Greetings fellow readers!

On the last Saturday of February, I participated in the Friends of Lebanon Public Library's first ever Local Author Fair, where I had the pleasure of meeting other authors and exploring an impressive selection of genres, both fiction and nonfiction. Friends and family and neighbors dropped in to show their support and make the day go by way too fast. I haven't done an event like this since before the pandemic and didn't realize how much I'd been missing the vibe of writers and readers gathered together in one room, surrounded by books, books, and more books.

Based on author and walk-in attendance, the Local Author Fair will become an annual event!

With this year's fair behind me, I've had more time to spend working on the next frontier western, Becker's Trail. I'm happy with the progress I'm making. Of course it's never as fast as I'd like it to be, but any kind of forward movement is a good thing! The plot has taken a new direction, bringing the story closer to the happy ending I'm looking for. I've talked a lot about the story without giving much in the way of details. So, here's a short teaser from Chapter One:

Lebanon, Oregon 1867

"Don't try to move," Levi told his mother. "Doc Hanlon says it's best you lie still." Ma set her blue eyes on him. Levi thought she had the prettiest eyes in the county, but right now they looked unfocused. Drugged. "Go to Quartzville," she said, her voice a rasped whisper. "Find your father." Pa said he was going to strike it rich prospecting for gold. "In a couple months, we'll be living high on the hog," he declared before leaving them to run the farm without him. He should have been home for planting time. It should have been him driving the wagon to town for seed and supplies. Ma was in this fix because of him. Levi's mother gave his hand a weak squeeze. "Take May." He frowned. "But she's just a girl. I don't know how to look after her. Aunt Ada – " "No. Your sister's fragile." A tear rolled from the corner of Ma's eye and into her ear. Levi swallowed the lump in his throat, the pressure of responsibility weighing heavy on him. Fragile was not a word he would have picked to describe his stubborn little sister, but his mother was right. May did not belong with Aunt Ada. They wouldn't survive under the same roof for an afternoon, much less the time it took him to reach Quartzville, some thirty miles east, locate their father and bring him home. "We'll find Pa together," he promised his mother, "don't worry."

And that's how thirteen-year-old Levi and his nine-year-old sister, May, find themselves riding to the booming mining town of Quartzville, Oregon, where they discover they aren't the only ones looking for their father.

I just finished reading The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox, who, in 1971, celebrated his 101st birthday the year the book was published. Fourteen hand-written notebooks filled by Chief Red Fox over the course of seventy-five years served as the source material that covers his childhood living with his family in a tepee and food was hunted on foot with bow and arrow, to traveling the world with Buffalo Bill. A candid, heartbreaking, enlightening must-read for western history lovers.

As a footnote, when I read that Chief Red Fox "became a sailor on the high seas" in the spring of 1884 at the age of fourteen, I realized he was two years younger than Alice in Come Snowfall.  I love it when my fictional characters mesh with history that way. It makes them all the more real to me.