Yep, in less than three weeks Midnight Cowboys will be available! If you have curiosity or nostalgia about the nineteen sixties, you will want to read it and the other tales in the 1960's "happening" PAX! As in very PAX, the tales will all be different and unique because the authors who created them are a very diverse bunch. We are in different age groups, live in different parts of the country--or even the world--and each bring our own voice and personality into the tales we write. Most of us have different methods and approaches to writing fiction as well.
As I often do, I set my story in the west; these guys are not "real" cowboys by any means and to some degree it really is their first rodeo! Riki thinks he is very sophisticated and worldly compared to his naive small-town-boy roommate, Jerry. But Riki has a lot to learn too about life and love in the world he calls home. My setting is a fictitious small west Texas town that is home to a state college.
My alma mater was in a small town in central Arizona but there are many similarities except we could not make an easy run across the border into Mexico. I was attending as a woman, not a young man, but the challenges were not so very different. The freedom of being away from home and watchful family or neighbors created an illusion that liberty was license! Riki and Jerry were lucky to fare as well as they did treading the edge of danger. But this is fiction where we should challenge but not crucify our characters, especially the leads!
Here is the blurb from
Midnight Cowboys. An excerpt will follow soon. Go back one post for the cover.
Midnight Cowboys blurb:
Two young men from very different
backgrounds end up roommates at a state college in west Texas in the latter part of the turbulent
sixties. In the course of their developing relationship, both of them get an
education. They tread very near the edges of risk and disaster in a time when “anything
goes” was a watchword, but the bond they form helps to bring them both back
from the brink and then long steps down the path to maturity and knowledge of
many kinds. Isn’t that what education is all about?
Riki is the black sheep of a wealthy family, on
his third and final chance to avoid the draft or disinheritance. His big dream
is to be a hot guitarist with a rock band and he has a weakness for
recreational drugs that make him feel better about himself. Jerry is a true son
of Bible Belt America,
happy to be able to go to college and perhaps rise above the lower middle class
level of his family. He has to grow rapidly through his shock and meld into the
turbulent times that had not yet found his small town roots. The two form an
unlikely friendship that develops into a deeper bond as they experience drugs,
sex and rock n’ roll in their heyday.
