New online magazine for Western fans.

My friend Dusty Richards is always up to something. Since completing his term as president of Western Writers of America, I guess he needed something to do (besides turning out one good Western novel after another) so he gathered up a bunch of other folks and started a magazine.

The first issue of Saddlebag Dispatches is now online. It features Western fiction, poetry, and nonfiction about the West, with stories by some fine writers.

And me.

“The Passing of Number Sixteen” will run as a three-part serial in the first three issues. It’s a modern-day mystery with a rodeo setting, all about the strange shooting of a bucking horse.

Saddlebag Dispatches is free. All you have to do is click on this link: http://www.saddlebagdispatches.com/campfire.html. It will take you to the magazine, then click on the cover and the whole thing will download.

Then start reading. And enjoy.

Odds and ends, bits and pieces.

Not long ago I finished reading Drygulch to Destiny by Kirby Jonas. I’ve known Kirby for several years through Western Writers of America, but only recently learned we once lived in the same small town in Idaho (although he is much younger than I) and he took ag classes from my brother, who taught at the high school there. All that aside, it’s a big, sprawling novel about a town tamer tortured by past accusations and challenged by lawless toughs in a mining boomtown. It’s a darn good story and well worth a read. (http://kirbyjonas.com/)

Speaking of Idaho, I recently spent a weekend there working on an article for Ranch & Reata magazine. The subject of the story is a remarkable young lady named Kimberlyn Fitch. She’s an oft-decorated rodeo champion, breeds show cattle, puts in her time at the ranch, and is studying to become a nurse. That’s her on the skyline in the photo above, gathering cows along a ridge above Midnight Creek.

I’ll be back in Idaho soon to conduct a couple of workshops at the Idaho Writers League’s annual conference. A month or so later, I’ll be presenting at the Kanab Writers Conference (http://kanabwritersconference.com/) in southern Utah, and signing books at the Read Cat Bookstore.

But for now, it's back to work.

Guest Post: Lessons from the Poets.

Lynn Wiese Sneyd of LWS Literary Services—a firm which provides a variety of marketing and publicity services for authors—kindly asked me to contribute a guest post to her site. The post went online today. It’s titled “Three Things We Can Learn from Poets” and talks about a few literary techniques employed by poets and how writers of prose can employ those tools to improve what they write. Read my contribution here, http://wp.me/p2CvCp-jh, and be sure to check out the rest of Lynn’s web site to access a whole bunch of interesting and helpful information.

The ideas in my guest post are condensed from an in-depth treatment of the subject I will present in late October at the Kanab Writers Conference. (More about that later.) 

And now a word from our sponsor.

My new collection of poetry, Goodnight Goes Riding and Other Poems, is now available from Pen-L Publishing. (!) It’s available exclusively from the publisher until the end of the month, when it will go into wider distribution to all the usual places that sell books.

Until then, Pen-L is offering the book at a 15% discount, saving all you early purchasers some money. Follow this link for this special, limited offer: http://Pen-L.com/GoodnightGoesRiding.html.