Year: 2025

I am pleased to announce that my novel Prodigies, which won the 2022 Margaret Laurence Prize for Fiction in the Manitoba Book Awards, will be published in the fall of 2025 in a new softcover and ebook edition by the Hat Creek imprint of Roan & Weatherford Publishing Associates.

And not only that: the sequel to Prodigies (currently titled The Ghost of Cheyenne) is currently scheduled for fall of 2026.

Prodigies was originally published in 2021 in a hardcover edition by Five Star Publishing, a division of Cengage/Gale. When Cengage/Gale announced in 2023 that they were pulling back from publishing new books, in order to focus on their core business of large-print editions of existing books, that left my sequel to Prodigies an orphan.

A few years of searching led eventually to Arkansas-based Roan & Weatherford, which has several imprints specializing in crime/thriller fiction, science fiction/fantasy, romance, non-fiction and, in the case of Hat Creek, traditional, modern and crossover westerns.

Roan & Weatherford is interested in writers who have a series in mind and Prodigies was written in a manner that left the door open for a sequel — or two or three. They also like publishing ebook editions, which will come as good news to friends who wanted to read Prodigies on their digital device.

Perusing other offerings from the Hat Creek imprint confirms that I’ve found a great new home for Daniel, Lily, Lincoln and the other characters who traversed late-1870s America in Prodigies. I hope you’ll saddle up and come along for the ride.

As a writer who enters a fair number of contests (eight or nine last year, I think), it’s a nice change to be able to say I’ve won one.

My short story, Clay Allison’s Girl, was named the winner of the 2024 Longhorn Prize for fiction, awarded by the magazine Saddlebag Dispatches. The story was inspired by a visit to Dodge City, and particularly by the section in the wild west town’s museum about the life of the women who worked in its brothels. You can find it here:

Saddlebag Dispatches is dedicated to history and fiction exploring the old west. The issue my story appears in is otherwise focused on the California Gold Rush of 1849. In a little example of synchronicity, I was reading H.W. Brands’s excellent history of the gold rush, The Age of Gold, when I received the news about my story.

As part of my prize, I’ll be receiving a hand-made silver belt buckle, which I look forward to donning with my Levi’s and a cowboy shirt. I may have to spend my prize money on a pair of cowboy boots to complete the ensemble.

And in other writing news, just a few weeks after that, I had another story of mine – this one with a contemporary setting – appear in the British literary magazine. My story Order Carnivora appears in Thin Skin, a new magazine focusing on work by writers over the age of 50. You can read it here.

I’m still sending stuff all the English-speaking world, so with a bit of luck this won’t be the lead item on this site for long.