Tuesday, December 18, 2012

A Christmas Lift


*Those who've been following along on this blog for a while might recognize this post from a few years back, but due to popular request I've regurgitated it for your holiday reading pleasure. And may I add, this is one of the few stories that I did not have to embellish in the least. In fact, I left out a few pertinent details, including the cup of coffee in one hand, the chewing tobacco and the sheriff. And still we survived. 

One of the traditions I do not miss since moving home is the annual Christmas pilgrimage. I've made the trip from Texas, South Dakota and Oregon, through dark of night and blazing sun, ice and sleet and white-out blizzards, but the wildest ride I ever had was right here in Glacier County.

Our car was packed to the roof when we left Oregon: Christmas gifts, suitcases, extra winter gear. We even remembered to put the tire chains in last, instead of at the bottom of the trunk. There was barely room left for three adults, a nine month old kid and my sister's Shitzu (don't even ask).

The first nine hours went well. The roads were good, the baby slept a lot. My brother hadn't eaten anything that generated copious amounts of methane gas. Then came Marias Pass. As we started up the last steep slope to the summit, we hit a snow squall and Greg said a really bad word. The thermometer indicator had suddenly jumped off the dial, the 'check engine' light flashing like Rudolph's nose.

We pulled to the side of the road, steam wafting from the grill. Two miles back, the sun was shining. Now it was snowing sideways. Greg tugged his hat down tight and ventured out to peek under the hood. More bad words. The big serpentine belt that operated everything on the car--including the radiator fan--was broken. Of course there was no cell phone service. Lucky for us, though, this was Montana. The first pickup that came along pulled over and to see if we needed help.

“Jim Jay in Browning has a tow truck,” they said. “We'll call him from the Snow Slip Inn.”

“Great!” I told Greg. “He’s our cousin.”

Jim Jay showed up in a flatbed car hauler, mounted on a Dodge Ram pickup. Later I would realize we should have paid more attention to the purple flames on the sides. At the time we were so happy to see him we wouldn't have cared if the flames were shooting out of the tailpipe. Besides, we had a more immediate problem: Four adults, one baby, and a single cab pickup. Oh, yeah, and the dog.

Greg volunteered to ride in the car. He climbed up onto the flatbed and into the driver’s seat. My brother and I and the kid got in the pickup with Jim Jay. Nobody asked the dog her preference.

The road had a thick snow pack that turned to slush as we rolled down off the Continental Divide, at a rate of speed that made my cheeks pucker. Both sets. We skidded around curves and flew over potholes, the car swaying and bouncing up on the flatbed. Jim Jay rammed through the gears without bothering to use the clutch.

“I didn’t realize you could speed shift a Dodge,” my brother said, trying to sound casual through clenched teeth.  

“Oh, sure, if you rev it up enough,” Jim Jay said, grabbing a higher gear. “Besides, I have a hard time with clutch since I screwed up my ankle in that last accident.”

Back in the car, Greg tightened his seatbelt. The dog buried her head in a Christmas gift bag. We reached Browning in less time than I could ever have imagined, or desired. When we slowed at the edge of town, I exhaled for the first time in forty miles. Thank God. Still in one piece.

“No sense stopping here, there’s not a repair shop in town anymore,” Jim Jay said. “I’ll take you on to Cut Bank.”

Five miles out of town, the speedometer hit eighty. I knew this because I was sitting in the middle and had a much better view than I wanted. Then I saw the first road construction sign. Forty-five miles an hour, no passing. And there was an ancient Chevy pickup puttering along in front us. We were saved.

“Better get around this guy, he looks like he might actually go the speed limit,” Jim Jay said, and whipped out into the passing lane.

We'd barely cleared the Chevy when the shoulders of the road disappeared, leaving an abrupt, two foot drop on either side. Traffic in both directions was forced to crowd the center, and our flatbed stuck out a foot over the line. Approaching drivers went wide-eyed at the sight of us barreling down on them. I’m pretty sure we left a few spinning off into the ditch in our wake, but when I looked back all I saw was Greg's white face through the car windshield. Then the pavement turned to frozen mud.

“I hate this part,” Jim Jay said. “Gotta practically crawl through here.”

The speedometer dropped to seventy. Back in the car, Greg had both hands clenched on the steering wheel, braced for when the tie straps broke and they went airborne. The dog commenced reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

We arrived in Cut Bank in record time and one piece, other than four sets of shattered nerves (the baby thought it was all great fun, but he couldn't see over the dashboard). Jim Jay slid to a stop, released the tie straps and dumped the car on the street, then roared away before we could ask how much we owed him. Greg staggered out of the car, green around the gills, weak in the knees. 

The dog made the sign of the cross and kissed the ground. And she's not even Catholic. 

Happy Holidays!


**No, this is not the dog from the story, and obviously this is not my son. I have no pictures of that dog, so we're pretending this picture will suffice. Slurp.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

The Next Big Thing

There is a thing on the Internet called a blog hop. It's sort of like the snowmobiling parties back when I was a kid. We'd ride from ranch to ranch, stopping for snacks and drinks, picking up more riders along the way until the we'd end the day (or night) with a big feed at someone's house. Back then (pre-911 and Homeland Security) our snowmobile hops often covered both sides of the Canadian border, a practice to which our local border patrol turned a benevolent blind eye. Try that nowadays, you'd get a close up look at a Blackhawk helicopter.

Ah, the days of innocence...and blackberry brandy in the glovebox.

In honor of the good old times I'm joining in a writers' blog hop called The Next Big Thing. It works like this: a writer posts the answers to a list of questions about their book, then 'tags' five friends, who tag five more friends, and so on. Follow the links and you get to know my writer friends, and the friends of my friends, and discover a whole lot of excellent books along the way.

I was tagged by the amazingly talented Kerry Schafer, who not only has excellent taste in first names but is one of the handful of my online acquaintances I've had the privilege to meet in person, over coffee in a charming little burg called Clayton, Washington, which is not where either of us live but somehow ended up being the perfect place to converge. I can't wait to get my grubby little hands on Kerry's first action/fantasy novel, Between. (Please do click, I'll wait right here).

Worth the visit, right? Now we move on to the question and answer portion of the program, where I tell you all about the book I'm working on, which we all hope with be the Next Big Thing (you'd think they named it that on purpose, huh?).



What is the working title of your next book?

Given this is the third rewrite, it is most often known as This Damn Book. In order to distinguish it from all the other Damn Books in my computer files, the official title is The Best of Bad Intentions.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

A blog reader forwarded me information on a call for submissions to a new line of western/cowboy novellas set in or around Amarillo, Texas, in which all of the stories would feature scenes in a particular honky tonk. I had a short story with a bar scene that fit the bill, and I thought, Hey! I'll just move it from Oregon to Texas and expand it to a novella. Easy Peasy. Be done in a month. Six weeks, tops.

A year and a half and 100K words later...a Montana girl has herself a book set Texas. Doh.

What genre does your book fall under?

Contemporary western romance. Or Cowgirl Lit, as my agent has been known to call it.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

I am so woefully ignorant of current pop culture I am incapable of naming an actor or actress under forty years old, unless you count Jake and his Neverland Pirates. Because I have a son. And a husband. And therefore almost no access to the television remote unless there's football to be watched, in which case they do not mess with Mom.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

A hot shot rodeo bullfighter with a bad attitude and worse intentions learns a few lessons about life and love from the only woman in Texas who picks up cowboys for a living (from the backs of bucking horses, not street corners).

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Sad fact: I am too lazy for self publishing. I'd have to learn this thing called 'formatting', and I can't even figure out why the font is teeny tiny in this section or how to get rid it. Imagine what I could do to a whole book. 

Traditional publishing is definitely my goal, although with the leaps and bounds made by e-publishers in the last few years my target market is expanding every day.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

Eight months, which will end up being about the same as this current, massive rewrite, which has resulted in about 75% brand new words. So I guess you could say this is my second first draft. Sort of.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I can't think of a particular book off the top of my head. My dream is to be compared to Virginia Kantra, who writes ordinary people with such grace and grit. Toss in a comparison to Jennifer Crusie's humor and I'd be in hoggy heaven.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

The people behind the scenes who make rodeos happen at hundreds of little towns all over North America (yeah, Canada too, eh?). My heroine's family owns a stock contracting business, providing bucking horses and bulls for the smallest of the pro rodeos in the Texas circuit. This is the grassroots of the sport, the regional shows where future champions are made. More dust and drudgery than fame and fortune, but Violet loves it just the same.

What else about the book might pique the reader’s interest?

I've competed in rodeos my entire life, and I'm told I write awesome arena action. Plus I have a tendency to embarrass my agent by making her laugh out loud while reading on crowded New York subways.


And now for the fun part: 

I get to introduce you to few more of my friends. As usual, I'm running a bit behind, so I only tagged three people instead of five, but what I lacked in quantity I made up for in All Cowgirl quality:

Stephanie Berget: who lives in one of my favorite places ever to rodeo--along the border of southern Idaho and Oregon. Gotta love that Idaho Cowboy's Association, and Stephanie writes one mean story:  Stephanie Berget

BA Tortuga: My designated "It might work like that in Montana, but that's not how it is in Texas, honey" reader. I have got to meet her daddy some day.  If you're tough enough for Rednecks and Romance go ahead and click.

Julia Talbot: She and BA are partners in writing, in crime and in life. On her own she writes everything from traditional romance to LGBT. If you can't find it here, you don't know what you're looking for:  Julia Talbot

So there you go. Hop, skip and jump through the links, backward and forward, and meet a whole bunch of great people. Enjoy!

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Sunday, December 02, 2012

Baa-ad Business


It never fails, you get the family together, the stories start to fly, and the next thing you know your sister is telling everyone about that time we smuggled a goat in from Canada.

I feel safe confessing this to all of cyberpace because it happened when I was in college and I assume there is a statute of limitations on goat smuggling. The rodeo coach at Montana State University had informed me that I needed to pick up another event, so I decided to give goat tying a shot. Unfortunately this required owning an actual goat, a fate which my family had so far avoided. Lucky for me friends in Alberta were kind enough to offer one up for the cause.

It’s also possible they just wanted it off their property.

There are means to legally import livestock from Canada, of course, but it seemed ridiculous to spend fifty bucks getting a health certificate on a free goat, so we stuffed it in the sleeper on the back of the pickup with strict instructions to stay low and keep quiet. We could have saved ourselves a whole lot of nail-biting. Even if it had bleated its presence to all and sundry I suspect the border officer would have developed a sudden, extreme case of deafness rather than risk having to confiscate the goat.

As it turned out, my goat tying career was short-lived. The goat was not. For years afterward it reigned supreme over the Longhorn roping steers, jabbing them in the belly with its sharp, curved horns if they dared cut in line at the feed trough.

I assumed that would be the end of goat ownership for me, but then I met my future husband. Greg’s goat was a billy named Bill. Yeah, I know, but the naming of animals isn't a real high priority for him. This is the same man whose dogs were named Squeak and Yip because that’s all they could say when he got them as puppies. His horse was called the Brown Horse. He did try to call it Vinita after the town in Oklahoma where he bought it. Then his friends changed it to Velveeta so he started just calling him the Brown Horse, which was perfectly logical name for a horse that is actually brown instead of, say, a dark red sorrel. 

But back to the goat, another example of color confusion. Greg bought Bill for two dollars at the sale barn, thinking he’d make a good lead goat for a flock of ewes. Turns out white sheep won’t follow a black goat and Bill didn’t think much of sheep anyway, so he crawled through the fence and moved in with the cows. Summer pasture in the Sisseton hills, winter grazing on fields of corn stalks, where the cows went, Bill went, Lord and Master of the herd.

Then Greg decided to send the cows away for good, to be run on shares by his friend Hollis up on the North Dakota border. They filed up the loading chute and onto the semi while Bill bleated frantically back in the corral. As the last cow disappeared into the belly of the trailer and the door started to roll down, Bill took a wild run, jumped the gate and zipped up the chute, sliding under the door and onto the truck by a hair’s breadth, a move worthy of Indiana Jones.

Greg and the truck driver looked at each other. Then they looked at the truck. Bill had already belly-crawled under the cows, all the way to the front of the trailer.

Greg clapped the truck driver on the shoulder. “Looks like somebody just got themselves a goat.” 

Needless to say, Hollis was thrilled. So was Bill. He happily lived out the rest of his days on their ranch because no one there was man enough to make him leave.


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