“Quivira” was written in the fall of 2011 in that initial burst of fiction writing I had after Smedley was released. I spent much of that summer and autumn giving presentations and doing signings around Connecticut. During my off moments I still wanted to write but I didn’t have the time to focus on a new long-form project, which is why I had begun writing short fiction. It was a way to keep my knives sharp without the commitment.

Prior to “Quivira” I had been writing alternate histories and likewise it was intended to be an alt-hist until it somehow went sideways into a land of doppelgängers and American Indian mythology. Being so busy meant time was a recurring issue in my head; and, more specifically, how often there aren’t enough hours in a given day to get things done. To succeed at one ambition often means sacrificing another due to lack of time — it is the compromise of the clock.

What if those squashed ambitions returned to haunt you in a literal sense?

Eric Guignard accepted the story for his first anthology Dark Tales of Lost Civilizations, which went on to be nominated for a Stoker. Better still, we struck up a friendship and years later would work together on another project.

When I was a kid my dad had a playback typewriter. As you typed a document the typewriter would perforate a tape of green paper. When you were done, you flipped a switch and fed the perforated tape back into the machine, whereupon it would automatically type a copy of the document — useful, I guess, in an era when copiers were reserved for big businesses and copy shops were far between. Of course, you had to type that initial document perfectly otherwise the tape would repeat a mistake in every copy, which to my mind restricted the machine’s utility to professional typists.

This strange artifact, so specific in time, sat large in my mind as I wrote “Mourning Dove,” which features a mechanical mashup of a printing press and a player piano. The story is a tight 3K, written late last year for Third Flatiron’s weird West anthology Principia Ponderosa.

A recurring thought at the time (you can maybe guess why) was whether knowing the hour and manner of your own death would be beneficial — you could live as if every day was literally among your last — or if the anticipation of death’s approach would be too anxiety inducing and therefore you would actively avoid knowing. Thing is, even in the absence of a prophetic machine we usually make one of these choices.

Story order is important to any collection, and I think as an opener for The Dead Ride Fast, the fast pace and relative brevity of “Mourning Dove” make for a solid tone setter.

Remember back in 2014 when I said I would publish a reprint collection of my short fiction the following year? Well, better late than never — The Dead Ride Fast will be available as an e-book next Tuesday.

The Dead Ride Fast collects six of my weird Westerns, all of them stories of existential dread on the 19th-century frontier.

I cannot express how much fun it’s been to put this book together.

There are many reasons why I wanted to publish under my own imprint. I try to live by P.J. O’Rourke’s maxim that a writer should always be paid at least twice for a piece of writing; and like the T-shirt says, What part of 70 percent royalties don’t you understand?

Yet what I enjoyed most was the absolute control over the entire product, from the cover to the typography to the interior layout. Writing can turn a little stale over time: you write something, it’s published, you receive a check. That two-beer buzz, so sharp when you’re in your early 20s, dulls as the years pass. The excitement I still feel when I write derives from the actual creation itself — the alchemy of writing and revision — but dwindles as soon as I send it off to the editor.

That thrill of creating, that alpha-to-omega electrification, was something I felt the entire time while assembling Dead.

If you want to know the technical nitty gritty of how I did it, Daddy Jack will tell you after the jump! jump!

Continue reading “The Dead Ride Fast” →