Jacquie Rogers: Muleskinners-Judge Not (Wolf Creek 6: Hell on the Prairie) #western @JacquieRogers

Muleskinners: Judge Not
by Jacquie Rogers
A short story in
Hell on the Prairie
Wolf Creek: Book 6

This week Romancing The West features the July 2 release, Wolf Creek: Hell on the Prairie. It's an anthology of seven short stories, all featuring characters in or connected to the Wolf Creek series, and offering  in-depth understanding of your favorite Wolf Creek residents.  There'll be giveaways on each post, so please check back each day.

• Monday: Troy Smith discusses his character, Marshal Sam Gardner, and his role in Wolf Creek.
• Tuesday: In Drag Rider, Chuck Tyrell has some fun with Billy Below--how'd this character get his name?
• Wednesday: Clay More tells us about doctoring in the Old West and in his story, The Oath, how Wolf Creek's Dr. Logan Munro deals with the conflicts his oath.
• Thursday: Cheryl Pierson's story, It Takes a Man, gives us an in-depth look at Derrick McCain.
• Friday: Jerry Guin tells us how his character, Quint Croy deals with his new job as a lawman, and how Asa Pepper ended up owning a bar in the rough part of Wolf Creek, called Dogleg City in Asa Pepper's Place.
• Saturday: Jacquie Rogers penned a guest appearance by a special character in her story, Muleskinners: Judge Not, that runs concurrent with Wolf Creek 1: Bloody Trail.
• Sunday: In New Beginnings, James J. Griffin gives us insight into the past of the town's blacksmith, and how a surprise changes his life.

If you're not familiar with the Wolf Creek series, you're missing out! Written under the house name Ford Fargo (the house name for Western Fictioneers), each book is the collaboration of some of the best western writers in the business, steered by Troy Smith, who also writes two WC characters. Links to all the Wolf Creek books are at the end of this article, just above the contest announcement.  For more information on the story world, visit Wolf Creek, Kansas.

RTW: Actually, I am Jacquie Rogers so this interview will be of myself. That’s not hard for a writer because we talk to people in our heads anyway. If we didn’t write, we’d have to take medication for it. So in this section, I ask myself for a brief bio. Here goes.

Jacquie Rogers

JR: Maybe I should make up something interesting, but might as well stick to the straight and narrow. I come from a dairy farm in Owyhee County, Idaho, and the majority of my stories are set around there. I had to do a lot of real work before I realized I could fake people out by writing books. Let’s see, need someone to milk your cows? Well, I know how, but call someone else. Same with programming your computer or running your political campaign. Actually, same with cleaning house, too, but so far no one has volunteered to do that for me.

I’m the author of the western historical romance Hearts of Owyhee series: Much Ado about Marshals, Much Ado about Madams, and Much Ado about Mavericks. I’ve also written a contemporary western romance, Down Home Ever Lovin’ Mule Blues, and a fantasy romance, Faery Special Romances, and other works. My story in Wolf Creek 6: Hell on the Prairie,  Muleskinners: Judge Not, is my first foray into traditional westerns, although I’ve read westerns all my life. I loved writing this story and it will serve as a launching pad for a new series next year.

RTW: Give us a blurb for Muleskinners: Judge Not.

JR: Elsie Parry and her father are headed to California, when their wagon is attacked by vicious outlaws, who happen to be biding time until they make a second assault on what’s left of Wolf Creek. This story takes place concurrently with Wolf Creek, Book 1: Bloody Trail.

RTW: What prompted you to write Westerns? What keeps you writing them?

JR: I write western historical romances and have wanted to write a traditional western for a long time, but just never did. What prompted me to write westerns in the first place? Originally, laziness. Since I grew up in an area not that far removed in culture and deed from the real Old West, I thought I could get away with very little research. Not so, because we did have electricity, cars, and telephones, and it’s amazing how much those three things change the world. The real answer to the question, though, is because my thought process lends itself to westerns better than any other genre, which is also probably why I love reading them so much.

RTW: It’s 1871 and you live in Wolf Creek, Kansas, what’s your job and how well would you get along with your character, Elsie Parry.

JR: My job? I’d probably be a dairy farmer if I had hired help, or a hunter if I didn’t. There are quite a few jobs I could do, and Kansas winters are cold, so maybe I’d take a job as a bookkeeper or some job where I could sit by the pot belly stove. I wouldn’t have to get along with Elsie because she doesn’t live there, but I think we’d be friends. She cracked me up a few times.

RTW: What surprised you the most about Elsie? Are there more surprises coming in future Wolf Creek books?

JR: When I started writing her story, she was as stubborn as her mules, so I was a little surprised at her flexibility, and also by her mysterious interpretation of judgment.  She's not in the Wolf Creek cast so you won't find her in future books, but she'll be in The Muleskinner series, released in 2014.

RTW: What would give Elsie the ultimate happiness?

JR: She wants to be settled in a place near the Pacific Ocean where her mules are happy. They were her only company for the last year of the Civil War and she’s very attached to them. She doesn’t think about marriage or children, since she’s twenty-three and hasn’t had a chance to learn women’s work; e.g., she wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about keeping a house or making a quilt. A stable, on the other hand, she understands.

Excerpt from
Muleskinners: Judge Not
by Jacquie Rogers
a short story in
Hell on the Prairie
Wolf Creek, Book 6

My pa wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. He’d flapped his lips all the way from Missouri to the middle of Kansas and I reckoned by the time we did get to the ocean, I’d be ready to dunk him in it.

“One of the mules is lagging.”

“Hermes,” I hollered. “Quit sniffing that bush and get over here.” Sure, my mules were coddled, but they’d been my only company for a year during the war, and the six years since, my best friends. “You know you’re supposed to stay by the wagon.”

The mule sent me a guilty look and trotted to his spot by the rear wheel with the other three. I have eight mules, but a harness for only four, so four mules pulled half a day, then I traded them out.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to tie the spare mules to the wagon, Elsie?” My father, Obadiah Parry, had lost his wife, son, home, and thought he’d lost me and the mules in the war, but he’d run into me a few years back.

Believe me, the moment I saw that man was the happiest day of my life. His brown hair had grayed and he’d hunched over and slowed down considerable, but his blue eyes still had that sparkle—the one that let you know there very well could be a frog in the sugar bowl, so watch out. I wouldn’t call him a moocher, but he did let me do the working while he did the talking.

“Maybe, but I ain’t tying them up. They know their jobs.” Unlike Pa, who was more of a dreamer than a doer. The one dream he had that worked out was when he decided to start a draft mule business with a mammoth jack he’d won in a card game. He talked the local farmers who had quality draft horse mares into giving him one foal for every two breedings. The result was more than a dozen draft mule foals the next year, but then the war broke out.

Now his dream was to go to California. I had eight of the mules, the wagon, nowhere else to go, and I was happy to make up for lost time with my pa. He had the gift of gab and a hefty dollop of charm, which got me more than one well paying freight job. We had a light load this time, though—supplies for the trip west. But we had to take a detour to Wolf Creek to pick up a wagon he’d won playing euchre last week.

Wolf Creek: Hell on the Prairie

Available in print, or ebook at

Amazon | Smashwords 

and soon at other online stores

RTW: Tell us about your other current releases.

JR: I just released a short story, a time-travel-to-the-future romance, called Single Girls Can’t Jump. It’s a fun, fast read. Then there are the Hearts of Owyhee books. Much Ado About Marshals won the 2012 RttA Award for Best Western Historical Romance, and all three novels have earned a quite a few five-star reviews. My books are fast-paced and a bit on the whimsical side. I figure we have enough stress in our lives without making even more stress for entertainment.

Later this year, Mélange Publishing will release the fourth book in the series, Much Ado About Miners. I also have several other novella and short story series in the works. Plus, I am hoping my Wolf Creek story about dairy farmer Gib Norwood will be included in the Christmas anthology.

RTW: Anything else you’d like to add?

JR: I’ve loved all the Wolf Creek books and I can’t say how happy I am to have my story included in the Hell on the Prairie anthology. I’d like to thank the Western Fictioneers and the editor-mastermind-ramrod of the Wolf Creek series, Troy Smith.

Wolf Creek, Book 1: Bloody Trail

Wolf Creek, Book 2: Kiowa's Vengeance

Wolf Creek, Book 3: Murder in Dogleg City

Wolf Creek, Book 4: The Taylor County War

Wolf Creek, Book 5: Showdown at Demon's Drop

Wolf Creek, Book 6: Hell on the Prairie

Contest!

One commenter will win two Kindle books.

Wolf Creek, Book 6:

Hell on the Prairie

and

Willow, Wish For Me

Winner will be drawn July 7, 9pm Pacific Time.  

Be sure to include your email address in your comment.

Be sure to read the interviews and excerpts all this week.  You can still enter to win books--just leave a comment each day!

The Fun Side of Love

The Fun Side of Love
by Jacquie Rogers

People, both readers and writers, often ask me how I write humor. In fact, this issue arises in nearly every writing conversation and interview. I’m puzzled by the question and completely stumped by the answer, whatever it may be.

All of my books contain at least an element of humor.  So how did I end up writing this way? The first bit of fiction I endeavored to pen was a murder mystery set in the future. That was in 1997 and futuristics weren’t exactly the hot item then, but that’s beside the point. I have 32 first chapters. That doesn’t count the first chapters I revised and revised. It was dark and gritty. Oh, I was so happy to be lord over such drama!

Only there was a problem--my critique partners kept laughing at it. By the last half of the book, I made it into a pretty decent romance, except of course most of it took place in the Virtual Wild West Theatre. Then I had two elements I hadn’t ever bargained for: humor and western. (Westerns weren’t selling, either.)

My next venture into a novel took me to western historical romance. This wasn’t a stretch at all for me because I grew up in a sparsely populated county in southwest Idaho where the Old West still lives, sorta. But I knew westerns weren’t selling and humor sure wasn’t, so at least I could make it dramatic. Only I soon found that plopping a laced-up schoolmarm in a brothel with batch of color-coded prostitutes was . . . well, dang it, funny. And it finaled in the Golden Heart that year.

Neither of these books sold, nor did the next three. So westerns and humor aren’t getting me very far. Until I hit the short story market.

Some writers thrive in a shorter format. Me? I’d never tried to write a short story and didn’t think I was suited for it at all, but wanted to give it a try. So while I love to write full-length novels, my first success came in short stories.

Faery Special Romances was born. I decided to write ten stories chronicling the life of the lead character, Keely, a matchmaking faery princess with attitude. And the first thing I thought of was a four-year-old faery with not so good wing control and downright lousy faery dust control, not to mention a lack of understanding when it came to consequence. Made me laugh. Thus, the concept of writing ten short stories starting in 1199AD when Keely was a kindergartener and works to match the faery Shaylah with the knight Sir Darian, to the future when Keely gets her own HEA. It’s a fun book.

Situational humor tickles my funny bone the most. In fantasy, you can create nearly any situation you want. What if: Bill Shakespeare was a changeling? A servant girl’s faery godmother stranded her on a pirate ship? A Regency miss needs glasses? A faery woman singing in a speak-easy is committed to the wrong man?

I suppose another person could make all these into dark stories, but I see the humorous side.  Example: I was critiquing a synopsis for a friend of mine, Eilis Flynn and raved about her story idea, laughing at all the possibilities. She looked at me, puzzled, and said, “It’s not funny.” And when I protested she said, “I have no sense of humor.” Maybe not, but nearly everything she says cracks me up. I love clever wit.  That book is now published as Static Shock. 

Clever wit, ah, another vehicle for humor. Rowena Cherry is a favorite author of mine, and one of my favorite quotes is from the tyrant emperor’s sidekick, Grievous: “The problem with your bloody Great Djinn gene pool is that there’s no lifeguard on duty.” Knight's Fork is rife with clever nuances.

Unexpected roles is a good way to create humor. In Deborah Macgillivray’s Invasion of Falgannon Isle, The Cat Dudley (yes, an actual cat) plays poker every Friday night at the pub. And wins. I loved The Cat Dudley--a great character. Made me laugh many times. My contemporary western, Down Home Ever Lovin’ Mule Blues, features a cogitating mule named Socrates who has decided his human needs love and sets out to find him a woman. Socrates is assisted by an Australian Shepherd named Perseus and a skunk named Guinnevere.

I use unexpected roles and awkward situations to create most of the humor in the ♥ Hearts of Owyhee ♥ series.  In Much Ado About Marshals, I put an honest man in a situation where he either has to lie to protect his best friend's and his lives, or deceive a woman hellbent to marry him.  There's a good-hearted sidekick, a rambunctious dog, and a couple of ornery widows to spice things up.  I also have a lot of fun with patent medicines.

Situational humor is in the forefront of Much Ado About Madams, because the suffragist heroine is a schoolteacher whose students are not seven-year-olds, but six soiled doves.  Now you have the working girls and a suffragist, not to mention the hero who has to buy clothes for all the ladies and is color blind.  I had a blast thinking of ways to make the hero scramble in that book, but he was always game for the next adventure. :)

The city vs. country scenario drove the humor in Much Ado About Mavericks.  The hero is a Boston attorney and the heroine is the foreman on the Bar EL Ranch.  I loved writing this book because the heroine was everything I wanted to be when I was a kid--but wasn't.  And of course the hero is the one I would've picked, too--handsome and smart.  (Luckily, I got a handsome and smart hero in real life!)  The point of this book is that you can't assume you know what's in someone else's heart, because you can be very wrong.  And of course, that's where the humor lies.

My only advice for writing humor (and believe me, analysis of humor is very un-funny) is to let your hair down and don’t let your brain interfere with what your fingers type. And good luck!

About reading humor? Suspend disbelief as much as possible, because the more you do, the more open you are to ludicrous characters, situations, or events.  Example: The Apple Dumpling Gang isn't at all believable but it's one of the funniest movies I've ever seen.

Enjoy the ride!

#KindleFreeBook - Willow Wish For Me

Free August 8th and 9th!
Willow, Wish For Me
by Jacquie Rogers

Ever wish upon a star? Willow, Wish For Me is #free today!  Get a free story that will make you laugh a little and sigh a little.  Romance, action, some magic, and a side dish of humor is just the ticket for an hour's escape from the chaos of real life. 

Did you wonder where Merlin went after Morgana froze him in a crystal?  Well, he showed up in Idaho Territory.  The year was 1885 but no one recognized him because, um, he'd turned into a mule!

From Diana Coyle, Night Owl Romance reviewer:

Ms. Rogers has outdone herself yet again by penning a fun and wacky story that makes you laugh out loud while you’re turning the pages.,. Whenever I read her stories I always strap myself in and prepare to take a fun and wild ride through one of her written adventures.

* Saddle up for another fun story from Jacquie Rogers. * BookwormForever

* I've loved Jacquie Rogers' stories since I read Down Home Ever Lovin' Mule Blues and she hasn't disappointed me yet. This is another hit.
Willow is funny and sweet.* A. Chambers

Overview:

• A high society debutante seeking solace as an herb farmer in the Old West.
• A high stakes gambler hired to retrieve said debutante for her unscrupulous suitor.
• A money-hungry, status-seeking ex-fiancé doesn't get the "ex" part.
• And Merlin, King Arthur's powerful sorcerer, re-emerges as a mule to fulfill his own destiny.

Idaho Territory: 1885

Willow escaped Boston and is now a content herb farmer, but she's lonely. When making a frivolous wish upon a star, she dreams a man who became her heart's desire. One day, as she was weeding, that very man rides up on a mule! But he's not the man of her dreams--instead, he's been hired to hand her over to the one man she despises--her ex-fiancé. How could Willow's wish go so awry?

Also on Amazon by Award-Winning Author Jacquie Rogers:
♥ Hearts of Owyhee ♥ series (Novel-length)
Book 1: Much Ado About Marshals (NOR Top Pick, CTRR Award)
Book 2: Much Ado About Madams
Book 3: Much Ado About Mavericks

Like Fantasy Romance?
Faery Special Romances (Night Owl Romance Award for Best Print Sci/Fi Romance Novel)
Faery Merry Christmas (novella)

Like Off-beat Contemporary Western Romance?
Down Home Ever Lovin' Mule Blues (NOR Top Pick, CTRR Award, PNR Top Pick)

Chicken Dinner: Merlin, Zerelda Mimms, and Facebook

It's a busy week in my neck of the woods. I have a new release out: Willow, Wish For Me. It's a short story blend of the Old West and Merlin. What's it about?

• A high-society debutante seeking solace as an herb farmer in the Old West.
• A high-stakes gambler hired to retrieve said debutante for her unscrupulous suitor.
• A money-hungry, status seeking ex-fiancé who doesn't get the "ex" part.
• And Merlin, King Arthur's powerful sorcerer, re-emerges as a mule to fulfill his own destiny.

Idaho Territory: 1885

Willow escaped Boston and is now a content herb farmer, but she's lonely. When making a frivolous wish upon a star, she dreams a man who became her heart's desire. One day, as she was weeding, that very man rides up on a mule! But he's not the man of her dreams--instead, he's been hired to hand her over to the one man she despises...her ex-fiancé. How could Willow's wish go so awry?

If you like out-of-the box stories, this just might be the ticket for you!

This week in the Old West:

April 22, 1889: the Oklahoma Territory Land Rush. See Callie Hutton's article right here on Romancing The West.

April 24, 1874: Zerelda Mimms marries Jesse James.

April 28, 1876: A new boomtown is founded in Dakota Territory called Deadwood.

Want to keep up with what happened in the Old West each day? There's a Facebook group for that: Today in the Old West. While you're on Facebook, check out the Western Historical Romance Book Club--a great place for readers and writers of WHR!

We Have A Winner!

Congratulations to

Kathleen

who won a digital copy of

Callie Hutton's

A Run For Love