Dear All:

With our lecture at Indiana University now history, we’re focusing on our next public appearance at CraftFest in New York.  On July 11, 2013 at the Grand Hyatt on 42nd Street, Michael will be teaching a class at 10:00 am in the Carnegie/Alvin room entitled “Research and the Willing Suspension of Disbelief.”   Willing suspension of disbelief is the pact between an author and his readers.  In short, it can be defined as “I will tell you a made up-tale and you will believe it.”  As part of the bargain, the author must make his story as believable as possible. To do that, he must not only make his characters and their motivation credible, but his facts must be in order.

This is where research comes in. If an author makes a mistake, for example, has the wrong weapon in the wrong time, not only does his story become suspect, but the reader asks, “If I can’t believe his facts, why should I believe in the motivation of his characters?”  It has happened to all of us.  We’ve been reading a rollicking good story and suddenly, something so jarring slaps us across the face with impossibility.  One of the biggest “I don’t think so” moments for us is when a character gets shot in the leg or shoulder, and sneaks out of the hospital to take the fight back to the bad guy. Knowing anatomy and terminal ballistics as we do, we’re usually evaluating the damage.  “Oh, shot in the chest. That’s smashed the third and fourth rib, hydrostatic shock has taken out the brachial artery and possibly the aorta as well as the upper lobe of the lung.”

Why then is the character driving a stolen truck in a mad chase through city streets in the next scene?

PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR will be out in May of 2014.  It’s a thriller set in the great city of Cahokia at around 1200 C.E..  Writing thrillers set in prehistory is a particularly daunting challenge. Not only do we have to keep the plot tight, with short scenes common to the thriller genre, but we have to build and describe a world foreign to most modern readers without slowing the story.  And most of all, it has to be believable. When we got started writing the PEOPLE books, American publishers were pushing “prehistory” novels, and contracting with lots of authors to write them. At a book trade show we met a couple of our new colleagues, and will never forget the established romance author who beamed at us, saying, “I just love writing prehistory. No one knows anything about it so you can make up anything you want.”

Fact is, yes, we do know quite a bit about these prehistoric cultures. It is only through research that we can write about them in depth, and with credibility. So far it has kept us in the game while the others are long gone.  Why?  Because at heart, the readers understood that other authors had been broken the covenant. The author had failed to establish the credibility of the story through sufficient research.  If the worlds they created smelled fishy, who could believe the story?

For more, we’ll see you in New York on July 11th at CraftFest.  You must register to attend, and if you’re a budding novelist, you will learn valuable lessons.  Meanwhile, we’ll continue researching extensively.

Dear All:

It’s been thirteen years since we’ve had a spring storm like this.  We’ve had snow every day for a week and a half.  At the maximum we had 18 inches on the deck even after some had melted.  Our drought-stricken, parched earth has soaked it all up.  None of the drainages are running, which means its going straight down to the roots.

Not that we’ve gone totally Native, but many of America’s original peoples believed the buffalo called the snows.  And in our case, we think it’s our Pia’s new baby heifer calf who did it.  She waited until the height of the storm to come into this world. Maybe so that she could be dropped into a soft landing in eight or ten inches of new fluffy snow?

Suffice it to say that we named her Stormy, hopefully because she’s called the moisture, and hopefully broken the drought.

We’ve been delighted to watch her antics over the last week.  She’s with a small herd of yearling and two-year-old heifers, all of whom she believes were put on earth for her to play with.  Running like a shot, she’ll charge them, bucking to a stop when they put their heads down and stomp at her.  Having elicited such a response, she leaps in the air, spins, and races off to harass the next buffalo in sight.

Pia, of course, thinks the world is back in order.  She’s never happier than when she has a calf.  So, at least at Red Canyon Ranch, life is good.  Now we’re waiting for the next bouncing bundle as the rest of the cows prepare to deliver.  If the buffalo have called the storms, we’ll get moisture with each one.

We’ve posted before that bison are a special kind of addiction.  We’ve been keeping our numbers down during the drought and while we concentrate on writing in an effort to survive the collapse of American publishing.  And despite our best efforts, the numbers keep climbing.  This year Hot Springs State Park here in Thermopolis didn’t receive bids on a number of their calves.  They were desperate to move the animals, and we couldn’t turn down the opportunity, so we brought home seven!  And then our old friend John Painter, president of the Western Bison Association, needed to move animals from his drought-devastated range in New Mexico.    He just brought the first load, for which we will provide pasture for a year until rain finally, if ever, returns to his Cerro San Cristobal Ranch.

For the last two days, we’ve been working with the bison, cutting and sorting, separating the heifer calves to stay with Pia here by the house.  Working with these magnificent animals is such a joy.  …Right up until Michael didn’t double-check the load-out gate at the corral.  It had only latched with one pin, and the heifers–clever little darlings that they are–knocked it open and zoomed right up the hill to be with the main herd.

Which meant we had to catch them again, re-sort, and trailer them back down the hill to the house pasture.  …All but little Nip.  She managed to escape again, and we’ll have to figure out how to lure her back into the catch pen before breeding season.

All this while we keep burning the late-night oil to finish PEOPLE OF THE SONG TRAIL.  The Song Trail is the path that shamans must follow to the Sky World and the Spirits who inhabit it.  The story is set in the Canadian Maritimes, and deals with early Viking contact.  Michael is also working part time on Touch of Sanity, a Civil War novel that he’s had in a box for almost three decades.   And yes, it makes for busy days, seven days a week.  It’s a reminder that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that when times get rough, you just buckle down and work harder.

So far we’ve only scheduled three events for the coming months.  We’ll be in Bloomington, Indiana, to give a class presentation, and a public lecture at Indiana University.  The public lecture is scheduled for April 24, 5 pm at the Black Laboratory of Archaeology on campus.

In June we’re off to the Western Bison Association summer board meeting in Santa Fe.  Always one of our favorite occasions.

And finally in July, we’ll be attending ThrillerFest in New York City.  We’re teaching a class at CraftFest and serving on a panel at ThrillerFest.  If we get enough interest, we might have a ”get-together” over coffee for any of our fans who are attending.

Dear All:

We’ve finished PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR.  We just shipped the 160,000 word manuscript off to our editor at Tor/Forge.  Writing this one was just plain fun.  The research on the great site at Cahokia has come such a long way since we wrote PEOPLE OF THE RIVER back in 1991.  Since that time, archaeologists have been amazed at the size and scope of the city in the 12th and 13th centuries.  As authors we have been able to write about characters that could have existed nowhere else in prehistoric America.  For all of you Dusty and Maureen fans, you’ll enjoy the modern forward.  Dusty has an “encounter” with a film crew doing a show on ancient aliens. And, well, being Dusty, he has a most definite opinion about their “work.”

We don’t have a release date for the book yet, but expect it no earlier than December of this year, and more likely in 2014.  As soon as we hear, we’ll post it here and in the fan club.

Like all of our novels, disparate data came together to answer one of the perplexing questions about Cahokia: Did they have writing?  Our clues came from the Iroquois wampum belts which, contrary to popular belief, were not money.  Actually they were records.  Entire treaties, agreements, and speechs were recorded by a specific pattern of beads utilizing shapes, colors, and sizes to denote words.

Is this applicable to Cahokia?  The evidence recovered from the excavation at Mound 72 is provocative, especially in the bead cache and the “Falcon” blanket under burials 13 and 14.  From Fowler’s description, it sounds like wampum.

Writing at Cahokia will remain a hypothesis until tested by further research. But it sure looks possible to us.  Wampum served as such reliable records they were admissible in early Colonial courts, and so persuasive that politicians went out of their way to have the belts destroyed. Our suspicion is that, like so much in eastern North America, wampum had its roots in Cahokia.  It would explain how they were able to manage such a wide-spread empire.

Dear All,

When you’re writing it always pays to heed the words of the great writers of the past.

Few writers, in our opinion, give truly meaningful advice about the difficult process of reducing the richness of human experience to words, but we like this piece of advice very much:

The writer “must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed–love and honor and pity and pride and sacrifice.”
William Faulkner

If you’re a writer, no matter what kind of writing you do, Faulkner’s words remain true.

Have a wonderful Valentine’s Day.

Mike and Kathy

Over the Chrismas break we had lunch with Dr. Laura Scheiber while she and Shannon were in Wyoming to move into their new digs in Cody.  Part of a buffalo burger lunch was dedicated to planning for the course in our books that Laura is teaching through the Indiana University anthropology department.  We’re going to be traveling to Bloomington for the final class on April 29 to discuss the books in a seminar, and to give a public lecture sponsered through the anthro department.   While most of the students are anthropology undergrads, assorted other majors have signed up, so advance knowledge of anthropology and North America archaeology are not prerequisites.  Readers need only acquire the books on the syllabus.

During the course, the students are going to be interfacing on Facebook with the  Gear fan club: book series First North Americans.  One of the TAs is going to be feeding comments to the fan club and reporting to the class.  To our knowledge this is a first.   Anyone interested in participating can join the fan club and submit their questions, comments, and observations.  You can do so by clicking on the tab on the Gear-Gear.com homepage.

We will keep you appraised of developments as they occur.  The books to be read and discussed include PEOPLE OF THE WOLF, PEOPLE OF THE RIVER, PEOPLE OF THE SILENCE, COMING OF THE STORM, and THE VISITANT.

Meanwhile, we’ve got some reading of our own to do.  It’s been a while since we’ve reread these old classics.  We’re pretty excited.

Dear All:

At Friday night’s awards the Western Bison Association presented Kathleen with a special appreciation award for her work on the behalf of the Western Bison Association and the buffalo industry in general.  Kathleen, virtually unassisted, produced and shepherded the “Petitition to Delist Woods Bison” from the Endangered Species list. The petition was submitted to the US Fish and Wildlife and will be acted upon in the next year.  Her hard work ensured that our panel on the pros and cons of “free roaming” bison was a success.  As an organization we have more research to do.  Only one of the invited wildlife conservation groups we contacted bothered to send a representative.  But what we heard was not encouraging for the bison industry.

While Michael had been aware of Kathleen’s award, the announcement that we had both received the WBA Founder’s Award completely blindsided us. This is the highest honor confered by the WBA. We send our heart-felt thanks and appreciation to the membership of the Western Bison Association.  We are honored and humbled.

Dear Al:

As we promised back in the beginning, we would be providing updates on the screenplay.  The screenwriter, Clayton Emery, has just informed us we can announce that he has the screenplay at two different studios, and that he’s got some other irons in the fire.  Clayton will be answering questions regarding the screenplay and its status on the fan club.

Oh, and the novel he chose to adapt for the screen?  PEOPLE OF THE MIST!

Dear All:

We just saw the most fascinating piece done on PEOPLE OF THE WEEPING EYE, PEOPLE OF THE THUNDER, A SEARING WIND and PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR.  Patrick Brian Miller, a superb author in his own right, is the brilliant director of the:

We’ve been working with him for a little over a month now.  Patrick’s quest is to enable the reader to visit, in person or on the web, those actual places used in fiction.  We’re honored and delighted that he used our novels as the first links to actual archaeologicals sites in Alabama, Tennessee, and Illinois.  We’re hoping that our publishers will add the links to our ebooks as well.  Literary tourism creates an added value to the reading experience.  It shouts, “Hey, guys! It’s real.  And you can visit the same locations as the characters inhabit.”

As authors, we get to live the experience first hand, for instance, climbing the steps of Monk’s Mound in Cahokia with Matron Heron, as you’ll eventually read in PEOPLE OF THE MORNING STAR. Through Patrick’s efforts, all of our readers will now share in the magic.

When we wrote PEOPLE OF THE RAVEN, we based it upon the best archaeological
evidence available–which was scanty, given the court case going on at the time. It’s great to see the anthropologists working with the Native peoples to present their findings and open a productive dialogue.

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