Well, after procrastinating for a good few weeks, scribbling another Lone Star Sons adventure, and playing around with photoshopping a cover for another collection of essays, I got started on The Golden Road – this will be the picaresque California Gold Rush adventure that I always wanted to write. In The Adelsverein Trilogy it was alluded several times that Fredi Steinmetz had gone to California with a herd of cattle …who knew that cattle had been taken over the southern route from Texas to San Diego in the mid-1850s to supply the gold mines? I didn’t, until I read of it in The Trail Drivers of Texas. Anyway, it’s mentioned casually a couple of times that he knocked around the gold mines for a bit and then wandered home again.
So – in keeping with my plan to continue exploring the western Barsetshire, and write the adventures of various minor characters as they star in their own book – this is Fredi’s turn to cut loose. And the venue – California at the heights of the Gold Rush is also a pretty wild and woolly scene, with all kinds of interesting, eccentric, and later-to-become famous characters wandering around … here goes. It is in my grand plan to make this my book for November, 2015. It seems to take me about two years to research and write (sometimes simultaneously, as I have a wonderful idea for a plot twist, and then have to hurry to the reference materials to see if that twist is even historically possible.)
I wrote the first draft of To Truckee’s Trail in a white-hot blaze of energy over the space of three months – but then, that was a book that I had been thinking about for years, and limited as to space and time. The Trilogy did take only two years – but that was essentially one humongous story, later sliced into three helpings. The other books – all seemed to fall together at one or two years, from start to final edit, even when I was working on some of them simultaneously. There are authors who can spin out a book a year, but … those always seemed to me to be a bit mechanical, and the books produced were nothing that any but the most devoted fans could fall upon with happy cries of joy. The authors who take two years, or even three years – well, the work is most usually worth the wait. And yes, this schedule has been kicked around in writer discussion groups for as long as I have been paying attention to them. So – herewith begins the new adventure – and I will, as usual, post the occasional sample chapter, as they are written.
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