeds; and Lou Prophet, a dissolute, funny,
big-hearted, foul-mouthed bounty hunter. All these guys are young in the books
Mean Pete writes about them in the 1880s and thereabouts. My books are set in
the 1920s.
But
you know what? Mean Pete gave me Lou Prophet! Mind you, Lou’s kind of a broken-down
crock by Daisy Gumm Majesty’s day, but he’s still a firecracker, albeit an
elderly and one-legged one. You see, after his youth was spent on tangleleg and
loose women and he got too old to continue as a bounty hunter, a film company
in Los Angeles hired him to be a consultant on some of their western flickers.
Old Lou had himself a high old time for a while there. Then one night he got
into a motorcar with two ladies of the night and a case of bootleg hooch, and
somebody drove the car off a cliff in Santa Monica (which is right on the
Pacific Ocean for anyone who doesn’t know). Lou was the sole survivor, although
he lost one of his legs during the accident. Therefore, in 1925, poor old
one-legged Lou, while still a foul-mouthed, uncouth sort of fellow, has fallen
on hard times. In fact, in SHAKEN SPIRITS, the Daisy book I’m writing now and
in which he has a part, he’s living at the Odd Fellows Home of Christian
Charity in Pasadena, California.
Doesn’t
it just seem inevitable that Daisy and Lou should get together? It did to Mean
Pete and me. Daisy and Sam break him out of the Odd Fellows Home, and Lou is
now helping Sam figure out who’s trying to kill Daisy. I haven’t had this much
fun writing a book in, literally, years.
So
thank you, Peter Brandvold! You’re not as mean as you like people to think you
are. Most of the time. Here’s a picture of Mean Pete and me when he drove
through Roswell on his way to Arizona to get away from the Minnesota winter for
a month or so (he lives in Minnesota).
For
the record, if you’re of a mind to, you may pre-order SHAKEN SPIRITS, which
will probably be published in October of this year (providing I have time to
finish it. Editing cuts into writing time, dang it).
In
the meantime, if you want to read Daisy’s latest adventure, SPIRITS UNEARTHED,
in which Daisy’s dachshund, Spike, finds a shoe with a foot in it at the
cemetery and chaos ensues, please feel free to do so:
Now.
Whatever should I give away at the end of June? Beats me. Oh, I know! I’ll give
away some of Mercy Allcutt’s books. There will be no more Mercy books, by the
way, until I can get the rights back to the last one. At any rate, I’ll give
away a copy each of LOST AMONG THE ANGELS, FALLEN ANGELS, ANGELS OF MERCY and
THANKSGIVING ANGELS. If you live in a country other than the USA, you’ll have
to settle for winning an e-book, because sending books all over the world is
too expensive for this little old crippled lady.
If
you’d like to enter the contest, just send me an email (alice@aliceduncan.net) and give me your
name and home address. If you’d like to be added to my mailing list, you may do
so on my web site (http://aliceduncan.net/) or email me (you
won’t be smothered in e-mails, because I only write one blog a month, and
that’s an effort). If you’d like to be friends on Facebook, visit my page at https://www.facebook.com/alice.duncan.925.
Thank
you!
