Good Nature follows a 14-year-old farm boy who is determined to prove he is ready to be a cowboy and finds himself in a world of unexpected friendships, dangerous conflicts, and difficult moral choices. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I’ve always loved the old Gene Autry and Roy Rogers singing cowboy movies. I wondered what would happen if you took that kind of simple narrative structure and plot devices – boy leaves farm, cattle thieves, murder, and a gangster-like dirty businessman – and treated the story seriously as a ‘real-life’ scenario.

How did you develop Little’s personality, particularly his combination of confidence, inexperience, curiosity, and occasional unexpected wisdom?

One of the things that happened to me around middle age was a very clear understanding of who I had been as a child, accompanied by an empathy for the younger me. At 14 I was intellectually precocious, morally ambiguous, and emotionally very much a child. I used Little to explore the way in which I navigated those characteristics and emerged, not unscathed but OK.

What inspired the title Good Nature, and how does it reflect the personalities, relationships, and moral questions explored throughout the story?

Much of today’s Western realism is stylized cynicism. Many cowboys may have been ‘hard men’ or lived the ‘red tooth and claw’ of nature. But they also laughed, and loved, and had to work through the daily moral and ethical problems that we all work through. The same goes for Native Americans of the time. In short, everyone was a person then as we are now. I wanted to shine a light, without being preachy, on the benefits of self-reflection, self-discipline, responsibility, humility, and love. Those characteristics are often thought of as weakness, but a ‘good nature’ is a strength.

When readers finish Good Nature, what is the most important message you hope stays with them about growing up, doing what’s right, and becoming the kind of person others can depend on?

I hope more than anything that an affection for the characters stays with every reader, and that as a result, readers reflect back on the experiences of Little, Adam, Sam, and Ivy from time to time as instructive in their own lives. I think the best fiction becomes ‘alive’ in that way.

Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon