<\/p>\n
A year ago, give or take a few days, I picked up a copy of The Rattlesnake Season<\/em><\/span> by Larry D. Sweazy<\/a>. <\/span>It was the day of release, the paperback original was fresh from the cardboard shipping box, and pulp still dusted the shinny cover. <\/span>It was glorious!<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>Honestly, I had not read Sweazy\u2019s fiction before, but there were blurbs from the iconic Loren D. Estleman<\/a> on the front and the iconoclastic Johnny D. Boggs<\/a> on the back so I ventured past the cover.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>The Rattlesnake Season<\/em><\/span> is the first in a series about Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe. <\/span>The series continues with The Scorpion Trail<\/em><\/span> and the forthcoming The Badger\u2019s Revenge<\/em><\/span>. Sweazy also writes award-winning short fiction and poetry and the Wolfe novels benefit from an economy and precision of language. <\/span>The sentences are tight, the imagery crisp, and the characters painfully real.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span>And the story is exciting, too.<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Below, in the first of a two part interview, Sweazy and I talk about writing in general and writing the west in particular. \u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n * The adversity people faced in 1874 was different than what we face today. Disease, war, lawlessness. But at the end of the day, those people wanted the same thing that we want: to live a good life, to be loved, to achieve something, etc. So, I also write about striving for something, too, even if it is the most simple of things, like wanting to be home. It worked for Homer. \u00a0<\/span>What sort of Westerns do you write, and what are they key elements? \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n While my novels mostly play within the rules of the genre, I try very hard to put a human face (and heart) to all of my characters. If there\u2019s a bad sheriff, I want to know why he\u2019s bad, I don\u2019t just want use him as a plot device, and I also want to see the consequences for his actions. I want to see and feel an emotional reaction from a character. If someone dies, or is injured physically, or emotionally, it should mean something to someone somewhere. I like fast moving action, and I like to balance it with emotion, or an emotional reaction, and offer the reader something they weren\u2019t expecting from a PBO (paperback original), traditional western: A well-rounded story that delivers on multiple levels.<\/span><\/p>\n Research is important to me, too, a key element, for sure, but I\u2019m not writing historical fiction, and I make that clear in every book. I chose to start the Josiah Wolfe series at the very beginning of the Frontier Battalion, so there are historical events and historical characters peppered throughout my novels. But, Josiah Wolfe is a fictional character, interacting with these real events and characters, and that allows me to tell a story, to bend the rules a bit as I need to. Of course, I want to get as much right as I can, guns, clothes, etc. so my readers aren\u2019t jolted out of the experience, but in the end, I hope I write westerns that are entertaining, informative, and surprising. The West is, and always has been, about possibilities. A new start. A chance to succeed greatly, or fail just as greatly\u2014or worse. Think of the Gold Rush and the broken dreams, of the men who left everything for a chance in California for something better, only to face uncertainty, poverty, and even death. What\u2019s even worse, is some of the people they left behind never knew what happened to them. Think of the mothers, the wives, the children , and the hole in their lives, forever, not knowing the truth about what happened to their loved ones. There are millions of stories set in the West that have yet to be told. It was a defining moment in our nation\u2019s history, for good and for bad, and that offers a writer a vast amount of characters and stories to choose from. \u00a0<\/p>\n The distance, however, also gives me some perspective, that I think is invaluable to me and prevents me from getting bogged down in details that detract from the story. There are several working western writers who live east of the Mississippi. Loren Estleman, Cameron Judd<\/a>, Robert J. Randisi<\/a>, to name a few. So, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s a deal breaker to live outside of Texas, and write about it. I have to be very aware of the flora and fauna, the history in a city like Austin, or the Hill Country. I\u2019m not convinced that my research would be any shallower if I actually lived in Texas. But it would be nice to walk out into the country and smell the air and see the sights, at that very moment, when I needed to. <\/span><\/p>\n * \u00a0<\/p>\n I think a lot of writers, and readers, would be surprised to see the depth of emotion in a lot of Westerns being written today. It wasn\u2019t that long ago that westerns were considered literary fiction, when there wasn\u2019t a genre that categorized novels in a place that some people find disparaging; think Owen Wister\u2019s The Virginian<\/em><\/span> or Ernest Haycox\u2019s \u201cStage to Lordsburg\u201d that went on to be made into the movie, Stagecoach. Westerns today reflect the same amount of quality writing, if not more. <\/span><\/p>\n *<\/span><\/p>\n Jeremy L. C. Jones <\/em><\/a>is a freelance writer, editor, and teacher.\u00a0\u00a0He is the Staff Interviewer for <\/em>Clarkesworld Magazine<\/em><\/a> and a frequent contributor to <\/em>Kobold Quarterly<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 He teaches at <\/em>Wofford College<\/em><\/a> and <\/em>Montessori Academy<\/em><\/a> in Spartanburg, SC.\u00a0 He is also the director of <\/em>Shared Worlds<\/em><\/a>, a creative writing and world-building camp for teenagers that he and <\/em>Jeff VanderMeer <\/em><\/a>designed in 2006.<\/em> <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A year ago, give or take a few days, I picked up a copy of The Rattlesnake Season by Larry D. Sweazy. It was the day of release, the paperback original was fresh from the cardboard shipping box, and pulp still dusted the shinny cover. It was glorious! \u00a0Honestly, I had not read Sweazy\u2019s fiction before, but there were blurbs from the iconic Loren D. Estleman on the front and the iconoclastic Johnny D. Boggs on the back so I ventured past the cover. \u00a0The Rattlesnake Season is the first in a series about Texas Ranger Josiah Wolfe. The series continues with The Scorpion Trail and the forthcoming The Badger\u2019s Revenge. Sweazy also writes award-winning short fiction and poetry and the Wolfe novels benefit from an economy and precision of language. The sentences are tight, the imagery crisp, and the characters painfully real. \u00a0And the story is exciting, too. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[75],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=995"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1536,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/995\/revisions\/1536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booklifenow.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nWhat do you write about?
\n*
\nLarry D. Sweazy:<\/strong><\/span> I think any good story, regardless of genre, focuses on the human condition. I learned a long time ago that you\u2019re never alone if you have a good book to read. You can visit other countries, other worlds, other minds, and come away feeling like you\u2019re not the only person in the world experiencing a rough patch. I write about overcoming adversity. I\u2019m interested in good people making bad decisions, and suffering the consequences. Or bad people making good decisions, and being rewarded in ways they didn\u2019t expect. Or accidents happening, and how they affect a character. Does an act of God break a man or make him stronger?<\/span><\/p>\n
\n*<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n
\n*
\nLarry D. Sweazy: <\/strong><\/span>I write traditional westerns. The term conjures a whole list of clich\u00e9s, I think. Bad Sheriff terrorizes an isolated town, power hungry ranchers battle weak, defenseless farmers, the gunfight in the street, etc. My current series, Josiah Wolfe, Texas Ranger, of course, is set in the state of Texas in 1874. There are a lot of westerns out there that feature Rangers during this time period, so I had to embrace the clich\u00e9s, and try to be fresh at the same time. <\/span><\/p>\n
\n*
\nWhat do you enjoy about writing in general? What do you enjoy about writing the West in particular?
\n*
\nLarry D. Sweazy: <\/strong>I am very lucky that I can walk into my office every morning, and sit down to write. Having the ability to write in the same place, at the same time, every day, is something I worked toward for a very long time. So, first off, the physical act of writing is pure joy for me. But that doesn\u2019t make the words come out any easier day after day. There is still a struggle to meet my word count every day, to craft a good story, to balance all of the business demands, but I never lose sight of how lucky I am. I don\u2019t derive all of my income from writing fiction, I\u2019m a freelance indexer, as well (I write back of the book indexes for technical and scholarly books), so there is always a time challenge to face. I get energy from that, from managing my days, and I like the freedom I have, and the variety of projects that come across my desk. I hope that joy is reflected in the final versions of all of my work.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
\n*
\nAnd what is the biggest challenge in writing the West?
\n*
\nLarry D. Sweazy:<\/strong> For me, it has to be the distance. I live in Indiana, so writing about Texas presents its challenges. I strive to get the research right, but at times it can be difficult. I have a vast array of guidebooks, birds, trees, wildflowers, that I have collected over the years, as well as other research material focusing on Texas. They help. It also helps that I lived in the Dallas area for nearly five years, the longest I\u2019ve ever lived in a place outside of Indiana. I also try to get out West, and to Texas, every couple of years on research trips. I have a trip coming up next spring that I\u2019m looking forward to. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n
\nWhat can a writer who doesn’t usually read Westerns learn from reading within the genre?
\n*
\nLarry D. Sweazy: <\/strong><\/span>There are a lot of good writers working in the field today, and I think a writer or reader who snubs westerns as purely shoot \u2018em, violent, one-sided depictions of the past are missing a lot of great storytelling. Robert Conley<\/a>, a Cherokee, is the first Native American to serve as president of WWA (Western Writers of America<\/a>). Robert has written over 80 books, fiction and non-fiction, and is not all that well-known outside of the western world. His perspective of the West, understandably, is different than mine. It\u2019s a shame, because Conley, like many others, such as Loren Estleman, Cameron Judd, James Reasoner<\/a>, and Robert J. Randisi, should be household names. Writers should read the best in all of the genres if he, or she, wants to be well-rounded. <\/span><\/p>\n