Greetings!

We’ll return to East Tennessee and the Smoky Mountains in the next three novels I’ll release later in the year: Night Flight, Luther Click & The Lawman, and New Hope.

Sliding back in time, I wrote my first novel when I was in graduate school in the 1990’s. It was a big brick of a book at one hundred forty thousand words. I set the novel in 1926-27 and centered it on a group of people in the mountains of East Tennessee—loggers, railroaders, moonshiners, lawmen, several doctors, barnstormers, even a group of pilots who flew the night mail.

It was a sprawling saga.

When I had it finished, I queried a passel of literary agents in an effort to find someone who would beat down the doors of publishers and get my book into print.

Over time, one hundred sixty-four letters of rejection came back.

It was not until I was at a Mid-South writers conference that some agent, to whom I was pitching my novel, told me, “Your book’s too long. Publishers won’t consider a first novel that’s longer than eighty-five thousand words.”

Incidentally, I had titled that novel Wings Over the Mountains because it starts with two brothers, Ben and Harold Wright—yes, the Wright brothers, but not those Wright brothers you know of in Ohio. Ben buys a crated biplane and has it shipped up to where he and his brother live and work in the Smokies. Ben has a yen to learn to fly the thing.

The brothers own a small sawmilling company.

I axed all that and re-started the novel with the brothers and their crew, on their lunch break, talking over a barnstorming show they had put on the previous weekend. Their star pilot, Rooster Wilhite, had flown pursuit planes in the Big War. Rooster now runs the saw in the brothers’ lumber mill.

He’s at the center of the surviving novel retitled Night Flight. Rooster loses an arm in an accident at the mill.

The question I wanted to explore in this story is how does a one-armed person survive in a world that requires him or her to have two arms for most jobs?

Two literary journals published excerpts from Night Flight, but that was the extent of the novel’s life in print at that time.

I let the book lay dormant in my computer for thirty years.

Two years ago, I opened the file and re-read the story. It was good, exceptionally good, but the writing was rough. It was, after all, a first novel. At that time, I was learning my craft.

So I began a rewrite, using all that I had learned about writing compelling stories through the eight novels and more than three hundred short stories I had published to that date.

My writers group critiqued Night Flight chapter by chapter.

Spoiler alert. Rooster discovers he can fly an airplane with only one hand to work all the controls. What you don’t know is what he has to do to learn that and what comes after when he gets a job flying the night mail on a route from Knoxville to Memphis and return.

It’s a big, sprawling story, one you’ll thoroughly enjoy.

I have a cover for the book. You saw at the top.

I’m now waiting for the last element, a review from Midwest Reviews, and then I can publish. That should be in November. So, yes, you will be able to buy the book as a Christmas gift for yourself.

The season of book events is here

For me, it started last Saturday when I set up my canopy and book display at the Stroll Through Albion Park’s Arts, Crafts, and Vendor Fair. Albion and its town park is a 20-minute drive north of Janesville where I live.

Fifty-five vendors were there. Two of us were authors, Pat Hall who writes for kids, and me. We promote each other’s books.

I tell the event organizers and everyone who comes that I have the prime location . . . right next to the bake sale. Everybody shops the bake sale!

Two stories from the day. One, I discovered my charge card reader wasn’t working, discovered it when a husband and wife couple wanted to buy several books. Fortunately for me, they did have the cash, but in the kerfuffle, she left her credit card on the table. Another customer found it after they had left.

So I took off on the run to find the couple and give them her card.

No luck.

After a ten-minute gallop around the park, I returned to my booth and told a friend of the couple, who had watched my booth, that I’d just hold onto the card, that when the dear lady reached in her wallet for her Visa to buy something, she would remember where she left her card and come back.

That’s kind of the way it worked it. When she couldn’t find her card in her wallet some fifteen minutes later, she sent her husband back to see me.

A happy conclusion.

Later in the day, Wendy Heisz and Kim Fuller, both avid readers, stopped. Wendy saw Early’s Fall and wanted it. The cover sold the book.

So Wendy said to her good friend, “Don’t you want to get a book, too?”

“Well, after I read yours.”

Then one of them spotted my three-book deal: Buy three of my big books and I’ll give you one of my ten-dollar books as a gift.

“Let’s get a third book for a friend, then we get a fourth book free!”

I said the gift would be my John Wads thriller, Iced, and handed them a copy.

They were now sold.

Wendy asked, “Can I use my credit card?”

I said, “No, my credit card machine isn’t working. The card reader and my phone won’t talk to one another.”

She said maybe I could fix it.

I opened my phone and couldn’t find the right screen and command to get the two to talk to one another.

Wendy, who’s a better techie than me, offered to try. She couldn’t do it either and said, “We really want the books. Maybe we can find a cash machine nearby.”

They did and came back with three crisp twenty-dollar bill.

I took the money and said, “The three books, that’s fifty-five dollars. You’ve got five dollars coming back unless you want to give me a tip—”

They didn’t want to give me a tip.

“Will you sign our books?” Wendy asked.

I said, “Sure. That’ll be five dollars.”

We laughed about that as I gave Wendy the five dollars she had coming.

“When we want more books, where can we get them,” she asked.

I said Amazon. “All my books are up on Amazon as real books and ebooks.”

She had my business card. She glanced at the back that has my information on it. “I live on Blaine Street,” she said, “not far from you. Can we come by your house?”

I said Amazon is easier.

She thought about that for a moment. “No, we want to come by your house,” she said.

New customers. New fans. New friends.

Coming events

If you’re in southern Wisconsin or northern Illinois, I’ll be at the Williams Bay Arts and Crafts Fair on August 1, Art on Main in Cambridge on August 7-8, and the Wisconsin Author Book Sale in New Glarus on August 22.

Until next time, keep reading. 

Jerry & the Sheriff