Johnny Gunn Writes

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Saturday, June 18, 2016

Introspection Anyone?

We’re moving toward the halfway point of the year, which might be a good time for a little introspection and reflection, maybe even some other ection if we can find one.

Our winter brought us some much-needed precipitation to the Sierra Nevada, the western Nevada valleys, and northern Nevada in general. Spring is an entirely different matter. We have gone from ultra gorgeous to fanatically evil on an every other week schedule.

Tomatoes and squash have suffered the most from the drastic changes, which included a hard freeze on June 15. If we can get the wind under high gale force, we might yet have enough veggies to fill the larder. Between chickens and rabbits, our freezer will look good for the summer and winter, but the shelves of home-canned veggies and stuff are empty.

On the publishing front, I’m dancing around like I had good sense. My very long, not quite novella length short story, Red Light Raven, http://bookgoodies.com/a/B01G2B7RUG has found numerous friends and appears to be selling well. The second book in the Jacob Chance, U.S. Marshal trilogy was released and is doing well. http://bookgoodies.com/a/B01F29L6ZQ , and I had some good news from a new publisher, New Pulp Publishing. They have released Blood of Many Nations, the first novel in a planned series featuring wild and crazy private eye, Simon Sol Dorsey, http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Nations-Simon-Dorsey-Mystery/dp/0692717161/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 .

Along with all that, Solstice Publishing has offered a contract on an action thriller I’ve been working on for several years called To Serve and Deceive. We are just getting started on the edit process and hope to have this little gem out in the next few months.

A publishing company in Great Britain has an historical frontier fiction piece under review at this time, I have an historical western fiction piece I’m working on, a second Simon Sol Dorsey piece is almost ready for review, and I’m doing research for two other westerns.

I retired from holding a real job several years ago, and I gotta say, I’m working harder now, enjoying the hell out of it more, during these retirement years, than I ever did working for the man.

I get up and five, coffee’s on auto-pilot so with a cup in hand, I feed the horses and chickens with our little Sparky Dog right at (Nay, under) my feet, then feed him, turn on the computer and have at it. When the sun comes up I head out and set the irrigation for the various garden plots, pour more coffee, and get back to it. By ten in the morning all the animals are fed and watered, the veggies are taken care of, and I usually have at least another thousand words in whatever project is on top of the heap that day.

That’s the end of the workday for me. After that, if the weather’s good, I’m outside playing with the animals or messing around in the garden or just sitting in the sun readin’ and grinnin’.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

Member, Western Fictioneers

Member, International Thriller Writers

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

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Monday, May 23, 2016

Just drive, please

Many, many years ago, I operated a small museum in Virginia City called the Pioneer Livery Stables and had more than twenty buggies, carts, wagons, and sleighs on display. I also had a team of Clydesdales and access to other horses and ponies that were trained in the harness.

It was a lot of fun to take the big team and a spring wagon into the Long Valley area, now all grown up with hundreds of houses, sometimes to spend the weekend at a springs or just take a day ride. Driving a beautiful team that is pulling a wagon that has seen a century of duty is pure happiness for me.

What brought this little commentary about has to do with driving, whether a single, a team, or more than one team. One of my wagons was used in the movie Silver Dollar, and we had four teams up on that wagon. That was surely a thrill.

The wagons, buggies, and carts were all set up to be driven from the right side, and in olden times, roadways and trails were often left hand traffic. There were few communities, territories, or states that had laws on driving. A quick view of old photos will show that, but don’t look for it in every western movie because that fact is often overlooked.

My child bride and I were watching a movie the other night and I pointed out that they got it right. The wagon was driven from the right hand seat and travelled on the left side of the road. Patty said, “When did we change to right hand traffic and left hand driving?”

There are more countries in the world with right hand traffic than left, with Great Britain and many of the old British colonies leading the left hand traffic pack. Consensus seems to be that because most people are right handed, and most weapons prior to the general use of gunpowder were operated with the right hand, if one were to meet an adversary on the road, it would be best if that enemy were to be on one’s right side. Thus, left hand traffic, which predominated until good old Henry Ford came along.

Before automobiles, though, Napoleon, a lefty, decreed that all the countries he conquered would have right hand traffic. Wonder what he would have done had he been ambidextrous?

A man named Albert C. Rose, some refer to him as being the unofficial historian of the U.S. Public Roads department, seems to think that in colonial times we had right hand traffic, but I challenge that simply because of the way buggies, wagons, carts, and sleighs were built, particularly I would like to point out, that brakes for those vehicles were operated from the right side and harness for teams was such that they worked better from the right side.

The earliest automobiles that were steered by way of a tiller had them mounted in the center, but when steering wheels came along, they were, for the most part, mounted on the right side. It was Henry Ford’s Model T that changed things. Ford put the steering wheel on the left side, and by about 1915 or so, all the American manufacturers did the same. I couldn’t find out why Ford decided to put his steering on the left side.

I also spent many years working in the mines in Nevada, and driving the huge haul trucks is something else again. Most mines demand left hand traffic on the haul roads leading from the pits to the mill. And, to make things a little more interesting, the driver often sits on the left side, but there is a good reason for that. The machine is huge, carrying as much as one hundred fifty tons of ore, and knowing where that truck is when approaching another truck is tricky. The driver is trained not to look at the other truck but rather guide his or her truck by watching the left side of the road. It works.

Driving the underground haul trucks is a whole nuther story. The drifts and tunnels are just wide enough for the vehicles to get through, and if you value your job you do not want to take out rib posts as you haul the ore out of the mine. You’re trained to look far down and in the middle of the drift or tunnel. That way your vehicle stays in the middle of the very narrow roadway.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

Member, Western Fictioneers

Member, International Thriller Writers

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

Or Tweet with me, darlin’?

Saturday, April 16, 2016

To Garden Or Not To Garden ...

My beautiful child-bride Patty and I live in what some call the inter-mountain west and others call the great basin, right along the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, about twenty miles north of Reno. Between an altitude of somewhere close to five thousand feet above sea level and the weather pattern disruption created by those lofty mountain peaks, gardening is a crap shoot every year.

There is no normal, but there is an average when we speak of end of frost danger, and that’s where the crap shoot comes in. If one wishes to make a fairly certain bet one could say there will be a cold storm with freezing temperatures and probable snow over Memorial Day weekend. One could get away with saying the three weeks before that would be sunny and warm.

Just one hundred miles to our west, right now, as you read this, in the great central valley of California, gardens have been planted, the plants are growing and blossoming, maybe even showing some fruit. I’ll not plant, even the strongest of my crops until at least May 20, and those veggies most susceptible to frost, on or about June 6. And still be fearful.

The ground is tilled, manure plowed under, seeds purchased, and I don’t even dare start them indoors since we’re talking more than a month before I could put them in the ground. A delightful friend put up one of those hoop house green houses and watched it head for Utah at more than sixty mph last year. It was last year that a dust devil lifted the horses’ weather stalls right out of the ground and set them back down in splinters.

No, a green house in western Nevada is not the answer, unless it’s made of brick and iron, which of course defeats the purpose. Some might ask, ‘why garden?’ Because of such things as fresh corn, tomatoes, green beans, squash, cucumbers, peas, melons, and chili peppers. We eat them fresh all late summer and early fall, can the rest, therefore, eat fresh from the garden food all winter, too.

It’s grand to light the BBQ on a summer’s eve, with two beautiful USDA Prime rib-eye steaks ready for the hot coals, and stroll out to the corn patch, rip a pair of ears from a stalk, and roast them, all the while toasting the gods of summer with either cold beer or fine wine.

Or, at the other end of the spectrum, enjoying the aroma of a leg of lamb in the oven, watching the blizzard bring next summer’s irrigation water to us, feeling the warmth of a roaring blaze in the fireplace, and waiting for a bowl full of green beans, swimming in butter, garlic, and crispy bacon, that you grew, picked, and canned.

So, this period, between the middle of April and the middle of May is true hell. Three days of warm weather and you are champing at the bit, and then it snows. And then, another two or three days of warmth, but no, don’t do it. The big box stores sell thousands of tomato plants to the newcomers the second week of April. Another several thousand a couple of weeks later, and then, damn me, another several thousand a couple of weeks after that. It takes a couple or three seasons before the newcomers catch on.

There’s a mountain peak called Peavine, just northwest of Reno, that stands as the gardeners’ beacon, and those that have lived in the area for many years swear by it. “Don’t plant your tomatoes until the snow is gone from Peavine.”

So, what does a frustrated old farmer do in these long weeks before one can plant? There’s a fridge full of cold beer. A rack full of fine wine. And a library full of good books. I believe I’m in heaven.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

Member, Western Fictioneers

Member, International Thriller Writers

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

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http://solsticepublishing.com/johnny-gunn/

You can find my novels, short stories and anthologies at

Solstice Publishing

Amazon.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Johnny+Gunn?_requestid=445490

Barnes and Noble

Monday, April 4, 2016

Learn Something New Everyday

I’ve always believed in the thought that one can and should learn something new everyday and not be afraid of the process. Many people don’t learn because they shy away from the thought or are egocentric to the point of believing there really isn’t anything new that they would be interested in learning.

I tried at one time to be a salesman for one of the radio stations I worked for, and while the change in career path failed miserably, I learned a little something from one encounter I had with a potential advertiser. He said to me, “I don’t need to advertise, everyone knows me and my business.”

I mentioned that to my sales manager and asked what my reply should have been. He said it happens often, and one trick he uses is to ask for the telephone book, pick a page at random and a number at random, make a call on the speaker phone and when the party answers, simply say, “We’re doing a quick one word survey. Do you know Don’s Vacuum Service Company?”

Unless it is a big successful business, most often the answer will be “no.” and the owner will hear that. Think about that the next time you’re putting together a little face book comment or tweet for your business.

This brings up something I learned recently about the publishing business. I haven’t been completely sold on the e-book concept, being a codger, a lover of hard-bound books, and a former newspaper and magazine publisher. You gotta hold it in your hot little hands, gotta smell the ink, feel the paper’s texture.

At the same time, I love to write short stories, and the real market for them is not in print magazines because few even publish short stories anymore. With fifty thousand short story writers and less than ten national publications paying for short stories, the market is limited. This is where the e-books really shine. A short story is a quick read, so taking one or two to camp over the weekend, or to the beach for the day, or on that quick flight to see your sister works perfectly.

Until my publisher, Solstice Publishing brought it up, it would never have occurred to me to think about publishing something in book form under eight thousand words. Novels generally run from about fifty thousand and up, up, up words, novellas are generally between twenty thousand and fifty thousand.

At the beach, at the weekend camp, on a day cruise across the bay, can be hard on a book, and I believe that until recently the majority of books taken out like that would be printed novels. Now, without much trouble at all, one can take one or more short stories in E format for quick reads.

Getting back to that advertising sales job, the sales manager was kind in every way when he suggested that I was a far better announcer and copy writer than I would ever be as a salesman, but I keep his thought in mind about understanding that with more than seven billion people on earth, presently, not counting our alien visitors, of course, there are just an awful lot of people that have not heard of my books. I’ve got to get busy.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

Member, Western Fictioneers

Member, International Thriller Writers

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

Or Tweet with me, darlin’?

Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Magical, Mythical, and Historically Accurate

The Mid 19^th century into the first decade of the 20^th is welded into our minds as the time of the cowboy, the local sheriff, the town marshal, the outlaw, the murderous Indian, and the frontiersman. It’s a time of myth in which the myth may well be reality, the legend is history.

Bank robbers and saloon girls, cattle rustlers and train robbers, card sharks and gunfighters are as real in our minds as are mountain men and horse soldiers, Deputy U.S. Marshals and frontier doctors, preachers and saloon keepers.

There are people performing basically the same work today, but what’s missing is the romance, the immediacy, and the flavor that was written into the history during its own time. The writers and poets of the time flavored the history for us, gave it a cream topping that won’t be felt until … well, maybe when we really do end up with classic space jockeys, and real Captain Kirks exist.

What is it about the “cowboy” that so enthralls today’s public? The cowboy is almost always portrayed as having loads of common sense, impeccable manners, a sense of wrong and right, and personal responsibility dominates. There is a duty to defend the underdog, to respond instantly to danger, and to defend a lady’s virtue at all cost.

The frontiersman of myth dominated fiction and life during the latter 18^th century and then it was time for the cowboy. Is it because the heroes are singular? We have heroes and myth surrounding war, but those myths rarely involve individuals. But the frontier hero and the cowboy hero are individuals. Even the anti-heroes, the outlaws such as bank robbers, gunslingers, and rustlers are often singular.

What will writers of fiction use for heroes a hundred years from now? Crime and mystery fiction also often features individuals, and sometimes is based on fact, but not to the extent that western fiction is. My prediction is that space cowboys are going to exist, because it’s what our mythical cowboys are made of that made them heroes in the first place, and the goodness of the human, when it is threatened makes for fine stories.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

Member, Western Fictioneers

Member, International Thriller Writers

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

Or Tweet with me, darlin’?

http://bookgoodies.com/a/B01CEUMZTW.

Thursday, March 3, 2016

Spring and Summer Comin' Our Way

We’ve spent a great deal of time giving the ground hog grief this winter, and of course he deserves every bit of it, but it’s time now to turn our attention to spring and summer, set aside the bitter cold, and welcome green leaves and red birds. Being a writer, foul weather can be a blessing, while trying to maintain a small hobby farm, the foul weather begets foul moods.

If I can’t get outside and clean corrals and chicken coops, can’t plow the fields and protect the roses, I can luxuriate in my little office and pound out vowels and consonants by the hundreds. All the while, Big Mama Nature is putting white stuff on top of the mountains and wet stuff in the aquifer, which means I might just end up with a good growing season later on.

Also, the more I can get written during the winter means the more often I can go fishing and camping this summer. The word is handed down from marble statues that date back hundreds of centuries, that to be a writer one must write every day. So, when fishing, I take notes, of the weather, the nature stuff, and anything else that pops into my limited mind whilst awaiting the next strike from a monster trout.

While camping, I have a yellow pad at my disposal day and night, and sometimes those little vowels and consonants find their way onto a page or nine. My short story, The Legend of Santé that was just released by Solstice Publishing http://solsticepublishing.com/the-legend-of-sante/ was conjured during a camping trip Patty and I took to Davis Creek Campground a couple of summers ago. Just the skeleton, mind you. It took a while to flesh it out to the fun little story it is now.

So the first day of spring is Sunday, March 20, and in my neck of the woods that means we will have frosty cold mornings, probably at least three or four more blizzards, until late in May. Our little rancho sits above 5,000 feet, so planting is always late in the spring. I cheat once in awhile and plant the root crops a little early, and often get caught by Jack Frost. That guy is not a friend.

All of that leads to that much more time to write. The garden is plotted, hopefully there will be opportunity to till in some good horse and rabbit manure, and my plans for planting are on paper. I was contemplating a story during the last big storm, watching snow swirl outside my office window when I received an e-mail notice from Solstice Publishing that they wanted some romantic short stories.

Humph, I said, I don’t write romance, and then vowels and consonants started dancing around the room and I started thinking western romance. No, I said, I’m not gonna write that some mean old law dog was going all googly eyes over the rancher’s daughter. But the idea wouldn’t let go and I started pounding the keyboard.

I was taught to type back in the ‘50s (1950s, smarty pants) on a beat up old Royal. So yes, I actually still type as if the stroke needed some muscle behind it, and I’ve been known to wear out a computer’s keyboard.

Well, getting back to the idea of a romantic western for the Solstice Valentine’s anthology http://bookgoodies.com/a/B01BH2F7E8,

I huffed and I puffed, the little piggies ran away, and I came up with what I thought was a slightly humorous western romance short story. By golly the editors at Solstice thought it was humorous enough to be included in the anthology.

Now, here’s the kicker, Solstice has also published it as a stand alone short story. Life is good if you don’t take it too seriously. I call the story Miss Minerva’s Sheriff.

I guess I really should give the groundhog a little slack. Without all those storms I might have found myself mucking out the corrals instead of getting two short stories published as stand alone books. On the other hand … Oh, never mind, let’s get the fishing gear out and make sure it’s ready to take on the trout, and we better make sure the camping boxes are filled with necessaries, and keep a close eye on that weather bird.

Until next time, read good books and stay regular

Johnny Gunn

Member, Western Fictioneers

Member, International Thriller Writers

Will you join me on facebook from time to time?

Or Tweet with me, darlin’?