Visiting Hillerman country

Shiprock, on the Navajo reservation. The region features in much of Tony Hillerman’s work.

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June is hot here in Las Cruces, with too many days of 100-plus heat to please us. Our plan was to head north to Santa Fe and beyond in our RV, and damn the price of gasoline. So last Sunday, we decided to load it up for a Monday morning departure. We plugged it in to run the A/C, but the rig draws too many amps, and we kept losing juice. Inside the RV, the air was stifling, which made us both ugly—and then we noticed the blinking red light on the carbon monoxide alarm.

So the next morning, after sleeping off our foul moods, we arranged for someone to care for the cats and then drove north in our car. That was much, much better. Our cats hate to travel anyway. We made no specific plans beyond looking at a map of northwest New Mexico and looking for routes designated as scenic. Our first stop was Santa Fe, our tiny and beautiful state capital. We ate dinner at The Blue Corn Café, where I ate chalupas, described on the menu as “Two yellow corn shells filled with black beans and choice of chicken, ground beef or calabacitas then topped with cheese, chile, lettuce, tomato, sour cream and guacamole.” Muy bien.

At the right is one of the more interesting storefronts. We also stopped in a small shop on 109 East Palace Street that turns out to have been the clearing house for nuclear scientists working in nearby Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project in World War II. A woman told us that each day, scientists would be gathered there, blindfolded, and put on a bus so even they wouldn’t know where they would be working. Monitors watched them closely when they went into Santa Fe in their free time to make sure that no one spoke about the project.

The sign at the right reads in part, “All men and women who made the first atomic bomb passed through this portal to their secret mission at Los Alamos....” The decoration above the plaque prompted the photo.

As lovely as Santa Fe is, we wanted to get out into the countryside, so we skipped out on all the museums we had planned to visit, rationalizing that we aren't big on museums anyway. Not far out of town, we visited Bandelier National Monument, with interesting and accessible Indian ruins.

We didn’t plan to visit Taos, which we had seen once before, but I took a wrong turn and wound up there anyway. In a Burger King parking lot, an elk head caught my attention; it was all trussed and riding on a flat-bed truck. We couldn’t tell if it was a real animal or not. I hope not.

A few miles outside of Taos, we noticed a small neighborhood of strange-looking (to us) homes. We stopped in front of one, and I asked for permission to walk around the yard and photograph it. The owner, a 30-something fellow, said he built it himself out of old tires, baled hay, and other recycled materials. Much of the living space is below ground, and some of the other houses have large banks of dirt around them for insulation. He said his heating costs run about $100 per year for propane. No one can blame this fellow for the energy crisis.

We also found the Rio Grande Gorge, where the river looks mighty compared to its peaceful flow through Las Cruces. I stood on the bridge and took a photo of the breathtaking view hundreds of feet below. That evening at the motel, we turned on the news to learn that a man had just leaped off the bridge; originally, he had been thought to be wearing a parachute that failed to open, but instead he had a backpack and a suicide note.

The Carson National Forest was a delight, with the road taking us up to 11,000 feet above sea level and through a vast range of evergreens and snow-dappled mountains. It was June 18, and there were still patches of snow alongside the road.

Our travels took us through several Indian reservations, such as Zia and Pueblo, but the Navajo reservation is the largest in the area. All seem sparsely populated and characterized by casinos, pawn shops, and mobile homes. I wish I could report better news. There is a lot of oil drilling in the region of Shiprock and Farmington, and Halliburton has a presence. Perhaps the various tribes will in time share in whatever wealth the oil fields generate. Perhaps.


Our specific goal in driving to the far northwest was to see Shiprock—the rock, not the town. It is a sacred Navajo site, and truly is a site to behold. That's the picture at the beginning of this post.



We hadn't planned to visit Four Corners until we realized how close we were. It's in the middle of the Navajo Nation, and we paid $3 per person to see a circular marker with an “X” in the middle, marking the exact intersection of four states. People stood in line, waiting their turn to stand on the spot, but we were content to watch and to visit a few of the Navajo vendors whose booths surrounded the spot. At the right, this fellow’s left hand is in Utah, his right hand in Arizona; his left foot is in Colorado, and his right foot is in New Mexico.



We drove up into Colorado and had lunch at the Cyprus Cafe in Durango, a great way to celebrate our 43rd wedding anniversary. The gyro was the best I've ever had.

I don’t mean to end this post on a downbeat, but I must comment on the dozens of roadside memorials we saw. Usually they consist of crosses decorated with flowers, names, dates, and pictures. Sometimes they appeared at dangerous-looking curves, but more often I saw them on straight, wide and benign stretches of highway. This cross, with a painting of a girl in a graduation gown, was one of a pair.

The Confederate War Bonnet

I wrote this for the Midwest Book Review. Since MBR permits re-use, I am posting it here as well.

The Confederate War Bonnet:
A Novel of the Civil War in Indian Territory
By Jack Shakely
264 pp. iUniverse $17.95

Civil War buffs and historical fiction fans will enjoy this novel with its authentic and unusual take on the conflict. Based on historical incidents and real people, first-time author Jack Shakely brings us a view of the war from the point of view of Jack Gaston, a member of the Creek Nation who serves the Confederate cause. Gaston, one of two college-educated Creeks, leaves his studies at Harvard University in 1863 to serve his people, who have allied themselves with the South. For the many tribes that appear in this story—including Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek—the main issue is not slavery or keeping the Union together—it’s survival. They must do what they can to preserve their own interests in the face of ever-increasing white encroachment.

Gaston’s odyssey takes him through many of the Civil War’s major conflicts. In one of his imaginative contributions, he writes a news column providing breathless accounts of one “Captain War Bonnet,” who strikes terror into Yankee forces. As intended, Yankee forces read the detailed accounts that included his whereabouts, which proves to be a great waste of their time and resources.

Himself of Creek ancestry, Shakely presents a good story with a decent plot and sympathetic characters. His research helps readers understand some of the differences and conflicts among the various Indian cultures, and certainly between Indians and whites. The Confederate War Bonnet seems at times like a mix between a novel and a non-fiction history, because of Shakely’s shifting point of view and the often reportorial style. It’s obviously Jack Gaston’s story, yet we occasionally hear from another narrator (the author) about what happens many decades later, for example:

...Maxey wrote to all the soldiers, “Your action has been glorious. You have made yourself a name in history.”

This of course was true. To borrow a phrase from Franklin Roosevelt it was a name made in the history of infamy.

And on rare occasions, the author editorializes:

Nothing in American musical history is quite so cringingly, wincingly embarrassing as the mistrel show. But this phenomenon of white men in blackface was a theater tradition for more than a hundred years in this country, lasting well into the twentieth century. The vicious racist stereotyping...

Yes indeed, but passages like this can make the reader wonder whose story this is. Shakely also refers to “this Chautauqua,” in the sense of the adult education movement, although the first such event didn’t occur until almost a decade after the Civil War.

These are not major flaws; I take them as minor liberties that don’t hurt the underlying story. Shakely states that most of the characters were real people, and the events historically accurate. The Confederate War Bonnet is a readable and well-told tale that Shakely fills with color, sensitivity, humor, and plenty of research..

Apparently, the war bonnet really existed, with its Confederate stars and bars woven in. Too bad the author didn’t have a photo of the headdress—it would have made a fine cover for a thoughtful book.

Note: Here is the Amazon link.

Memories of Germany

This article just appeared in Southwest Senior here in Las Cruces, and is reprinted with their permission.

I Remember…

By Bob Sanchez

It was 1985, and my 13-year stint in customer service had mercifully ended. I was determined to change my career to technical writing, but every potential employer wanted applicants to show both academic credentials and a writing portfolio. So I enrolled in a technical communications program at the University of Massachusetts, and took on all the freelance writing assignments I could find—for free when necessary, as long as I garnered at least a byline.

In those days, personal computers were new, and The Boston Computer Society (BCS) had taken on the task of educating the area’s public about their use. They published a slick magazine that printed some of my work, though they didn’t pay; those clips formed the rudiments of my portfolio, but the work was not technical.

Then at a BCS meeting, I traded business cards with a professional translator named Lee who said he needed someone to provide him with publicity. He was thrilled with the newspaper profile I wrote for him (gratis, of course), which he reprinted and distributed endlessly.


One day, Lee called me. He had a German client named Gunther who had written a computer manual in English and wanted help in editing it. When I looked at the draft, I thought—to paraphrase Truman Capote—it didn’t need an edit so much as a trip to Lourdes. “It needs a complete rewrite,” I said. Their answer surprised me: “Come to Germany and work on it here.” They offered a good wage plus expenses, and said my utter inability to speak German was no problem.

In July, I kissed my family goodbye and boarded an Iceland Air flight to Luxembourg, where Gunther himself picked me up and drove us across Germany’s heartland at about 110 miles per hour on the darkened Autobahn. My obvious terror amused him. At a restaurant stop, a waitress complimented me on my German, though I had stumbled through all three or four words in my vocabulary. In a highway rest room, a woman sold toilet paper by the sheet.

Gunther had arranged for me to stay with a young family who lived across from his business in a tiny farm town, so for a month, my commute was a 30-second walk to a vintage 1923 schoolhouse that Gunther and his two sons used for their business. After a breakfast of coffee, bread, and jam, I would cross the road, greet the sons (who’d gone to college in California and spoke excellent English), and go to the second floor. There I was typically alone with my computer station and my work, the window open to the smell of manure and the lowing of cows from the barnyard next door.

There were no restaurants nearby, and I had no car during the week, so Gunther’s wife served substantial evening meals. The nearest city was Fulda, a lovely city about the size of Las Cruces. I’d read about the “Fulda gap” in Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising—it was the invasion route for Soviet armies. On Saturday mornings, one of Gunther’s sons drove me to a car rental shop where I rented a vehicle and headed out on my own for the weekend.

My automotive jaunts took me through beautiful, rustic villages to the barbed-wire border where signs warned of unexploded land mines. Few of the locals outside of my work spoke any English, yet I generally conveyed what I needed by smiling and pointing—and occasionally looking desperate. Trucks with names on their sides like Mengele and Krupp reminded me that this beautiful country and friendly people had a dark past.

One weekend I drove to the Rhine River and boarded a tourist boat. We passed postcard-worthy towns, bucolic vineyards, and three dozen castles before turning around at the base of a massive cliff named Lorelei’s Rock.

Another weekend took me to Berlin, which meant driving through communist East Germany. At one point I pulled to the side of the highway, thinking I could help a stranded motorist. After many gestures, he conveyed that he wanted me to tow his car somewhere. I pictured this destroying my rental car, so I gave him a ride to the nearest telephone instead. I was only willing to go so far for world peace.

West Berlin was inexpensive, because I slept in the car. My weekly pay was thick in my wallet, making me constantly self-conscious. Most of this money had to come home with me to Massachusetts to pay bills. I stood at the edge of a crowd, watching a Middle-Eastern con artist run a shell game. He was good. I always thought I knew which shell the pea was under, and I was always wrong. A lot of people lost money, but I held tightly onto my wallet, fearing I’d be scammed or robbed.

The Berlin Wall near Checkpoint Charlie was a mass of grafitti, colorful and chaotic; I stood on a platform and looked into East Berlin, which seemed gray and sterile. Later that day, I inadvertently cut off a motorcyclist in traffic. Oops. He was a police officer, and he pulled me over. Since I couldn’t appear in court, I had to pay my 30 Deutschmark fine directly to him. Then on my way back, of course I had to drive through East Germany again, where another police officer flagged me down and ticketed me for speeding. Unlike in the decadent West, the East Germans had strict speed limits on their autobahn—and they had speed traps. For my part, I had receipts for traffic fines from both countries. The receipts became souvenirs.

My first technical writing assignment was completed in a month, and I missed my family considerably. My wife and eleven-year-old son Jeff greeted me on my arrival back in Boston, and they told me they had recently seen Back to the Future at a theater. “Well, we’ll have to see it again,” I said. “The three of us.”

The silver is gone, but the tourists are gold

As the story goes, prospector Ed Schiefflen came to southern Arizona looking for silver, and folks warned him that all he’d find was his own tombstone. Well, he found silver, and he founded the town of Tombstone. The town bustled for as long as the silver held out, drawing honest workers as well as no small number of criminals. Around 1900 or so, Tombstone was said to have a higher rate of homicide than New York City.

It’s under 300 miles from our home in Las Cruces, so we finally packed our cats, George and Gracie, into the RV to check it out. G & G were underwhelmed by the whole experience, homebodies that they are, but Nancy and I quite enjoyed the trip. We stayed in an RV park within sight of the O.K. Corral, where lawmen shot it out with malefactors and sent them off to Boot Hill Cemetery to rest in graves like this:

It’s a small graveyard with freshly painted epitaphs on wood markers. Like almost everything in town, it is maintained for the benefit of the tourists who keep the town alive. Now, folks can tour the town in horse-drawn wagons.

—and when they’re through, they can whet their whistles at Big Nose Kate’s, a saloon named after the girlfriend of Doc Holliday:

—or they can check out what is billed as the world’s largest rosebush, a century-old Lady Banksia that is large enough to walk under and covers about 8,000 square feet:

Above is the view from a specially-built stand that provides a better sense of the breadth of this amazing bush. Here is the trunk:

You can also pay to see fake shootouts at the O.K. Corral, but Nancy and I spent our cash on ice creams instead.

By the way, G & G would be upset with me if I didn’t show them in the RV. Here’s George:

And here is his sister Gracie:

Taking the RV to Big Bend National Park

The Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park

Our friends didn't think we’d go on Monday, because the weather had been so bad here in New Mexico. But we had already left Las Cruces for Big Bend in Texas before the weather soured, and were clueless until our return today. Passing through El Paso, we could hardly see the nearby Franklin Mountains, which were a ghostly outline through the swirling sand. The wind whipped across the border from Juarez, occasionally limiting the visibility to a few hundred feet.

So by virtue of our RV trip, we missed most of a big howler. Good thing. We had headed east on I-10 to Van Horn, and then south through Valentine, Marfa, Alpine, and Marathon, with gorgeous weather nearly the whole time. We saw a family of javelinas by the roadside, but by the time I could stop and grab my camera, they had escaped deep into the chaparral. Same luck with the antelope we saw. There were lots of free-range cattle, and Nancy had to hit the brakes to avoid hitting a bull that had wandered onto the highway. He had trouble with his footing on the asphalt, but he found his way to safety. As we started back this morning, we saw five vultures perched on a wire fence and looking at a dead animal—like personal-injury lawyers checking out a potential client, I thought.

We met interesting people at the RV park in Marathon. A retired couple, for example—she a former prosecutor, he a former police detective. Back in the 1990s, they had just been back from their honeymoon about a week when she saw him on live television in a shootout with a man who had just murdered his girlfriend. Our companions were both fascinating; we could have listened to them reminisce all night.

Ocotillo in bloom

Our RV in Marathon, Texas

Cholla with nest (cactus wren, I think)

RV park grounds, Marathon, Texas

Big Bend National Park

Maiden voyage to the Gila Cliff Dwellings

This week, we drove our new (to us) RV up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings in south central New Mexico. Technically, it can be a day trip, but we have friends who left Las Cruces at 6 a.m. and returned at 10 p.m. Much of the trip is on narrow, winding roads with occasional steep drops. We had to avoid a stretch of Highway 15, because it is closed to vehicles over 20 feet long, and our vehicle is 25.

Both elevation and latitude increase on the trip, and the vegetation changes gradually from sere desert with dried-up arroyos, creosote bushes, and prickly pear cactus to ponderosa pines and streams with honest-to-goodness water in them. The cacti never completely disappear, but they become much less prevalent in the upper elevations.

I will hold back on many of the details, because I have an assignment to write an article about it for Southwest Senior. But the dwellings were briefly the home of the Mogollon Indians about 700 years ago, and were abandoned for reasons unknown. The area was the home of the Chiricahua Apache, whose most famous member was Geronimo.

An Amazon plot?

On my favorite writing list, The Internet Writing Workshop, there’s been discussion about what Amazon is supposedly doing to self-publishing outfits such as iUniverse and PublishAmerica. Angela Hoy wrote a lengthy story outlining Amazon's supposed malfeasance. As the story goes, bad boy Bezos (see mug shot) is protecting his own BookSurge by removing the “Buy” buttons on listings for competitors’ books. In a variation of the tale, competitive listings themselves are being removed. I read that “all 1500” PublishAmerica authors have been affected. When I expressed skepticism, saying that my iUniverse offering, When Pigs Fly, is still available for purchase on Amazon, a correspondent said I would pay for my smug refusal to read the whole Hoy piece, and my day of reckoning would come.

Yeah, well. Allow me to quote my favorite B-movie actor, Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify. In the small sampling of PublishAmerica, iUniverse, and BookSurge listings I checked on Amazon, all were treated the same.

Maybe there is something to the claims, but I don't see it. If you want to scare me, do it with easily verifiable evidence. At least do some minimal fact-checking before you pass along a rumor.

A trip to Arizona

Last week I finally met my friend Kate Reynolds after corresponding with her for years by email. She and her husband were gracious hosts to my wife and me when we went to Arizona to pick up our RV. Kate is a fine writer who has contributed to The Insider’s Guide to Phoenix and The Insider’s Guide to Tucson.

The timing of the trip was great, as poppies and bluebonnets are abloom in abundance. This is a photo taken at the Tonto National Monument, said to be the last stronghold of Cochise. Note the blanket of poppies on the mountainside:


Roadside bluebonnets, my mom’s favorite flower:

Poppies and saguaro on a hillside:

Bergaalwyn blooming in Tohono Chul Park, Tucson:

And bougainvillea at the Holiday Inn, Mesa:

“Ve have our vays”

In my research for an article about self- and subsidy-publishing, I came across the name of iUniverse’s #5 best-seller, which I won’t name here. So I bopped on over to Amazon to see what its ranking is, and wouldn't you know, it doesn’t have a ranking. A quick email to Amazon confirmed that no ranking means they haven’t sold at least one copy. So I called iUniverse’s marketing department to inquire about it. The author lives in Florida and apparently has pretty decent sales on Amazon UK, but none at all in the US. The guy I spoke to at iUniverse had been curious too, and called the author to learn his secret, but apparently the author refused to reveal his methods. He has his vays...

The iUniverse guy did mention that for some of their best-selling non-fiction, an institution might purchase a substantial number of copies and distribute them to members, thus creating the high sales numbers.

Bright colors, dull sales

We visited our son in Austin for a few days—a 1300-mile round trip—and I packed copies of my novel in the car, hoping to do a little business along the way. I already have two retail customers, and I’d hoped to add to my client list.

Seeing our son was more important, of course. He showed us around the city, we ate too much, and we spent a couple of hours at the Zilker Botanical Garden, which is beginning to show some beautiful colors.


My gift shop customer in Johnson City still has a dozen copies of my book from her last purchase. Business is generally slow, she said. They just aren’t getting much foot traffic at this time of year. She still sells copies now and then, but she is hoping that business picks up a lot in spring when everything is abloom at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.


My restaurant customer still has a ton of copies of When Pigs Fly left, including four at a prominent counter display. My wife and I ate lunch there on our way home, and we watched as two fellows stood and looked at the book. One of them picked it up and flipped through the pages, appearing to be on the verge of buying. His friend said he was pretty sure he’d heard of it. Then the man picked it up again, flipped through the pages again. Then, oblivious to the urgent brainwaves I was transmitting (“Buy it, already!”), they left without the book. I like to think they’ll be back.

One of the loveliest towns along the route to Austin is Fredericksburg, where I found a small, independent bookstore. I walked in and introduced myself and my book. The lady said that business is very slow now, but the book looked interesting. She suggested I come back later and speak to her husband, so I left the copy with her to examine.

Later, the man said my book’s pricing wasn’t too bad for a self-published book. But he has a deep-seated prejudice against “dot-com” publishers and everything they publish. I said I understand fully, and that’s why he’d be dealing only with me. And yes, the irregular quality of the books can be an issue, but my book has gotten great reviews. No, that’s not it, he said. It’s the discounts. I told him what I was offering, ten percent better than iUniverse. Fine, he said. but there is also the problem of non-returnability. But you’d be dealing with me and not them, I said, and I will accept returns.

He was still skeptical, so I told him he could hold onto the book, read it, and judge it on its merits. He seemed to think that was fair. I don’t expect immediate business from him in any case, but I hope that we will eventually do business.

“I’ll think about it”

A booksigning at Coas is always fun. The owner lets me plunk down behind a table right by the door, brings me a cup of coffee, then leaves me on my own for two hours or so on a Saturday morning. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve sold books there—five, maybe six—and I never sell fewer than five copies or more than six. This past weekend I arrived early, sat down, and started smiling at people. It was going to be a good day. After all, hadn’t my good friend Dave sold 35 copies of his novel the week before at this same table? His book even costs more than mine.

People stopped and smiled, then moved on. Or didn’t stop at all. A couple of previous customers said hello. My friend Joan staggered by to say she was getting over pneumonia. Another showed interest but claimed to have no money. One nice fellow spoke to me for ten minutes because we have the same last name. An elderly gentleman asked if this was a book he could read to his granddaughter. I said no, and he left. A gangly mountain-man type wearing boots, dusty denim, a broad-brimmed hat, and a long beard half-glanced at me and shook his head as he left the store. They allow all kinds in here, his look seemed to say.

This is no way to get rich...

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After a while, he seemed to have a point. What was I doing here, wasting my time, selling nothing for the first hour? Several people looked at my book, said “I’ll think about it,” and disappeared into the store. That usually means they have no intention of buying my book, but they are too polite to come out and say so. My only consolation was going to be the sight of all the pretty women walking by.

Then the unexpected happened: One of those folks who said they would think about it came back to the table with a copy for me to sign. She actually had thought about it. Such a relief; I hated the thought of striking out. And along came three New Mexico State students to chat me up, and two of them bought copies. But the most satisfying sale was to a woman who said she would wait to buy it used. She never paid list price for a book, she said. She much preferred to buy books for a dollar, which you can easily do at Coas. I said oh, that’s fine, but she kept talking until she convinced herself to spring for a copy then and there. (Today she wrote me an email to say she just finished the book and how delighted she was with it.)

So I sold five for the day, but also met a couple of prospects for editing manuscripts, and one for building a website. Not bad. I can’t always judge a booksigning just by the number of books signed.

Later in the day, I proofed a novella in exchange for a purchase of eight copies of my book. This is no way to get rich, but life is good.

“Oh, they’re long gone.”

Last week, I sent out a batch of brochures for When Pigs Fly, and today I began following up. I’d obtained a list of truck stops off the website of a trucker’s association. The first six numbers I called from that list had been disconnected. Then I reached a fellow who said that all his customers spoke Spanish. After that, two of my numbers connected to offices of Progressive Insurance Company, followed by one that connected to the post office in the town I had in mind. I told the lady about the truck stop I was trying to reach, and she said, “Oh, they're long gone.”

Sigh. This list was worth what I paid for it, and not a penny more.

My last call worked out better. I spoke to a woman who said I had to contact their corporate purchasing department. I did so, and collected contact information. Then I contacted iUniverse to find out how big a discount I could offer for large quantities, with the idea of the customer buying directly from the publisher. Pfft! Thirty, thirty-five percent. If I want to offer a higher discount, I have to buy huge quantities and sell them myself—national chains normally demand a discount of 50-70 percent, the iU guy said, “and don’t forget that we never accept returns.”

I never expected to make a profit selling my novel, but I had hoped at least to get more copies of my book out there. It’s a truism that self-published and subsidy-published books don’t sell many copies, but of course they don't. The publisher's whole business model is based on many authors each selling only a few copies. They are simply not interested in volume sales.

When Pigs Fly garners uniformly excellent comments from readers, but it seems I have to reach those readers one by one. I may look into canceling my contract with iU and republishing on my own, but I’m sure that's no small task.

A lesson from the desert

The things a writer won’t do for research. On Friday, I headed into the Chihuahuan Desert to explore it as a possible setting for my next novel. How about following some of those unpaved roads off I-25 and heading in the direction of the San Andres Mountains? What a great idea! Maps show a road leading to a locked gate at the edge of the White Sands Missile Range, which encompasses the entire hundred-plus-mile mountain range. Nothing appears to be paved between the Interstate and the restricted federal land. There are very few roads, and they are marked poorly when they are marked at all. Creosote bushes, grassy clumps, prickly pear, cholla, and other low-growing vegetation dominate the landscape. Rattlesnakes aren’t obvious, but travelers on foot had better tread with care.


What have I forgotten? Oh yes, sand. The county road is like a washboard for the first mile or two, and you can drive on it in perfect safety if not in perfect comfort. Hard-packed sand and a wide road pose no problem.

Long-neglected fencing drew my attention, though out here it’s hard to know what is being kept in or being kept out. At a fork in the road, a tiny sign points towards Engle, a town that is nowhere in sight across a vast, open space. On the other branch is the back of a yield sign that's peppered with bullet holes. I followed that left and never saw another sign until I returned on foot—about which more later. That looked like the direction to follow, as it would take me deeper into Sierra County, where Spaceport America is going to be built some day soon.

The road split again, and my sharp left turn gave me serious pause. I stepped out of my car to check the road ahead, because it looked as though I might be about to drive off a cliff. If you’ve driven the dicier hills in San Francisco, that’s what it looked like. But okay. Reassured that my death was not imminent, I drove carefully down the hill.

From here on, the road narrows to barely more than a car’s width. Deep gullies appear in several places along the roadside. The sand becomes softer—much softer. At another fork, I took a right and saw the road parallelling a string of telephone poles that seemed to disappear into endless flat nothing. That looked like a mistake, so I executed a careful three-point turn (four-point, really). The banks of sand on either side proved no problem.


Back at the fork, I took a right—not my first mistake of the day, but surely my biggest. My all-wheel-drive Volvo got stuck in a deep sand bank. What a mess. I had nothing to work with but my hands. All four wheels were stuck, and I couldn't see any daylight between the sand and the undercarriage.

I looked around: not a building in sight, and absolutely no traffic. I started digging with my hands and jamming flat rocks under the tires for traction. No go. I called my wife and then AAA. The lady asked how many feet my car was off the paved road. About 15,000, I said, estimating three miles from the highway. Triple-A really wasn’t a viable option, as any tow truck would likely have gotten stuck itself.

Eventually, after more hand-digging, I abandoned the car and hiked back to the highway. One fellow in a pickup truck stopped on the way, but said it would be a couple of hours before he could help me, as he had to go help his mother, who was recovering from a stroke. He offered me a ride, but he was going in the wrong direction, and it was getting dark. So I thanked him and kept walking to the highway, with the plan of making it to the Border Patrol checkpoint a few miles to the south. Within a few minutes, a Border Patrol cruiser picked me up and gave me a lift to their station. My wife arranged for some friends to come and pick me up.

The next day, my friend and our wives drove back, bringing shovels and cardboard for traction. We went down that steep hill, immediately thought better of it, and turned around in what was the last available wide spot. Then we hiked about a mile, pretty much all on a downhill slope.

Even with two shovels and four brains, it took us 90 minutes to extract the car, but we did succeed. Then we all headed north to the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, where we rounded out an oddly satisfying day.

There is a lesson in this, that we must respect the desert. It’s still winter, and the 60-degree day turned into a 30-degree night. In the blazing summer heat, my gaffe could have been deadly.

Balloons, batteries, and books

Tip: If you go to a balloon rally, pack extra batteries for your digital camera. On a co-o-o-old Saturday morning, we arose at an uncivilized hour to meet friends and walk to the 16th annual Mesilla Valley Balloon Rally. My double-A’s were good for only five exposures; luckily, this was one of them.

This coming week, I’ll start mailing copies of a new brochure out to prospective retailers, offering them a 30 percent discount if they purchase When Pigs Fly directly from iUniverse. Direct mail isn’t known for its high response rate, but I will follow up with them by phone and see what happens. For the last several weeks, thinking about and working on promotion has occupied more of my time than writing fiction. But my 2007 sales were about 300 copies—all hand-sold—and I’d like to do as well this year.

Writing groups, marketing my pig, and making time to write

The other day, we drove to Bosque del Apache to see the snow geese and sandhill cranes. The Bosque is one of the few places to find open water in New Mexico, and it is a haven for many thousands of migratory birds. It was a welcome respite from my writing and marketing, as fun as those activities are.

Once a month, I make the 40-mile trek south on I-25 and east on I-10, past the smelly stockyards of Vado, over the Texas line (“Drive Friendly—It's the Texas Way”), and head for the Dorris van Doren Library and the monthly meeting of the El Paso Writer's League. They have just put up a website, which no doubt will grow and prosper.

That’s the week after Mesilla Valley Writers meet in Las Cruces, and I try to be active in both.

Then there is the admin work for the Internet Writers Workshop and the reviewing and web work for the Internet Review of Books. And every so often, but not nearly often enough, I hook up by Skype with my old writer’s group who are in Massachusetts.

All of this, and I am trying to market When Pigs Fly a little better than in 2007. It looks to me as though gift stores may be the best retail market for my book; the bookstores want a bigger margin than iUniverse is willing to give, and then in a bookstore, my WPF would be just one more book competing for attention. In a gift shop, there might be little or no direct competition. So that’s the new focus for 2008.

Wouldn’t it be nice to just sit down and do some extensive writing? I have started three different novels in the last year without making a whole lot of progress on any of them. But I think—maybe—I have the story I want to stick with. Now to actually write it...

December Internet Review of Books is out!

Yesterday the Internet Review of Books published its third issue! This is a monthly collaborative effort among Carter Jefferson, Ruth Douillette, Gary Presley, Jane Elioseff, and me. It's a lot of work and a lot of satisfaction. My main responsibility is maintaining the website, but I also write monthly reviews.

Cuando los Puercos Vuelen

Our friends Jim and Robie sent along this photo from Mazatlán, Mexico today, and I promised Jim I'd steal it. This is an out-of-business restaurant named Cuando los Puercos Vuelen, or When Pigs Fly. On the left is a detail of the li'l porker.

Old novel, new book?

In the last year, I haven't written as consistently as in the past, partly because I've been busy marketing When Pigs Fly. I have begun a couple of new novels in a comic vein, though neither is far along. Probably, it'll be necessary to set one aside and push on with the other. It's a certainty that neither could be ready for publication in 2008, not at my writing pace.

This morning, my wife was telling some friends about my prize in El Paso for Little Mountain, and she suggested I self-publish the novel. I'd had an agent for it back in the '90s, and it made all the usual publishing rounds without success. One small publisher expressed great enthusiasm to the point of calling me several times and doing a free copyedit in anticipation of publishing it, but then he went out of business. Since then, the darned thing had been sitting on my hard drive for so long, it was going to start collecting mold.

So this poses an interesting question. whether to publish and market a northeast-based ethnic mystery that is so different from When Pigs Fly, which is pure comedy and largely southwest-based. I've decided that life is to short to waste circulating my novels to agents and traditional publishers anymore, spending months or even years searching for the approval of strangers. Screw that, to coin a phrase. Barring unforeseen circumstances, any future novels of mine will be either self-published or unpublished.

A plus to publishing Little Mountain in 2008 is that it would give me the time to finish a new project and publish in 2009, thus giving me a record of publishing almost annually.

Folks who have read my comic novel speak well of it. They laughed with me, but will the same readers be willing to read a serious mystery about a Cambodian homicide detective in Lowell, Massachusetts? Or am I going to have to look for a different set of readers?

The photo shows a Cambodian dancer in Lowell, Massachusetts, circa 1981.

A writing award

Don't you just hate it when you don't blog for six weeks, and no one notices? Lately I've been deeply involved in The Internet Review of Books, but lots of my energy, what energy there is, spins out in a dozen directions.


Today I won an award at the El Paso Writer's League, second prize for book-length fiction. I'd submitted a portion of my unpublished ethnic mystery, Little Mountain, which is set primarily in the Cambodian community of Lowell, Massachusetts.

Here are some mountains with a dusting of snow in southern New Mexico: