Here Be Cowboys

As a child I started out reading, and latterly writing, science fiction. That was my genre of choice growing up. From the space adventures of E.E. Doc Smith to the poetic works of Samuel Delaney and the paranoid futures of Philip K. Dick. Dragons with Anne McCaffrey. Fantasy door stoppers featuring the adventures of Thomas Covenant. It wasn’t a straight path from pulp to serious writings, but I guess there was a kind of loose progression that started with Smith and ended with Delaney and Dick and other more mature works.

What I wrote back then was definitely pulp. It was derivative. I ended up consciously or unconsciously mimicking the styles of the authors I most enjoyed reading. But I could no more convincingly conjure up the California settings of a Philip K. Dick novel, than I could plot anything even remotely as wild or original as one of his stories.

My dreams of a literary career took equal place back then with my dreams of making it in the music industry. But publishing your own works (if I’d had anything worth publishing) was untenable in fiction. Self-publishers were derided and the success of Watership Down (a hugely successful book, self-published after multiple rejections from mainstream publishers) was the exception that proved this rule.

Music had gravitated in a different direction. When punk broke out from the established music industry stranglehold, people were free to make and release their own music. There were vibrant scenes where people recorded albums to tape and ran off copies in their bedrooms. Artwork could be printed at the local printing shop. If you became popular enough you could move on to vinyl releases, run your own label or even get signed up by a major or independent record company.

I guess that partly explains why I got more into music than writing. I still kept my hand in though. I still wrote short stories, gradually becoming less overtly SF in nature and more in a genre that had come to be classified as slipstream. Stories set in the real world, with real world characters, but where events were slightly out of kilter. Where perhaps some weirdness or magic had crept in.

The writing didn’t really go anywhere, but I kept at it. In Bristol I joined my sister and others in what had become known as the BFW – the Bristol Fiction Writers group. I tried to sell a story or two, but without any success. I had made some records by that point and had come close to getting signed by a mainstream record label based in London. (A friendly A&R rep had championed my work – she had a soft spot for Bristol and probably that helped me to get half a foot in the door).

Nothing came of the music or the writing back then. We entered a new millennium and I relocated further west to Penzance. Here the writing career, such as it was, took off. I had a close friend, a Canadian, who was studying for a PhD in marketing at the Manchester Business School. We’d first met online, but now she was in my country and shortly she was in Cornwall visiting for a week’s study break.

We bonded over many things, but prime among them was a love of books . We were both avid readers and avid writers. We supported and spurred each other on. The internet had unlocked new writing markets – you no longer had to paw your way through the latest edition of the Artist and Writers yearbook to find places to submit your work. Submitting itself became easier. I made my first sale to an online literary website. I may have been in my late-30s, but at last I could call myself a professional writer.

It was about this time that I learnt the benefits of tailoring what you wrote to increase the chances of being published. We’d entered a contest for a new short story anthology and my friend Cath’s story had been chosen for inclusion in their first edition. She wasn’t a prize winner though. First place had gone to a story about The Holocaust. To us this felt like a cheat code. Judges sitting down to read that would instantly be primed to seek out any profound message they could find. My submitted piece, set in the environs of a local poodle parlour, didn’t stand a chance.

There were lessons to be learnt, but I wasn’t so naïve as to go away and attempt my own piece of Holocaust fiction. But I had spotted another trend. The fishing story. Maybe it was Hemingway’s fault, but for whatever reason, every small press publication we studied seemed to contain at least one story related to fishing. Personally I had never been fishing. I had no interest in fishing. I was a lifelong vegetarian, so as an adult I didn’t even eat fish. But none of that was going to stop me.

And so it turned out that my fourth professional sale came with Ghost Fishing, a tale of magical realism about a man living in a remote American town who has something missing in his life and is gifted it by the river, but gifted it at a price. It’s not a favourite among the many stories I’ve written over the years, although there are parts of it I’m very proud of. Perhaps it’s because the setting was alien to me and I was trying to bend my style to fit to that theme. It was an exercise embarked on to a prove a point and it succeeded.

Mostly I had a distinct style and type of story that I wrote. It served me well enough. It got me into a few publications, although it was certainly nothing you could consider as a career. But my strangest attempt at writing-what-you-don’t-know was still a couple of years away. Which is where we finally get to the cowboys – via, as you might have noticed, a rather circuitous route.

I’d reached my late 30s having never read a single piece of Western fiction. I’d never even seen any of the many movies in that once popular genre. I knew no more about the mythic west of the United States than I did about crocheting or the Aga Khan.

Then one day all that changed.

Cath and I had become charity shop junkies. We spent hours trawling all the local stores looking for cool second hand books to purchase. Every town had a sizeable collection of charity shops. Where I lived we had Scope, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research, a local cat rescue charity and the big player, Oxfam.

Oxfam were our nemesis. They charged double what most other charity shops did for books. They were snooty about what they sold. We once overhead some of the shop staff decrying the quality of the donations they received. They wanted to be the Waitrose of the charity shop sector. We hated this snobbery. But we still went there, because … because we were charity shop junkies.

And it was in Oxfam that we stumbled upon a collection of eight western novels. Cheap looking paperbacks that had been stacked out of sight on the lowest possible shelf, where it was hard to access. And each one was marked for sale at only 25p. I had no interest in westerns, but Cath was intrigued. The covers were pulpy, but enticing. And for just £2 we could have eight fresh books to read. Most books in Oxfam were priced higher than that for a single copy. I guess the snooty staff just wanted to offload this stuff as quickly as possible.

So we bought the lot. And we ended up reading them aloud together, often lying in bed and attempting to recreate the accents. We laughed openly at the silly dialogue and some of the ridiculous character names. But the books themselves were fun and the plots raced along in the manner of all good page turners. We had a gas. We kept an eye out for more of the same – our original stack were all by Louis L’Amour and he’d been prolific enough during his career to churn out hundreds of the things -  and gradually built up our collection.

But I would never have thought about writing in that genre – no more than I would’ve sat down and written something about The Holocaust. But at some point, primed as I’d become to seek out any possible fiction market, I stumbled across a new publishing venture that was running a competition aimed exclusively at writers of western fiction. Billed as 'the first annual cowboy up contest', run by some people out in the west of the USA, and with a manageable word limit (I forget exactly, but probably 2-3,000), we decided it would be fun to try entering.

I had no expectation of success. I might have read over a dozen westerns by that point, but it wasn’t a form or style of writing that bore any resemblance to the fiction I wrote. And the only part of The States I’d visited for myself was Vermont, across the border from Canada and about as far from the vast spaces of the ‘wild west’ as you could get.

So I started out with a simple plot idea. It came via a half-remembered episode of a popular 70s TV drama called Secret Army. Secret Army was about a resistance organisation operating out of occupied Brussels during the second world war. It was – and remains – one of the best pieces of TV drama the UK has ever produced, but it was as far removed from westerns as you could imagine. But themes are universal and I wasn’t actually taking the plot of one of these episodes, simply a single motif which it turned out later I had largely misremembered the significance of. But all stories start from somewhere, some seed, and then they develop a life of their own.

So I had a plot. I kept the setting as simple as I could – the action takes place in a single location, a cave somewhere out in the mountains. I made the characters and scenery as authentic as I could, based on nothing more than those handful of novels I’d read. And off it went, with no expectations of success against what I assumed would be a stack of entries from real writers of western fiction. People who actually knew what they were writing about.

So I was genuinely surprised when my story turned out to be one of the dozen or so selected as a winner, to be included in an anthology of contest entrants. I didn’t earn a fee for this sale, but I did receive a few free copies of the finished book.

And that, as it turned out,, was my last professional sale. The internet had widened the marketplace for small press publishers, but it had also made it much easier for writers to submit their works. There was a question of economics and the time it must have taken editors to read through all the submissions they were receiving. Getting anything published was harder when you were up against so many other writers, many of whom were undoubtedly more talented and more determined to succeed.

I’d made a couple of attempts at writing a full length novel (more on that maybe another time), because that was the only realistic way to make a living from writing, but that hadn’t borne fruit. Personal circumstances changed. My enthusiasm for the writing process dwindled and I turned my focus back to making music.

Almost twenty years later I still read the odd western. They’re harder to find these days. In Penzance the local library used to have a small section devoted purely to western fiction. Over the years it shrunk to a single shelf. Where I live now, if you can find westerns at all, they’ll be in the large print section. The audience has aged to a point where those that remain lack the eye sight for those old tightly printed paperbacks. The books themselves I guess gradually got removed from circulation as they aged and fell apart.

You can still find westerns – not I suspect so much in charity shops, but in more specialised second hand bookstores. But I’m no longer a second hand book junkie. I prefer to borrow from the library, return what I read and maintain a more minimalist lifestyle. I do retain at least one of those cheap and battered paperbacks on a shelf somewhere, nestling under an imaginary sign that states simply: Here be cowboys.