Sisley Creek Press now has a home

Sisley Creek Press now has its very own home on the WWW! I've got the site set up, now I just need to add some pages. I was gonna do book excerpts on here, but it's a royal pain to keep them where folks can find them easily, so I'm gonna do them on the site, and link from here to the excerpts. Much better idea!

There are currently only a few pages built; there's the front page for the site, and a page that introduces the bookstore part of this whole convoluted enterprise. I'll eventually have separate pages for each of the books that you can see over to the left here, along with author profiles, excerpts, etc.

This is getting to be exciting, at least to me. Anybody who has read very many of the posts on here is probably getting a little bored with it all, but to me it's a grand new adventure. I've never attempted anything like this before, and I'm looking forward to it...

My first box of books has finally arrived!

Finally, Tyler's Law has arrived! The proof copy came about ten days ago, and my first full box got here today. The UPS guy just dropped them off! Right at the moment I'm planning on using these for handout/review copies while I order some more to sell, but I might be enticed into selling a few of them...

Sisley Creek Press is another couple of steps closer...

to reality! I have the domain name officially registered with Google's registry source, and I've filed the business name with the state of Oregon. I'll post my progress toward becoming a full-fledged publisher type as I go along. I still have to jump through all the rest of the hoops necessary to start publishing my books myself...

Complications has been totally rewritten, so I need to get that one its own ISBN number, new cover graphic, etc., then I can re-release it. It'll be an exercise in how to produce my own books that won't have to start with actually writing the book, which will make it a little less time consuming...

To all my loyal readers out there, it hopefully won't be too long before you can read my books printed under my own imprint...

March 1st already...

Amazing, isn't it, how time flies whether you're having fun or not? It seems like Christmas was just last week, and now here it is March 1st already, as the title of this rambling dissertation says...

So, what's been happening in your world? It's pretty quiet here, actually. Got the last of the sheep feeders done and installed, so that's one thing there won't be any rush about as lambing approaches. There's been a minor shake-up on my Ag Issues team, but I think I've got that covered. The weather for my weekend was pretty good; a little windy, but relatively warm. I either sun- or wind-burned my beak yesterday, maybe both...

I'm getting the biking bug. I've been doing all of my riding indoors (which is incredibly boring but generally liveable with the TV and all), since late last fall, but with nicer weather, and things starting to dry up, I'm starting to think it's time to haul my fat, Spandex-clad hiney outside and put in some road miles of some sort. I think I'll start with my Diamondback mountain bike for the nonce, and leave my road bike installed on the trainer. With the Slime tubes and the kevlar tires, the Diamondback is heavy as hell, especially the rolling weight (ah, resistance training). On the other hand, the only flat I've had since I set it up that way 2 1/2 years ago was last summer when the valve stem sheared off of the back tire. I wrote one of these long-winded posts about that occurence here. I'm kind of thinking that if I start with the Diamondack, by the time I switch to the Roubaix, with its skinny tires, that bike will feel like a feather, and I'll be able to jet up the hills. Yeah, right. Don't kid yourself, Buster. You'll never jet up hills, unless you lose about 40 pounds. Ah well, a boy can dream...

So anyway, life is good, Praise the Lord, and the creek just keeps on rolling by...

Another day in the life...

I had an e-mail today from a fellow Writer's Guild of Eastern Oregon member, who recently registered on a site called OregonAuthors.org. Looks quite interesting. It gives Oregon authors a place to set up their works for people to notice, and might make for some good publicity. So I signed up. I should know shortly whether or not I've been accepted...

I'm still looking very hard at the idea of setting up my own publishing deal, and I've already had someone ask me if I'll be taking on clients. I think I know how to make that work...

Spent the day finally getting the sheep feeding panels that Cheryl wanted done, and turned into feeders...

Got a coyote this morning, but not on the dead sheep that I hauled out a couple of days ago. Hauled another dead sheep out today, maybe there'll be a coyote there tomorrow morning...

Welcome to my new home away from home...

As of this afternoon at about 1:30 PM, my old website is no more. I decided to terminate it in favor of something more compact and easier to manage. This will be my new home on the Web, so to speak, for the foreseeable future, or until I get evicted for not paying my rent or something disgusting like that... :>)

Speaking of the foreseeable future, in the movie Appaloosa, Everett Hitch, ably played by Viggo Mortensen, had this to say: "Life has a way of making the foreseeable that which never happens, and the unforeseeable that which your life becomes." Interesting philosophy for a guy who makes his living with a gun. The Scriptures tell us something similar in that we are to depend on God, and not our own plans, to carry us through. He will decide if we are to prosper or falter...

If you haven't seen Appaloosa, I highly recommend it, even though I'm not a movie critic, I don't play one on TV and I didn't stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night; I just know what I like. There's not a lot of shoot-'em-up, though there is some, but there is a lot of character development, and it follows the book closer than most movies. If you're only sitting in the theater for the blood, gore and violence, you'll more than likely be disappointed. But if you like your movies with some depth alongside the blood, go see this one if it's still playing. If it's not in a theater near you, go buy the DVD; you won't regret it. I bought the DVD two weeks ago, and I've already seen it three times...

Complications Excerpt

As promised, here's a brief excerpt from Complications: The Deputies Book 1

The bad guy, Howdy Baxter, is holding Kitty Moynahan hostage, thinking that he can use her to make Harvey Palmer and Deputy Jesse Thompson drop their guns...

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Jesse saw Baxter’s dive into the tunnel and heard Lila’s agonized voice as she fought to save Kitty. He rose and started for the tunnel, but before he could move away from the ore cart Baxter appeared with his body pressed tightly against Kitty and his arm and hand holding her in front of himself as a shield. The Colt was pressed tightly against her jaw. Jesse took a step forward; the Remington in his right hand swung up as he turned sideways and stepped into a perfect target stance.

“Stop right there, Deputy Thompson!” Baxter snapped. “Or I will spread this young lady’s brains all over this canyon. And I don’t think you want that now, do you?”

Harvey appeared in the corner of Jesse’s narrowed vision, Winchester at the ready. “You stop right there too, Palmer!” Baxter snarled. “If I have to kill both of these lovely ladies to get your attention, I will. You have my word on that.”

“What have you done with Lila?” Harvey grated. “If you’ve touched one hair of her head…”

“Those are big words for someone who will be dead soon!” Baxter suddenly laughed, a high-pitched caw that brought the hair on the back of Jesse’s neck to attention. “Throw down your guns and I’ll only kill the two of you. The ladies can go free. And the same goes for whomever you have on top of the bluff.”

Jesse thumbed back the hammer of the Remington. The front sight was steady on the small sliver of Howdy Baxter’s head that he could see. At the same time, he saw that the hammer of Baxter’s Colt was back and the knuckles of his trigger finger were white. Baxter was on the edge of pulling the trigger and killing Kitty.

“Drop the gun, Baxter,” Jesse said evenly. “If you kill her, the whole territory will be hunting you and you know it. Even your own men will track you down and kill you.”

“But that won’t matter to you, will it?” Baxter crowed. “You’ll be dead.”

“So it looks like a standoff,” Jesse said. His gray eyes narrowed as he tried to figure the odds of shooting Baxter without Baxter killing Kitty.

“I think not. Drop the gun!” Baxter commanded. His voice was rising and he was getting further and further from sanity. Jesse’s finger tensed on the trigger. Then something caught Jesse’s eye that kept him from firing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author's disclaimer: Before everyone starts thinking that my blog is degenerating into nothing more than a commercial for my books, let me say that, well, it is, but only temporarily. It'll get back to normal as soon as I manage to migrate everything from my old website. Until then, please bear with me...

Cowboy Ethics and Cowboy Values...

The following link will take you to a blog on Fox News that I think makes a whole lot of sense:

Cowboy Ethics and Cowboy Values

Check it out. You'll probably agree...

Major overhaul in progress...

For those of you who may accidentally trip across this rambling discourse on my life occasionally, things may look a bit different than what you've seen on past visits. That's because I've decided to set up housekeeping here, and do away with my other, much more costly, and hard to work with, website. I'll be adding features as I go along, so stay tuned...

So far, I've changed my profile picture, added some landscape fencing (barbwire), and stuck in some of my favorite links. I've also included an area for book advertising and sales. So far the only books there are mine, but I'll be adding some of the ones that belong to some of my cowboy buds as time goes by. And I'll be posting some book excerpts, that sort of thing...

So come on back, y'hear?

One down, who knows how many to go...

Well, it appears that the "traditional publisher" gig has fallen by the wayside. Due to some research by the nice lady who did the copyedit for the novel that was supposed to be going to the "traditional publisher", and also due to still another "your work's not good enough to publish so you have to spend a whole bunch of money on our editor" e-mail, I've decided to shelve that idea for the time being, unless they come up with a better offer. Funny how "it doesn't cost you a cent to publish with us" becomes the above-mentioned "hire our editor", isn't it? Doesn't that constitute me spending my money to have my book published? The book in question, Complications, is already a Print-On-Demand novel, so I see no point in doing the same thing all over again. Guess I'll look for another publisher. Or become a publisher myself. I can do that, ya know...

As I was in the middle of reading, laughing at and complaining about the publisher's last e-mail, which, by the way, completely ignored my copyeditor's, and my, comments on their review, which was done by someone who apparently had no clue whatsoever regarding the westen genre, Cheryl suddenly asked, "Why don't you set up your own publishing company and publish it yourself?" That was an idea that I kicked around when my second book, Tyler's Law, was ready to go to print, but I decided that I didn't have enough time to mess with it. But now I'm thinking about it again...

Using the crash course in copyediting that I got during the rewrite of Complications, I've been doing an extensive rewrite of Book 3, Valentine's Revenge, for the last several weeks, and I do believe that it is decidedly improved over what I originally wrote. Once I get through the rewrite of the rough draft of the original, I just need to finish the danged thing...