Monthly Archives: August 2010

Greetings All: We’re packing, heading to Billings to catch a flight to Detroit, to pick up a rental and drive to Jackson, Michigan. Our good friends and supporters at News Group have taken a large order of COMING OF THE STORM in paperback. First thing Monday, August 23, we’re going to be signing every one and placing an autograph copy sticker on the cover. If you live in the upper Midwest keep your eyes peeled when you head to the grocery store, airport, or drug store. We love warehouse signings! Each time we do one the distributors are able to disperse thousands of copies of our books into hundreds of retail outlets. But it’s brutal work. If you don’t believe it, try signing your name over and over five thousand times. Worse, you’ve got to do it as quickly as you can open a book, sign, close it, sticker it, and grab the next one. Our record on one of these mass signings is 9,881 books in 14 hours. That was with help from Levy Home Entertainment employees doing the picking, opening, stickering, and repacking. We ached for days afterwards. Okay, so why do we do it? Because in Michael’s case, he was 21 before he met a real, live author. Thank you Gaydell Collier. You were instrumental in changing his life. But getting back to the point, Michael would have cut his right arm off to have had a signed book by an honest-to-God author. Kathleen feels the same way, though she grew up in a writing family. With a signature, we are able to give a book a different quality–a personalized touch on that particular copy on that nameless and faceless book rack. You see, authors are mostly faceless, just names on a cover. A signed book gives us the opportunity to reach out to the reader. A way of saying, “Here, we poured our hearts and souls into this in an effort to provide you with the best read we can.” So, if you live in Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, or Pennsylvania, or are flying through O’Hare, Detroit, or Columbus, check the racks. It’s the best way we can personally reach out and offer you a good read. For the rest of you, be aware that COMING OF THE STORM, the first story of Black Shell and Pearl Hand, will be on a book ack near you by September 1, 2010. We know that many of you wait for the paperback, and yeah, we’ve started to get questions as to when COMING OF THE STORM will be available. It’s here, guys. Black Shell asked me to forward his best wishes. He hopes you enjoy COMING OF THE STROM, and to let you know that he, Pearl Hand, and the dogs will be back in FIRE THE SKY February 2011 in hardback.

Hello All: We wanted to give you an update on the ebook situation. Wow, talk about a fluid market! Currently we have floated an offer to both Tor/Forge and DAW Books in an attempt to resolve the compensation issue. Yes, dear fans, authors have bills and kids in college and want donuts from the local convenience store, just like everyone else. With the exception of the occasional retiree and college English professor, every writer on earth hopes that his work will be valuable enough that some publisher will pay him to write more! We hope this works out and that you will have access to all of our books in digital format soon. On another front, it was 42 degrees here this morning, which is cool for this time of year in northern Wyoming. August is usually our hottest month. Many of our cottonwoods, aspens and willows have started to turn yellow. Our squaw currants were bright red at dawn. Early autumn? Looks like we’d better start cutting wood for the woodstoves… Best Regards, Michael and Kathleen

Greetings All: Red Canyon Ranch is unsettlingly quiet. We watched the Indiana University field crew pack up yesterday and drive off into the sunset. Well, all right, they’re headed east for Indiana. Technically they had sunset in the rearview mirror. Walking down to the guest house today, the only sounds were the birds, the rattle of the cottonwood leaves, and uh, that’s it. Nothing else. No laughter, no chatter, no colorful pin flags on the Nostrum stage station. The porch chairs were empty when I walked into the yard. Inside the house, the computers were gone, the kitchen clean and lonely. Piles of screens, containers, bedrolls, and the other minutia of life in the field were nowhere to be seen. Walking up to the stock pond, the magic carp was flipping around the bottom, searching here and there, wondering what had happened to the arky raft. Somehow he’d never noticed when it became part of his world, but it’s sure as hell missing now. On the way back to the house a rattlesnake slithered away into the grass apparently happy to have tranquility restored. Now that the people were gone, he was hoping for good hunting given all the mice the archaeologists had lured in with dropped crumbs, cookies, and the occasional overlooked plate. So it is with sadness that the 2010 field season has drawn to a close at Red Canyon Ranch. What’s the big news? Katie’s crew, aided by Matt’s human backhoe action, located the floor of the Southwest room in the Nostrum Stage Station. It was made of sawn planks and buried under almost four feet of collapsed roof and overburden. We’ve taken samples from the planks and will have Paleoresearch Associates identify it. In the center of the room the crew located a huge stump set in the floor–probably an anvil stand. Given that the place was a stage station, they had to have a place to shape and fit horse shoes. The trash midden produced another oddity: an unfired 7.62 x 53R Russian military cartridge with a 1917 Remington head stamp. Nearly 300,000 Winchester 1895 muskets were shipped off to the Czar just before WWI, with additional civilian sales of the rifle and cartridge in the U.S. Most likely this was one. It’s kind of cool to think that someone with a model 95 in 7.62 Russian used to live here. In addition, the creekside tipi rings were fully mapped and tested. Dr. Scheiber’s team proved that we have two stone circles down there–and best of all, they’re historic! Not only was a broken pair of scissors recovered from inside the rings, but also a handful of spent primers pressed out during cartridge reloading inside the lodge. This dates the occupation to sometime later than the mid 1870s. Next year they’re coming back and there will be more to report. So, dear readers, if you’ve always dreamed of becoming an archaeologist, maybe you’d better check out the Indiana anthropology program at Bloomington. You’re probably too late for fall semester, but if you manage to register for Spring–and cut Doc. Scheiber’s mustard–maybe we’ll see you out here for 2011 with a trowel in your hand.