18 July 2005 A little over a week ago I finished writing THE BARON DECISION. The manuscript numbers 597 pages and should arrive at Forge (Tom Doherty & Associates) today. I was writing 12-14 pages a day, but on the last day, I wrote 25 pages, 15 in the morning, 10 in the afternoon. There is one more book to write in the Baron Series. It will be entitled THE BARON LEGACY. It will actually be number 7 in the series, with GRASS KINGDOM (already published) being the final book. This novel will cover the years 1872 to 1931, or thereabouts. This was not an attempt to break any speed records in writing. Rather, the story and the people were not only of great interest to me, the people had all become real over the course of the several books. And, it was an intricate story that totally absorbed and consumed me. There are many characters in these books and breathing life into them was both a challenge and a deep fascination. And, as exciting as this book was to write, my mind is already racing ahead to the next one, for a great many things will happen in the course of its telling. I am now writing the first novel in a new series for Berkley, THE SAVAGE GUN. This novel begins in Cripple Creek, Colorado in the year 1892, the year my father, Keith Sherman, was born. A man named Bob Womack started the late gold rush there in 1890. so the book is rich in that period’s history. I’ve had to do some serious thinking about the future of Western novels lately. The climate in publishing has changed so drastically in recent years that I see little chance of changing editors’ and publishers’ minds on the genre. It seems to me that the editors are all fearful of thinking outside the box. They want traditional Westerns that involve a lot of gunplay, a lot of action and very little depth to the storyline. So, I have pulled two proposals from circulation, feeling that they don’t have a chance of garnering any kind of interest with the current companies still publishing Westerns. These two stories are really mainstream novels that happen to be set in the West. Each novel should run a minimum of 100,000 words and garner a suitable advance for that length. Publishers are no longer paying high advances for Westerns, and they seem to want books that run no longer than 80,000 words. They seem destined to stay in this rut for some time unless they find a way to reach a larger audience, obtain better distribution, and put some money into promotion. At present, distribution is poor, no effort has been made to reach a mainstream audience, and no money is spent on promotion. The two novels I had my agent withdraw from consideration are not traditional Westerns with high-noon shootouts, saloon fights, or the like. Rather, they are intense novels of pioneers living on the edge, facing adversity, overcoming powerful obstacles. One, THE WIDOW’S JOURNEY, concerns some of the pioneers who set out for Texas at the time Moses Austin planned to create colonies of Americans in that territory when it was still owned by Spain and later Mexico. It covers a broad landscape in Texas history through the eyes of a woman whose husband was killed by Apaches on the way to Texas. The other, BURNING MOUNTAIN, focuses on a family in Colorado who are eking out a living raising cattle and cutting timber high in the Rocky Mountains. The father is a cruel, abusive man, who beats his wife and two sons. The two sons hate their father and scheme to kill him in order to protect their mother. Another villain is the father’s brother, who plays a key role later in the story. He is cut from the same bolt of cloth as his brother. I should probably try and sell these stories to a name writer such as Larry McMurtry, but I won’t. I still carry the hope that one day soon the publishing world will wake up to the potential market for such stories and begin to tap the rich lode of material contained in the mines of many of our contemporary Western writers. In the meantime, I am trying to enrich the literature by putting as much heart as I can into these shorter, traditional Western novels. While they may seem like formula works at first glance, they are well off the beaten path. An example is the forthcoming novel, THE VIGILANE, which will be published by Berkley in October. It is set in the Arkansas Ozarks where we used to live. Let’s see if this one finds an audience. I’ll be at the OWL meeting (Ozarks Writers League) in August up in Branson. Sometime soon, I’ll talk about some forthcoming short story anthologies set to publish some of my short stories, and before the year is out, I hope to conduct a short story workshop under the auspices of NETWO, the North East Texas Writers Organization. There has been considerable interest in such a workshop. All that remains is to find a time and place to conduct the workshop. In it, we will all start and finish a short story, and that includes me. It will last at least 4 weeks with 2 hour sessions. Writing is my life. And, reading is an important part of that life. I hope it’s yours, as well. Jory Sherman