Mescalero Vision Notes
This will be the second book that I have published. I will be receiving them in the mail per my contract with my publisher within a couple of weeks. It is currently available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This has been a long and laborious trial for me and my daughter, Kali. She is my agent on this one, and I needed her help all the way.
I had a wonderful time writing the novel. The ideas and words seemed to flow through my brain faster than I could pen them down. The hard part came after the script was completed. When you are writing page after page, you are somewhat in a hurry. Taking time for grammar and punctuation is often placed second to the idea you are trying to convey so after you are done with that chapter, the work starts. Back and forth you go with this wording and that sentence until you and the editors are satisfied with the correct verbiage to be displayed. Sometimes, the changes are hard to justify since they take you, the author, out of the mood you were in when you penned the phrase, and you are left with straight out-of-the-box grammar and not what you had in mind.
Sometimes, while writing in the old Western genre, you need to portray a form of speech much less than our modern correct grammar. The old men of the Western era spoke with different accents that represented other parts of the country they were raised in. You had your Southern accent, Eastern accent, Canadian accent, and your uneducated hillbilly accent. Add these into a Western setting with the slang of day that was acceptable in that time and age, and you are outside the lines of modern acceptable English grammar. With this in mind, you can see how the Western genre authors are graveling back and forth over the correct pronunciation for a particular sentence and or paragraph that the author needs in his novel to portray the setting and characters as he has them displayed.
Mescalero Vision was written with this exact type of slang that the old timers were famous for. As you read the novel, you will see that the conversations and descriptions of the characters involved in each setting were selected to match the period of the day and their manner of speech, and old western slang helped to convey a realistic setting for each chapter.
I grew up in the 1950s helping my grandfather on his cattle operation. At times I was surrounded by men that had come out of the era portrayed in this novel. They had been raised by parents who had tamed the West. I listened to their stories and tales of times past, and I couldn’t help but catch certain phrases that didn’t fit with modern grammar. I was fascinated by the fact that this foreign language slid from their tongues as easily as anything I had ever heard. They used words in sentences that I was taught in school were not part of our vocabulary, but here they were talking as comfortably as if they did not know any other method of communication. I listened and remembered some of the more used phrases of the old men, and these were put in this novel to bring some realism to the stories as they unfolded.
In writing this novel, I spent a great deal of time on details that bring life to each character, desert scenery, and action setting. I tried to let the reader live inside the life and mind of his or her hero or villain. While I was on scene in the desert setting for this novel, I had a sense of loneliness that I am sure the characters felt. The vast reaches of the desert were foreboding, and a person could get lost just by looking out into a sunset that seemed to stretch endlessly across the sky never to end. That Southwest desert country along the New Mexico and Arizona border is very rugged and dry. Water would have been the mainstay for life back when you traveled this stretch of the country. Travelling by horseback or stagecoach the trip had to be planned from A to B. Heaven help you if you were stranded along the way. That part of the desert only holds a small amount of water so all life depended on being able to access it when needed. This presented a problem for Western expansion. The Native Americans had been using these watering springs since the time of their ancestors when they first came to this region and discovered them. Now, add to the scene a dedicated race of people hell-bent on expansionism and a newly formed military presence in the region to protect pioneer Americans, and you have the setting for a conflict of interests. This is where Mescalero Vision takes its start as it brings to life the difficulties in living during this pressing time of greed, broken treaties, dangerous men, and struggling women as each of them tries to carve out their own better way of life in a most unhospitable environment.
I hope you will take the ride down through the many trails this novel has to offer and enjoy it as much as I did in writing it.
