Gunslingers follows a young man living on a ranch who, after witnessing his family’s murder and cousin’s kidnapping, sets out to right the wrongs that have been committed. What was the inspiration for your unique story?

Since Gunslingers is a western, I was certainly inspired by the movies I watched growing up like Clint Eastwood westerns, the Young Guns series, and both versions of 3:10 to Yuma. While I was writing, I had the soundtrack to Paint Your Wagon playing in the background fairly often, but I don’t know if any of those songs bled into Gunslingers or not. I read much more in the science fiction and fantasy realm, and had just re-read Stephen King’s Dark Tower series when the germ of the idea for Gunslingers started to take hold, but it took another five years or more to blossom.

The mythos of the American west is all about independence, learning to rely on yourself, and standing up to those unsavory forces that are drawn to those areas where the traditional law cannot reach. Gunslingers is a classic coming of age story or heroes journey set in the backdrop of our collective imagination of what it means to be a cowboy on the frontier.

Will wants revenge but learns he can have more in life than rage and hate. What were some driving ideals behind your character’s development?

Will starts out living a fairly sheltered but typical life on a ranch in the old West, but his genealogy includes the original settlers and heroes who conquered the West, so when that comfortable life is snatched away from him, he falls back on that heritage of strength and resilience to buoy him and fuel that need for revenge. If we live off of anger and revenge, though, we are looking back on what we lost, and not forward to what we could still have or build. Along his journey, Will starts to see that there are more possibilities for his life than shoot-outs, bloodshed, and an early grave.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

Gunslingers touches on a host of different themes including the gap between our myths of the past and the actual history of that past, the treatment of women and indigenous people, and individual pain versus the societal gains in the name of progress. The overarching theme though for all of the main characters relates to our struggle to escape the obligations, burdens, and sins of our own past and the inherited past we receive from our families.

What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?

My next book is called Janie and focuses on one of the other main characters from Gunslingers, Janie De Casas. As readers of Gunslingers will agree, Janie is too powerful a character to leave her where we did. Janie is currently in the editorial process and should come out later this year with the possibility of more to come after that.

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