Earlier this year I was talking to an editor at a new press and he mentioned they wanted to include westerns in their lineup. He found out I live in Oklahoma and wondered half-seriously if I’d end up being their western guy.

Naturally that’s been on my mind ever since, only because I’d like to sell books. Westerns are a tough nut to crack, and historically have had a picky audience. Going back to my teens I always heard that western readers would crucify you if you messed up any historical details in your book.

I wonder now if that’s less of the case—after all, how many western readers are there, especially of that type? Go look at the western section of B&N, it’s even more sparse than the paperback sci-fi section. You’ve got two authors: L’Amour (dead) and Johnstone (puts out six books a year.) I’ve read both. I love L’Amour, and Johnstone is good…if I’m in the mood for a western.

There’s also the “modern western” like the Walt Longmire Mysteries, which are awesome, and TV shows like Yellowstone, Landman, and whatever else Taylor Sheridan makes. I’d have to know more about that side of the life to write it.

As much as I’d love to sell books, I’d eventually hate to get stuck in westerns in the way L’Amour did. It wasn’t until the end of his career (near the end of his life) that he got to really experiment with other genres. His publishers could sell his westerns so that was mostly what they wanted from him. I might have a couple of westerns in me before I die, but it’s not what keeps me awake and dreaming all the time.

Still, as I’ve thought about it over the last few months, I’ve tried conjuring a story set in the back half of the 19th century that didn’t rely on a speculative element. No magic, no sci-fi. What would I write? I thought about the Kurt Russell movie Bone Tomahawk, where a sheriff and his posse go to war with a tribe of what they think are just violent Indians, but are really caveman leftovers that even the regular Indians try to avoid. A cool idea that fits the setting.

This last week I read a nonfic by Michael Punke, who has done a great deal of historical reading and writing about this time period, pushing into the early 20th century. The book is THE LAST STAND, published in 2007, and it’s about the fight to preserve the American bison from extinction—after it was basically a matter of economics and government policy to destroy them all.

During the section where Punke talks about laws protecting the bison, he mentioned how poaching then became a problem. After most of the herds had been eradicated, people still wanted bison products, so the anti-hunting laws did little more than increase the price of those goods. It was up to groups of conservationist hunters to proactively go out and catch poachers before they did irreversible damage to the animal population.

That particular scenario gave me something to think on. In the moment, I wasn’t able to immediately conjure up anything revolutionary, just a story about a reluctant hunter who gets hired to take on a poacher, and slowly sheds his reluctance as the hunt reveals more and more of a personal stake in the quest. Compelling, but slightly overdone.

Then I remembered a book I read least week, BY THE GREAT HORN SPOON, about a Boston kid and his butler who joined the 1849 San Francisco gold rush. (Fictional account.) The setting and the characters were enjoyable on their own, but what really carried it was the pacing and the constant give-and-take of success and failure for the main characters. Each success revealed something new about the setting, and each failure forced them into the next step of their journey.

If I were to set a character—say, a grizzled veteran of the Confederacy, trying to make a new name for himself in the west some 15 years after the war—on a path to catch a poacher, and his journey was a back-and-forth of success and failure that showed different pockets of 1880s America, and I could somehow wrap it up in the charm and prose that Charles Portis used in TRUE GRIT, I could put together something special. Something I could be proud of.

TRUE GRIT is one of those westerns that transcends its genre—even people who don’t read or watch westerns will read this book and watch the movie. (The 2010 version. I’ve found that fewer people have seen the John Wayne version, myself included. I just need to get around to it.)

And that feels pretty good.

So after I finish tackling the other projects I have ahead of it in the till, I expect I’ll answer the bug that bit me on this one, and I’ll start cooking up a Graham Bradley western.

This is what reading does to me, kids.

Anyway. Drive safe, see you out there.