I
continue to work on The Vampire of Rome, but this week, progress has
been a bit slow. Lots of things are occupying my writing time, and
that just will not do. Like spice, the stories must flow. I shall
endeavor to make up on lost ground this weekend. A small snippet to
whet your appetite while we wait for October to arrive.
He
opened it to reveal an old cramped 1920 style elevator complete with
a scissors folding screen door to keep the occupants from falling
out. That was also shoved aside and we entered.
Father
Antonio moved over to a bronze handle that had an arrow head tip. The
plate where it was pointing said “Caleus,” moving the handle up
and the arrow head down lead to the second position “Inferus.”
Roughly translated; Heaven and Hell.
This
week I have gone a bit further afield in introducing you to authors.
I will readily admit I have read and enjoyed many books by Louis
L'amour and what could be better than a Western? How about a
noir-Western that's not all cowboys and Indians? This week
I give you Quinn Kayser-Cochran, and his upcoming book WIDOWMAKER.
Tagline:
When the frontier closed, the West got wilder.
Logline:
When his longtime employer turns on him, a troubled company detective
switches sides in a 1907 conflict tearing apart the isolated mining
camp of Delamar, Nevada.
WIDOWMAKER
is the first book in a semi-noir series following Shepherd Sunday, a
war-scarred veteran of the Boxer Rebellion and Philippine War, and
former chief of security for the Eastern Nevada Mine Owners’
Association.
It
is 1907—an era of Ragtime saloons and isolated mining camps,
horse-drawn wagons and swift new motorcars, overnight millionaires
and unemployed hordes. In the scramble for Nevada’s incredible
mineral wealth, mine owners and unions are locked in a
death-struggle. In this war, no one is neutral, but the orders
detective Shepard Sunday follows put him at odds with his
long-dormant conscience. When his boss decides he wants Sunday’s
girlfriend for his own, Sunday realizes
there’s
a price
on
his head and that the only people he can turn to are his former
enemies in the miners’ union. Evidence of a monstrous fraud may be
what Sunday needs to
bring
down his boss’s corrupt empire, but only if he can survive long
enough to take it public. Fraught with class, social, and race issues
that echo across the decades, WIDOWMAKER is a white-knuckled tour of
one of America’s forgotten battlefields.
“Huge
gold strikes this past decade have pulled Nevada out of its
depression, but they’ve also set a certain breed of men over the
rest of us. Men who worship money and power. Remorseless men
determined to crush anyone standing in their way. Men like my boss,
Jack Lipford. Coming home after the war, there was a ready market for
men with my skills, and I’ll admit I sold myself cheaply. For the
past two years, I did whatever he asked. Anything to bring the
miners’ unions to heel: arson, theft, and—however sorry I am to
say so—murder. Anything Lipford wanted and all I have to show for
it is scars and a guilty conscience. Man’s never satisfied, though,
and when he went for my girl, I couldn’t take it anymore. Should’ve
seen it coming. Now my closest friends are dead and my former
deputies are trying to run me down. Give me enough time, though, and
I can handle them. Handle them all or go down fighting. Lipford,
too—hell, I know his weaknesses better than anyone. As it is, I’m
running so hard now I can barely catch my breath. No breath, no
water, and no rest. Lord, just give me a little more time and I will
set things right again.”
Excerpt
from WIDOWMAKER:
Funny
thing about these desert snowstorms: rarely does anything accumulate.
On the highest peaks, sure, but down in the basins or on west-facing
slopes like the one Delamar occupies, often nothing stays. It can
storm for hours on end but the stuff just blows away. I don’t know
where it all goes.
No
one’s out now and the streets are empty. Big Curt has chains on the
tires so other than some slipping and sliding, our drive up to the
Black Cat is uneventful. We talk shop. Nothing friendly and nothing
important, and since neither of us can keep
the
windscreen clear, before long he has
to lean
outside just to see the road. This pretty well kills the
conversation. Almost as bad, the fast-falling snow throws back so
much glare from the Pierce-Arrow’s headlamps that he simply shuts
them off and runs dark. Curt is nothing if not confident, though, and
we continue at a pace that seems excessive in view of conditions.
Road uphill is narrow but not especially steep, and good thing, too,
given that it turns back on itself five or six times before we reach
the narrow summit of Chokecherry Ridge. Down the ridge’s back,
though, Christ, the road’s a rocky mess and it’s a wonder my
teeth aren’t chipped. Curt has to throttle back until we are barely
crawling between the whitened cedars.
Typical
for this corner of the district, the Black Cat Mine is a shirttail
outfit. Its dumps are small. Full-time crew of six, around
four-hundred feet of drifts, and three buildings clustered near the
main incline’s mouth. A concrete magazine for storing explosives
hunkers in the woods a hundred yards to the south. I know this
because I have one of the keys to it. To date, I don’t think the
property has produced more than a few carloads of shipping ore. Could
be that the Association keeps it going so that those of us in
security have someplace we can put in scutwork without attracting
attention. Or maybe it’s a blue-sky concern, operating just so our
boss’s agents can curb stock in San Francisco and New York. Again,
I don’t know.
Curt
says something, but it sounds like he has a frog in his throat. “You
hear about the Gold Cord’s
run-up?”
Wasn’t
paying attention so I ask him to repeat himself.
“The
Gold Cord, bub; upper Helene Wash. Cobb Farlane’s outfit.”
“Haven’t
followed the markets in a while.”
“Your
loss.” Curt clears his throat, spits out the window, and wipes his
mouth with his sleeve. “One of the shift bosses told me something
was doing—that they’d struck a rich, new ledge but weren’t
gonna announce it for a few days—so last week I bought a thousand
shares at twenty-five cents. Closed this afternoon at four and
three-quarters. Sold it all, too—how do you like that?”
“It’s
something, alright. Congratulations.” Who knows if he’s telling
the truth or just trying to get a rise out of me?
“Minus
commissions, that forty-one hundred, eighty dollars.”
“I
can do the math, Curt.”
The
car’s rear wheels spin and spit rocks as we climb a rough stretch.
I grab a strut to keep from bouncing out the door and a shotgun in
the black seat clatters to the floor.
Soon
as the car reaches firmer ground, Curt coughs and spits out the
window. “Thought you played the markets, no?”
“Not
lately.”
Not
since last March, anyway. Goddamn system’s rigged as far as I’m
concerned. Back in February I was a rich man, too—on paper, anyway.
Lasted about two weeks and then the floor collapsed. I’ll bet
thousands of people all around this state could tell you how they’ve
been butchered in
similar
fashion. Nevada has more former millionaires than New York and Boston
have real ones. Me, I’d been reading about all the bigwigs making a
killing—Charles Schwab, Bernard Baruch, and George Wingfield—and
caught Greenwater fever at the eleventh hour. Sucker. Bought $5,000
worth of shares on margin. Watched these soar to $95,327.15, and
ended up with a trunkful of paper worth about forty-five cents—all
in the span of thirteen days. Worked off-book to pay down most of
what I owed the broker, collecting debts and such, but still I’m
short about a thousand dollars so I’ve been living like a bum ever
since.
And
despite
this
smashup—hell, because
of
it—I can’t help keeping my eyes peeled for the next big play.
Just how it is out here. Everyone’s afflicted, everyone’s looking
to get rich overnight. Something new ever comes along, mark my words,
this time I’ll get out faster than I got in. I just need another
break.
“Too
bad for you,” Curt says before turning again and spitting out the
window.
Glancing
sideways, even as he’s straining to see through the swirling
darkness, I can see Big Curt grinning in that ugly way he has.
Bastard.
Author:
Quinn Kayser-Cochran
Website:
quinnkaysercochran.com
Twitter:
@Qkaysercochran
Goodreads:
https://goo.gl/lPK6Op
What
is your main character’s motivation?
Initially,
Sunday is obsessed with revenge against a former associate, someone
who betrayed him twice—once during the Philippine War and again
after they’d returned to Nevada. Later,
Sunday
finds himself at odds with his former boss, Jack Lipford, and his
thirst for revenge becomes a burning desire to see Lipford brought
low and his empire destroyed.
What
is his secret strength/weakness?
Sunday’s
greatest strength is his adaptability, whether assuming a false
identity
to
escape a hostile situation or improvising during
his
escape from the isolated mining camp of Delamar. His greatest
weakness is arrogance—a stubborn insistence on believing what he
wants in spite of evidence to the contrary. This leads him to
underestimate potentially lethal adversaries and to trust others who
are anything but allies.
Any
philosophical issues in this story?
I
tend to root for underdogs. For people who make amends after doing
wrong. Both of these outlooks figure into WIDOWMAKER. I also detest
the abuse of power. I cheer when abusers—whether individuals,
corporations, or governments—get their comeuppance.
In
the course of my research, I found interesting parallels between
events at the turns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
First is a concentration of wealth in the hands of a few individuals.
In both eras, these wealthy few
subsequently
used their money to try to bend the entire Republic to their benefit.
Both eras also saw widespread public opposition to these plutocrats,
there were
controversial
foreign wars, and racial animosities affected nearly every region of
the country. Lastly, both eras witnessed
rapid
and disruptive technological changes.
When
did you start to write this one and why?
I
started writing WIDOWMAKER about three and a half years ago. I love
studying the history of mining and the settlement of the interior
West, but I’m not aware of much fiction addressing these subjects
from angles that interest me. Ninety percent of the time when I tell
someone I’m writing Western fiction, they ask if it’s about
cowboys and Indians, and I am just not a cowboys-and-Indians guy.
Frontiersmen, romance, or ranching, either. Mines and miners are what
I like. I’m writing what I want to read.
When
will it be available?
WIDOWMAKER
is currently with an editor; I hope to have all my re-writes
completed by May of this year. Then my agent gets to do his magic.
Early 2017, maybe?
What’s
next in this series or in your next book?
I
imagine Shepherd Sunday still has at least a half-dozen stories left
in him, spanning the remainder of Nevada’s boom years (1900-1915),
across World War I, and on into the Great Depression. He may wander
into an adjacent state or two, but generally I see him as a creature
of the West and living out his life there. I’m done researching and
plotting books two and three, so I have a good idea what I’ll be
working on for the next several years.
Where
do you get your ideas?
Reading
and travel. Reading for ideas about people, places, and events.
Travel for the sensations unique to a particular place: it's weather,
sounds, and smells. Far easier to write about a place having stirred
its dust.
When
did you start writing?
I’ve
always enjoyed reading, and I think writing is a natural extension of
that. I wrote for creative publications in high school and college.
Had a few freelance articles published as an adult, but didn’t feel
the urge to write books until I was in my 30s. Perhaps I heard some
biological clock ticking. I’ve always held jobs where I’ve
written a great deal, though typically it’s very dry, technical
stuff. Creative writing is an antidote to all that repetition and
conformity.
Before
my kids were born, I had a small art career going and that was my
creative outlet. By some quirk in my DNA, though, I find it intensely
frustrating to sit down at the easel for anything less than four
uninterrupted hours. Now that I have kids, that just never happens.
With writing, I find I can easily pick up where I left off and ten
minutes of writing is as satisfying as ten hours.
I
don’t promote it much, though,
because
truth be told, I’d love to reel it back in for repairs. Let me spin
a cautionary tale for independents working on their first book: more
than a marketing plan, more than an online platform, even more than
an agent, what you want is a
good
editor.
Many independent authors could substantially improve their work by
finding someone (freelance editor, wise mentor, etc.) who will call
them on their BS and cull all the weak sub-plots, gaps in logic, and
flabby prose everyone puts into their first several drafts. Not
supportive friends or family who will overlook or minimize problems
to
spare
your feelings. Writing is re-writing and finding someone to coach you
through that process is essential. What you want is a cold-eyed
realist who will drag you away from your own worst instincts. That
said, finding the right freelance editor is hard. For one, the good
ones are expensive
but
you will unquestionably get what you pay for.
Someday maybe I’ll revisit GLORIETA. Then again, maybe I won’t.
There are other stories that need to be written.
Who
or what inspired you to become a writer?
Every
good book I’ve ever read. For nonfiction, I appreciate J. Anthony
Lukas, John Krakauer, Walter Karp, and academics such as Sally
Zanjani and Brian Linn.
For
fiction,
I enjoy
reading
Hilary Mantel, Joseph Conrad, Henry Miller, Donna Tartt, and Russell
Banks.
As
a reader, I skew 3/1 in favor of nonfiction, so
I
suppose my interest in fiction is my
way
of putting flesh on the bones of history. That, and I love every
minute I get to spend in front of a keyboard.
What
is the hardest part about being a writer?
Consistent
production. Distractions are everywhere. And I write slowly. I wish I
was monumentally productive, but I am not. Not at all. That’s the
reason I rarely blog: it takes everything I have to produce one
manuscript every four to five years.
I'm
pretty sure I'll be pre-ordering a copy of WIDOWMAKER as soon as it is available.
If the thought of a noir-detective Western appeals then you should
follow Quinn, encourage him to write faster, and get ready to enjoy
Nevada in the age of ragtime bands. And while we wait perhaps you'd like
to check out my dark urban fiction/horror novels -
Junior
Inquisitor Book One
Soulless
Monk Book Two
The
Witch’s Lair Book Three
