Fun, Follies and Loss of Innocence in Novel Land

Tag: Old West

Me and Billy the Kid

Writer with a retro typewriter

Yippee ki-yay! I was going to run down this Wild West story and ride it to the big time

As mentioned in I Become a Crawling Thing, for a while I used to be what’s called a freelancer.

Basically, you’re a journalistic tumbleweed. You roll around trying to find an editor to hire you for an assignment at whatever pitiful pay you can get.

Scrounging for dollars back in the day, I rolled into a chamber of commerce office with a big tip for the magazine editor. One of my relatives had other relatives who claimed that one of their kinfolk actually knew Billy the Kid, the legendary western gunslinger.

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A flying saucer lands on me

Man staring up at a landing UFO

How did my Old West saga turn into a space opera?

My previous post — I Give Birth to a Baby — told how I came up with a desperate ploy to get cash from a publisher so I could keep writing full-time.

I settled on churning out a western because I knew all about the Old West from watching cowboy shows on television.

Thanks to blessed inspiration and being kicked in the ass by desperation, I had the manuscript ready to go in a month.

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I give birth to a baby

Writer deep in thought

A desperate time calls for a desperate solution

If you read A Sharp Poke in the Eye, you know that I wound up in a sorry state after struggling to write great literature.

The $1,800 bankroll I had been living on for one year was collapsing like a bad lung.

This is when you are faced with two awful impending realities: eviction  . . . or . . . getting a real job.

What would you do? Apply for a job?

Uh, not me.

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