Time.

This is a leap year. Leap years come around every four years to keep our calendar more or less harnessed to the sun in its travels. February, being the shortest month on the calendar, gets the advantage of leap year with the addition of an extra day. Tomorrow is that day—February 29.

I often hear people say they don’t have time. That there aren’t enough hours in a day or days in a week or weeks in a month…and so on, to do something they want to do.

Well, if you’re one of those people, you’re in luck.

Tomorrow is an extra day. A day added to your calendar to give you 24 free hours to do whatever it is you haven’t had time for. A whole day. An entire day tailor made for reading that book. Or writing that story. Or that poem. Or whatever has been nagging at you, but which somehow always falls victim to the lack of time.

The time is now. Get ready to get up in the morning and get it done. 

At least get it started, and don’t worry if you don’t get it done. There’s another tomorrow, another 24 hours, waiting. The truth is, you’ve got all the time there is. And you won’t be getting any more of it—at least until the next leap year, in 2028. Don’t wait.

Good Books.

Read any good books lately? Along with numerous other writers, I was asked by the Shepherd.com web site to list the three best books I read in the past year. Not necessarily books that were new in the past year, but books read during that period. 

For almost 40 years (don’t ask me why) I have kept a list of the books I read. So, finding my three favorites for the year took nothing more than paging back 12 months and going through the list to see which titles jumped out at me. Some surprised me, to be honest. Others almost topped the ones I chose, but not quite. Still, it was not an easy decision. Maybe, on a different day, my choices would be different.

You can see my list here: https://shepherd.com/bboy/2023/f/rod-miller. 

And don’t hesitate to wander around the Shepherd.com web site for other lists by other writers on other subjects. (Somewhere on there is my list of five Western novels about cowboys who really are cowboys, rather than the usual fare of outlaws, lawmen, gamblers, and the like.)

To read or not to read?

Book reviews can be helpful for readers. Honest book reviews, that is, not the puff pieces authors often ask friends to post online. An honest review that expresses the reviewer’s opinion of the book—good or bad—can help prospective readers weigh that opinion in their decision to read—or not read—a particular book. A review can also inspire readers to read books they had not known about or considered.

Not long ago, I got an email from the New York Journal of Books where readers find reviews on hundreds of books in every category imaginable. They invited me to join their panel of reviewers. It says on their website, “This panel includes bestselling and award-winning authors, journalists, experienced publishing executives, academics, as well as professionals across a number of disciplines and industries.” Given that, I can’t help but wonder how or where they heard about me. Still, I signed on.

Truth is, I am no stranger to book reviews. I wrote a library’s worth of brief reviews for Western Writers of America’s Roundup magazine (and not always to the authors’ satisfaction). True West magazine has asked me to review a few books. I write a lengthier book review each month for the Utah Westerners newsletter. And my reviews have appeared here and there on other occasions.

If you are not familiar with the New York Journal of Books, check it out. It may help you answer the question all readers ask: To read, or not to read?

My Favorite Book, Part 27.

 

When President William McKinley was assassinated, a high-toned politician said, “Now look! That damn cowboy is President of the United States.” The “damn cowboy” in question was Theodore Roosevelt. And he remains, to this day—despite a few Texans and a make-believe movie actor—the only real cowboy to rise to that office.

Roosevelt’s cowboy career is chronicled in The Cowboy President: The American West and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Michael F. Blake.

Blake outlines the circumstances that sent Roosevelt, a patrician New Yorker, to the frontier West where he established cattle ranches in North Dakota. More than an owner, Roosevelt worked alongside his hired hands and became adept at handling horses, working cattle, riding the range, and surviving in a hard land.

Based on detailed research, Blake relates Roosevelt’s cowboy career to his wider life, telling how the lessons he learned in the West colored his endeavors in government service, the military, politics, and family life. The result is a well-rounded picture of the cowboy president that’s interesting, intriguing, and informative.

You’ll close the book with new understanding of and appreciation for “That damn cowboy.”

Dateline: My House

 

SANDY, UTAH: Work proceeds apace at writer Rod Miller’s desk. The author recently shipped With a Kiss I Die off to Five Star Publishing. The novel follows the star-crossed love story of a young emigrant girl from Arkansas and a Mormon boy from Utah Territory, and events leading up to the historic Mountain Meadows Massacre. Given publishing schedules, the book is not expected to see the light until 2023.

In other news, Five Star Publishing recently completed the cover design for the writer’s forthcoming release, And the River Ran Red. This novel is also based on Western history and tells the story of the Massacre at Bear River, the deadliest slaughter of American Indians by the US Army in the history of the West.

But not all the writing news is related to tragic historic massacres. Miller just finished proofing page galleys for the paperback and ebook release of the hilarious Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award-winning and Western Writers of America Spur Award finalist novel, Rawhide Robinson Rides the Tabby Trail: The True Tale of a Wild West CATastrophe, soon to be released by Speaking Volumes. That publisher also revealed the cover design for Rawhide Robinson Rides a Dromedary: The True Tale of a Wild West Camel Caballero, a finalist for the WWA Spur and Western Fictioneers Peacemaker awards. Both comic novels should hit the shelves, physical and digital, any day now.

On schedule for release in early 2022 from Five Star is a novel by Miller that has already been labeled a “frontier classic,” All My Sins Remembered. Finally—for now—This Thy Brother, a sequel to his 2018 Peacemaker finalist, Father unto Many Sons, is expected for release by Five Star in the fall of 2022.

Read all about writer Rod Miller’s fiction, history, poetry, and magazine work at www.writerRodMiller.com and www.RawhideRobinson.com.

Lost by a nose.

    I miss the smell of books. It used to be I could walk into any one of a number of bookstores in my area and breathe in the smell of ink or paper or glue or dust or whatever it is that gives bookstores that distinctive smell. They were all different, I suppose, but there was something in the way they touched the nose that they shared.
    Most of those bookstores—along with their counterparts all across the country—are gone now. A few are victims of the recent and ongoing pandemic. Some lost out by being undersold once too often by online predators. And some were done in by the so-called big-box category killers that took over the market in years past, aided by business practices since declared illegal.
    The most venomous of those is still around and, in many places, is the only seller of new books still standing. Visiting those stores just isn’t the same, somehow. And they don’t smell right—they smell like coffee, rather than books.
    There are still some bookstores that smell like bookstores are supposed to smell, but there are fewer of them all the time, and they are increasingly farther between.
    I look forward to my next visit, spending time sniffing out some good books.

 

Anticipation.

Having something to look forward to makes life more interesting. At least I have always thought so. It can be something big or small, important or trivial, consequential or just for fun. But having something, anything, on the horizon helps spur us on in the direction of life.

At this writing, I have three new books on the shelf next to my bed that I cannot wait to get to. As soon as I finish the book I am enjoying now, I will open one of them—and I cannot decide which will come first. The books bear little resemblance to one another, but each is written by a writer I admire.

There’s The King of Taos by Max Evans. If it’s anywhere near as good as his Hi-Lo Country or The Rounders, it will be well worth the wait. I once had the privilege of having lunch with Ol’ Max Evans and a few other writers. He said something I will never forget; in fact, I used the line as the basis for a poem. He was telling us a story—something, he said, that happened a long time ago. He paused, then said, “Hell, when you get to be my age, everything was a long time ago.”

My friend Marc Cameron has a new novel, Stone Cross, featuring Arliss Cutter, a Deputy US Marshal stationed in Alaska—an assignment Marc knows all about, and his Arliss Cutter novels demonstrate that. Marc also knows about writing, and his political espionage thrillers featuring Jericho Quinn can keep you up nights.

Finally (for now), I have a new collection of short stories by Wendell Berry, Stand By Me. I have read many, probably most, of the stories elsewhere, but Berry is such a remarkable writer I can’t wait to read them again.

But I will have to wait.

I will wait shivering with anticipation.

One sitting each.

A “short story” has been defined as one that can be read in one sitting. That being the case, Hobnail and Other Frontier Stories, a new anthology from Five Star, is good for seventeen sittings.

Some of my favorite Western writers, including Loren D. Estleman, Johnny D. Boggs, and John D. Nesbitt are featured here. And there is a story by yours truly.

“The Times of a Sign” is about mules and jacks and horses and thievery, as it tells of a young man who takes part in a horse-stealing expedition to California, which leads to establishing a mule- and oxen-breeding operation in Missouri. As he explains to a questioner the absurdity of the sign advertising his enterprise, he relates the adventure of establishing the business.

The sign reads:

for sale

mules and oxen

breeding stock

     

What could possibly upset him so? One sitting with Hobnail and Other Frontier Stories will answer that question.

A look into the future.

Five Star, publisher of several of my books, just sent the cover design for my forthcoming novel, Pinebox Collins.

It’s about a one-legged itinerant undertaker in the Old West.

From the battlefields of the Civil War, Jonathon “Pinebox” Collins wanders the West seeking his place in the world. Cow towns, mining towns, boomtowns, small towns, growing cities—he tries them all.

Along the way, he witnesses what, where, and how the West changes America and the world. And he sees who makes it happen, crossing paths with pivotal people of the times. Among them, “Wild Bill” Hickok, whose trail repeatedly intersects with Pinebox’s.

Pinebox Collins offers a unique view of the Old West, through the eyes of a man who looks death in the eye every day.

The book is due for release in March 2020. Put it on your “to-do” list.

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 48: The only way to learn to write is to write.

If you want to be a writer, you have to write. It’s pretty hard to argue with that. But how do you learn to write? Or to write better?

I’ve heard tell the only way to do it is to write. And write some more.

It certainly can’t hurt. But there’s that old saying that says if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. In other words, if you just keep writing, you could keep making the same mistakes over and over again. That won’t help.

You could take a course. Go to a writers conference. Enroll in a writing program. All of which will most likely do you some good.

But there’s an easier way: read.

You can learn to be a better writer by reading good writing. At least it seems to have helped me, as I have never learned anything about creative writing (which my journalism degree did not cover) anywhere but in books. I love to read. I do a lot of it. And when I find a writer or a book that I especially like, I will read it again, and sometimes again and again. Once you’ve read a book enough that you don’t get caught up in the story, you start noticing how the author does things—how he chooses words, how she builds phrases, how he makes sentences, how she moves the story along, or pauses to let you catch your breath.

All those things, and many more, get embedded in your mind and when you sit down to write, they affect how—and how well—you do it.

And when it comes right down to it, reading is a lot more enjoyable way to spend time than sitting around in a classroom talking about writing.

Crass commercialism for Christmas.

Although it has nothing to do with the reason for the season, this is the time of year we shower one another with gifts. Books make fine gifts. They last a long time and the reader gets to open them again and again.

If you want my opinion (a big IF, I admit), books with my name on the cover make fine gifts. Poems. Novels. Short Stories. History. Humor. Adventure. Drama. Conflict. All set in the American West, the best part of the world. You’ll find enjoyable, engaging reading for anyone and everyone from junior high to geriatrics.

Visit www.writerRodMiller.com and www.RawhideRobinson.com for information and links to people who will take your money (but not much of it) and send you books.

Thanks, and have a Merry Christmas—and all other gift-giving occasions.

Ranching and rodeo with the Wrights.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of writing about the Wright family of Milford, Utah. You know the ones—the family with more saddle bronc riding success in rodeo than any other tribe has equaled, or even approached—or ever will.

There’s a new book about the Wrights, written by New York Times journalist John Branch. It’s titled The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West. Over the course of a few years, Branch spent a good deal of time with members of the Wright family at home, at the family ranch on Smith Mesa, at grazing permits above Beaver, Utah, and goin’ down the road with the best batch of bronc riders in rodeo.

It’s a well-written book that lays bare all the triumphs and tragedies in the family, and there are plenty of both. In a family of thirteen kids raised by a pair of hard-working parents, there is never a shortage of domestic dynamics.

For one unfamiliar with ranch and rodeo life, the author does a pretty good job of capturing the ins and outs of the West; only a few odd expressions and descriptions betray his inexperience.

Evelyn Wright, matriarch of the clan, a friend, and one of the finest women I know, tells me it is strange to read about your life and your family, and that she and her husband, Bill, found a few errors but nothing significant. After reading the book, you’ll be impressed with their bravery in allowing the reporter into their lives, knowing what would be revealed.

The Last Cowboys is a fine book about a fine family surviving broken dreams, broken hearts, and broken bones.

My Favorite Book, Part 15.

Since the late nineteenth century, the American West has been an environmental battleground. At one extreme, rabid capitalists see the region as nothing more than a rich land to be exploited for personal gain, never mind the effects their profiteering has on the land and the people who live on it. At the other extreme are radicals who believe mankind has no place in the West; that it is best left to the elements and we humans should only be allowed to sneak in and take a peek every now and then, then leave.

Most folks, as is usually the case, are sandwiched somewhere nearer the center of those extremes and look to achieve some kind of balance betwixt and between. Even then, viewpoints are fervent and disagreements intense.

Although somewhat dated since its publication in 1971, Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee paints arguments between conservation and development in vivid colors. And, the fact is, the arguments have changed little since then—or ever.

The book sets the views of David Brower, outdoorsman and long-time leader of the Sierra Club and the titular “Archdruid,” against three powerful men with contrasting views. One of the encounters lies outside the West, featuring a real estate developer on Hilton Head Island off the South Carolina coast. Another concerns mineral mining in remote areas, specifically in a wilderness location in the Cascade Range. The third, and most engaging for me, pits government dam builder Floyd Dominy against Brower during a float trip through the Grand Canyon.

McPhee, a meticulous reporter and imaginative writer, allows each man to state his case during each encounter, and allows readers to take from the debates what they will. And, like all good art and literature, Encounters with the Archdruid asks a lot more questions than it answers.

Shameless commerce (and a freebie).

It’s that time of year. ’Tis the season when giving and getting are on everyone’s mind. And what better Christmas (or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or Boxing Day) gift could there possibly be than a book. Or two or twelve.

Being a writer of books, I hope, of course, you will consider giving my books as gifts. There are nonfiction books about the history of the West, novels of the serious and silly kind, short stories for short attention spans, and poems for even shorter attention spans. Enjoyable reading for folks from junior high to geriatrics.

You’ll find information about them all at www.writerRodMiller.com and www.RawhideRobinson.com.

If you hurry, you’ll have time to read them yourself before you give them away. But if you don’t finish in time for Christmas, Chinese New Year comes around February 16 in 2018, and it’s another fine opportunity to give a book as a gift.

 Happy holidays.

Enter by December 7 to win a free copy of Rawhide Robinson Rides a Dromedary: The True Tale of a Wild West Camel Caballero on Goodreads. Visit Rawhide Robinson Rides a Dromedary Giveaway and find the button marked “Enter Giveaway” and you’re in. But hurry. Rawhide Robinson waits for no man (or woman).

My Favorite Book, Part 10.

Mountain Man by Vardis Fisher is the story of Sam Minard, a young man who leaves the settled parts of America to make his way as a free trapper in the West. Borrowing from both fact and legend of the era, Minard is loosely based on John “Liver-Eating” Johnston, and Fisher includes the disturbed widow for whom Crazy Woman Creek was named in the story.

Minard takes a Flathead woman for a wife and fathers a child, but while he is away trapping, Crow Indian warriors kill his family. The mountain man turns Crow hunter, tracking down and killing every man of the tribe he finds, which results in his being hunted by his Crow foes in an ongoing and bloody feud.

All that is well and good, and for the most part the story the book tells is not much different from other mountain man and fur trapper tales. What I like best about Mountain Man is Fisher’s lyrical language and rich imagery. I get cold and hungry every time I read the book; at other times I feel well fed and comfortable. He writes a romantic version of life in the Old West, but he romanticizes it beautifully.

The book was the basis (along with other sources) for a fine movie, Jeremiah Johnson, starring Robert Redford.

It’s a good movie. But, as is usually the case, it’s a better book.

My Favorite Book, Part 9.

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols is a strange book. It can make you laugh so hard you’ll fall off your chair. And it can make you cry.

The characters in the story are quirky, odd, strange, eccentric, and altogether realistic and believable. Nichols captures the dialect and vernacular of the people who have populated the northern New Mexico mountains for centuries in ways that tickle the ear. Equally well-drawn are the gringo interlopers who, in the name of “progress,” attempt to upset the delicate balance between people and the land.

While there are serious issues at work here, treated with the gravity they deserve, the missteps and mistakes of combatants on all sides add humor and hilarity to the telling. Pride and poverty, affluence and hubris, nature and the supernatural, legalities and scofflaws all play a role, and together they weave a wonderful tale of a town trying to survive in spite of itself.

“Spring into Books” 2017.

Book lovers who live along the Wasatch Front here in Utah are in for a treat. The Salt Lake County Library System’s “Spring into Books” event is on the horizon.

Dozens of authors (including yours truly) will be on hand, offering reading for all ages and all interests. There will also be workshops, readings, fun and games, and other activities. If you’re in the area, join us Saturday, May 20 from 2:00 to 6:00 p.m at the Viridian Event Center in West Jordan.

Otherwise, find my books online at writerRodMiller.com for good reading this spring, summer, or any season.

My Favorite Book, Part 6

John McPhee is a name you will see here again. He is, without doubt, one of my favorite writers. Some of his books are collections of articles he wrote for The New Yorker, others address a single subject.

No matter the subject, if McPhee writes it I will read it.

Witness the fact that I have read his books (and many others) on raising oranges, building birch-bark canoes, Bill Bradley, the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the Swiss Army, cargo ships, and the geology of North America—subjects I have no particular interest in but enjoyed immensely reading about.

Among my favorite McPhee books is Rising from the Plains, one of five volumes that make up his Pulitzer Prize-winning compilation, Annals of the Former World.

The book is about the geology of Wyoming, as seen through McPhee’s travels with geologist David Love. You’ll find that reading about rocks can be fascinating.  But Love is also a Wyoming boy who grew up on an isolated ranch when the West was still wild, and those stories are just as engaging as the tales about traces of the Triassic on the landscape.

This is about high-country geology and a Rocky Mountain regional geologist. I raise that semaphore here at the start so no one will feel misled by an opening passage in which a slim young woman who is not in any sense a geologist steps down from a train in Rawlins, Wyoming, in order to go north by stagecoach into country that was still very much the Old West.

So begins Rising from the Plains by John McPhee. How can you not read on?

Lies They Tell Writers, Part 35: Nobody reads anymore.

A lot of the advice you get as a writer is discouraging: Writing a book is hard work. Publishers won’t read your manuscript. Self-published books don’t sell. Bookstores won’t stock your books. Nobody reads anymore.

There’s an element of truth in all those disheartening claims.

Except the last one.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that nobody reads anymore. It’s usually attributed to all the other distractions competing for former readers’ time: TV, movies, music, video games, social media, and so on and so on.

But, the fact is, according to the Pew Research Center, 73% of adults in the United States read a book in the past 12 months. And that hasn’t changed much over the past five years. Most of them—65%—read a printed book, 28% read an ebook, and 14% listened to an audiobook. Not only are people reading, they’re reading (and listening to) multiple formats (which is why that adds up to 107%).

How much Americans read is also holding steady. Readers read an average of 12 books a year, with the “typical” reader getting through four books. Obviously, readers like me are pushing up the average—in the past year I’ve read somewhere around 60 or 70 books.

There’s no doubt people are still reading.

I only wish they were reading my books.

My Favorite Book, Part 1.

Readers—and writers—are often asked to name their favorite book. The question leaves most of us, it seems, struggling for an answer. Here’s why.

A friend sent me an article a while back in which a writer was asked to write about her favorite book. She concluded that there have been several books that were her favorites at various times of life.

That sounds right to me. And I would add that most of those favorites remain favorites. There are books I read decades ago that I go back to and enjoy all over again. There are others that stick in my memory that I haven’t re-read, but plan to someday. And there are books I enjoyed at the time, but not enough to be my “favorite.”

Back in my high school years, perhaps as early as junior high, I engaged in what we would now call “binge reading” the short novels of John Steinbeck. Of Mice and Men. Cannery Row. Tortilla Flat. The Red Pony. The Pearl. I read those, and others, back then and I have read them over and over since.

Later, I likewise enjoyed his longer books—East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, The Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley…. I have read those and others more than once, and will likely read them again.

Steinbeck is, perhaps, the first writer I read whose way of writing I noticed. Beyond the stories, beyond the characters, I enjoyed the words he chose and the way he assembled those words into phrases and sentences that, despite what they said, were engaging all on their own and a joy to read.

They were then, and they still are.

Given all that, I guess my favorite book is Tortilla Flat. Or The Red Pony. Or something else by John Steinbeck.

Or maybe something else altogether. It all depends.