GUNSLINGER 6: Author GORDON L. ROTTMAN

by Tom Rizzo

Gordon L. Rottman’s latest novel—MARTA’S RIDE—represents an excellent blend of action, adventure, and romance against a backdrop of the Texas-Mexico border in the late 1860s. 

Marta’s Ride—the third in Gordon’s outstanding Ride series—features a mute 16-year old Mexican girl as the protagonist who finds herself alone after Indians massacre her family.

During her quest for survival, she meets Bud Eugen, an unemployed cowboy. Although suspicious and afraid, Marta and this young cowhand form what might be considered a cautious relationship. 

As in the previous two novels, The Hardest Ride and Ride Harder, the characters in Marta face life and death choices amid a harrowing adventure pitting them against brutal weather, ambushes, attacks, and shootouts with evil bloodthirsty banditos.

Gordon gives his resourceful mute teenage heroine a powerful voice in a vivid and memorable tale of kidnapping, murder, friendship, and re-awakening. 

The fourth book in the series, Marta's Daughter, is slated for publication later this year. 

                       GUNSLINGER 6

  

1. A lot of people say heroes/heroines are in short supply these days. Tell us about your protagonist Marta. And, was there a real-life inspiration behind her?  

That's a difficult question. There was no one single person that inspired Marta Amora Hinojosa. She is much like my wife, but she's not as prone to violence...thankfully. Many of her characteristics are derived from my daughters and nieces. All are strong outgoing women and girls. I've spent thirty-five years on the family ranch in Mexico and have watched all these girls working and playing there, it’s a different world.

I've never bought into the concept that most women of the Old West, and especially on the Texas-Mexican Frontier, were mostly passive and subservient. There were, of course, subservient women, but there were just as many if not stronger women. If not, they would never have established a civilized society in that wild land. Marta wanted what most women wanted, security, and safe place to live. She was willing to fight for that and make sacrifices to achieve it.

2. What was the biggest challenge you faced about writing the viewpoint of a character from the opposite sex?   

That's another tough one. It wasn't easy. I did not want this to be just something about how a guy thought a woman would think and react. Of course, Marta's previous life in a family of migrant workers had a big impact on how she responded. It had been a hard and challenging life living rough on the road. She's been physically and verbally abused, looked down upon, assumed to be a prostitute and thief, starved, suffered the weather, had no permanent home and had seldom spent a night under a roof. She did have a loving and hardworking family, and that brought her through many trials: How would she think, how would she deal with situations, most of which we have never experienced.

A major factor in regards to Marta is that she's mute, not because of the trauma of a murdered family, but an accident when she was nine. Being mute Marta has to find ways to express herself and being an "outspoken," and passionate girl makes that a special challenge. 

Because she is forced to find ways to express herself and make her wants and needs to be known, she has become more forceful and outgoing than a "typical" 16-year old Mexican girl. Bud Eugen is quite perplexed by the feisty girl, not only because of her strong personality, but he's had basically no experience with girls.

One example, begging. Marta finds begging one of the most abhorrent tasks she occasionally has to undertake. I talked to some beggars in Mexico and once I got them to open up I was stunned that they actually had strategies and very precise do's and don'ts.

When Marta sets out to beg in a town less than hospitable to Mexicans we learn how she picks the business she would sit at with the pros and cons between businesses and even churches. Where she sat was important, how she protected herself, and what she would do when invariably chased off were on her mind. We learn what threats she was on the lookout for ranging from self-righteous white women, gangs of young boys, and stray dogs. And what would she do when a certain young out of work cowpoke who she never expected to see again showed up? Relatives enlighten me on that reunion.

While a sensitive subject, it is no secret that Marta and the other kidnapped girls were raped and abused in many ways. That, of course, is a difficult subject and writing about it is an uncomfortable challenge. I read numerous articles about depicting this in narrative writing. Most complain that authors present it no better than a porn scene and to varying degrees of explicit description. I don't describe it, you know it happens, and you see the anguish and devastation the girls have to endure afterward, and they each are affected by it and deal with it in different manners just as real people.

3. Some might consider "Marta’s Ride" a retelling of "The Hardest Ride." What’s your take on this?

Marta's Ride is in a way a retelling of The Hardest Ride but from Marta's point of view. It has given her a "voice" of sorts to tell her story--she's the narrator. It does have to cover some of the ground crossed early in The Hardest Ride, but that part's shortened and of course seen from Marta's much different perspective. Too, there are numerous events that Bud never saw and that Marta had to deal with herself. For her, it is the first time she actually lived in an Angelo environment, and there is much that is new to her, some good, some bad.

Once she and the other girls are kidnapped and taken to Mexico, it is a completely different story. There are subplots, characters, terrifying events, and places visited that are not even alluded to in The Hardest Ride. At one point she's kidnapped from her kidnappers. One event sets the stage for a future title that will come to its conclusion three years later. Marta's Ride also gives us "the rest of the story" of what happened once they returned to what Marta now thinks of as home. It provides more on this than even found in the second book, Ride Harder.

4. Tell us something we don’t know about Marta and Bud. What makes them tick? Tell us one thing about them that we don’t learn from the book, perhaps a secret in their past.

Through all three novels, we hear mention of Bud's hateful and abusive mother whom he's not seen in nine years. While he's not making any effort to find her, deep inside he would at least like to know what became of her no matter how dysfunctional she was and how dangerous life with her had been.

Bud has a soft spot in his heart, which he reluctantly admits to. If he didn't, he would have turned his back on a mute, abandoned Mexican girl. Marta has a hidden desire. She wishes to see the ocean, simply because she does not believe such a thing exists. And, eventually, Marta also wishes for a family, her own children, which she never mentions to Bud and something a simple cowpoke like him never dreamed of.

5. Your series is quite popular. Reviews are outstanding. From your perspective, how do you judge the quality of your work? 

I was quite surprised at how popular the books, or rather Bud and Marta, became. I had read barely any Westerns, and the few that I had were mainly Cormac McCarthy. I do like traditional Western movies. I was putting together a story idea for a present-day story set on the Texas-Mexico border. It changed a great deal, and three factors changed it to a traditional Western: 1) Traditional gave me more flexibility in all what occurs without so many present-day real-world constraints, 2) I liked the idea of researching the period, which is not all that different than the present way of life in Morelos, Coahuila, and 3) I liked the challenge of writing a Western something totally new.

6. What was the first story you ever published and what was it like and what do you think of it now?

I'd never done any short stories until I had one punished in Sundown Press's "Sundown Western Tales." I started writing articles for military journals and magazines in 1975. That got me recognized as an "authority." My first military history non-fiction book was in 1984. I've since published about 130 military history books, mostly very dry technical subjects. 

I learned how to do historical research though, which is beneficial in researching Westerns. In the early 1990s, I co-authored three Tom Clancy-style WWIII techno-thrillers, which let me put to use my training as a Soviet military specialist and later as a Special Forces and SEAL war-games writer for 11 years. (I was in the Army for 26 years, and that's a great experience for writers.) 

The Hardest Ride was my first real fiction effort. I made a lot of mistakes including too slow of a start, a bit too much backstory, and included a lot of detail. Of course, that detail was beneficial too. Many reviewers like this subtle insertion of the details of what they ate, what they wore, and how they lived in the 1880s.

I've tried to learn and improve with each subsequent book of the Ride-series. I hope and think the next novel, Marta's Daughter, released by this summer, shows major improvement, although one of my nieces said she was emotionally and morally exhausted proofreading it. 

As a bit of a preview, Marta's Daughter takes place during the Mexican Revolution. Bud is 47 and Marta 41 and makes cameos. Their 17-year old daughter, Arsenia Renee Eugen, is sucked into the storm.

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Gordon’s first book of the series—The Hardest Ride—achieved bestseller status at USA TODAY and Amazon. The novel won the Western Fictioneers' Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel 2014 and also ranked as a Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award Finalist for Best First Western Novel 2014. Western Writers of America also honored The Hardest Ride, naming it a finalist for a Spur Award for Best Traditional Western Novel for 2013.    

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Tom@TomRizzo.com

www.TomRizzo.com

Last Stand At Bitter Creek

Finalist for the 2013 Western Fictioneers' 

Peacemaker Award for Best First Novel  

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Roping the Spoken Word

by Richard Prosch

Recently, a friend of mine who drives a truck for a living asked if my stories were available in audio. Not only did I tell him no, but I had to admit I'd never really given audio books much thought.

As a kid, before falling asleep, I listened to old time radio shows. Gunsmoke, Escape, and Have Gun, Will Travel were my favorites, but I never made the move to audio books.

A quick search at Amazon revealed what I'd been missing. The wide variety of western titles and authors was encouraging, but when I started to plan my own foray into audio, enthusiasm turned to worry.

How much time would it take? How much would it cost? How best to proceed.

I have a friend who works as a voice professional for radio. Friend or not, his style had to fit the bill.

Unlike radio shows, so much has to be conveyed by one voice, the job can be tricky. With westerns, the tenor immediately sets the tone. Close your eyes and imagine the voices. Gabby Hayes or Clint Eastwood? John Wayne or Smiley Burnette? The music: lively or somber? The sound effects? Or lack thereof?

Then, along with all the technicalities of recording (levels and bit rates), the legalities of distribution (music and SFX usage rights) and paying for studio time, we had to crunch some numbers.

I discovered Audible and their extensive help menus and forums were invaluable. I contacted our friend Ken Farmer, who produces his own audio works. Finally, I took the plunge and simply worked through the curve.

"Branham'sDue" may take a while to show a real profit, but it was a real adventure to produce.

Many of us Fictioneers have heard our characters come alive via audio. Whether through Audible's royalty sharing program, our own MP3 files, or a publisher's arrangement, we're reaching for a new audience and additional revenue.

As I wrote, Ken Farmer helped me a lot. Ken has four books in his The Nations series available through Audible/Amazon, and samples are a click away at the link. Ken says the format provides good extra revenue, and I don't doubt it. He narrates the works himself, and with each story weighing in at 8 to 9 hours, there's plenty of entertainment there.

On the other hand, Gordon Rottman's publisher arranged to have The Hardest Ride recorded. The sample proves narrator James Simenc's voice is perfectly matched to the story.  Again, that's something to watch out...er, listen for. In this  case, Simenc needed to read a part of the book that had a lot of Spanish in it. Gordo wrote to me:   

As the POV was a Texas cowpoke, he didn't have to be native-level Spanish, but he needed to pronounce it well enough to be understandable to a Spanish-speaker and not mangle it. He turned out to be able to rattle it off very well. That's an important consideration for a narrator if there are even small bits of another language.

Georgia Woods of Hartwood Publishing has these suggestions if you attempt to go it alone:

In general, if you’ve never listened to audio books, you won’t know what to look for in a narrator or in general when it comes to how it should sound.  Also, you have to understand how the contract works, how the recordings work, and how to tell the narrator what’s wrong as well as being able to sit and listen at the computer and give timestamp information for every error.  It’s quite time-consuming, to be honest, so we don’t do it with books we don’t feel we can profit on, for sure. 

Audible can help.

Mike Long let them pair his novel, No Good Like It Is, with narrator Keith Newbill. Mike and Keith both market the story and have also thought more about getting the book into the hands of professional drivers, maybe on CDs.

Dusty Richards' publisher produced CDs of his Chet Byrnes stories and, unlike the examples above, went all out in old time radio style with multiple actors, music and sound effects.

Finally, Marc Cameron and L.J. Martin worked with Books In Motion to market their books as recordings. Larry says publisher Gary Chandler will accept original manuscripts and non-exclusive work. He adds:

They are a GREAT company, honest, and super to work with.

In this new world of digital publishing, where the western is ubiquitous as ever, yet strangely invisible to the general public, I think audio books offer a good avenue to reach our audience. 

Uniquely able to find markets that movies or television can't, mp3 downloads or CD recordings can get our stories and names in front of new ears --something that just might translate into new eyes and new book revenues in the future.

After growing up on a Nebraska farm, Richard Prosch worked as a professional writer, artist, and teacher in Wyoming, South Carolina, and Missouri. His western crime fiction captures the fleeting history and lonely frontier stories of his youth where characters aren’t always what they seem, and the windburned landscapes are filled with swift, deadly danger. Read more at www.RichardProsch.com

Man-Tracking 101 by Gordon Rottman

I apologize for this being so long, but I didn’t want to do a two-parter and make you wait a month for Part 2. Two of the photos have nothing to do directly with tracking; I just wanted to honor two friends who taught me a great deal about the skill.

We’ve all seen trackers in movies and novels, whether an experienced trail-wise cowpoke or a sage Indian scout. They’re typically depicted prodding along on their house leaning over to locate their quarry’s tracks. This works if distinctive tracks are left on impressible ground. When tracks are indistinct the tracker needs to be afoot to effectively detect what sign he can.

What is laughable is when the tracker is mounted and is tracking at night by torchlight. It is virtually impossible to detect sign by this means other than the most obvious, and most aren’t that obvious, especially at night. Besides dim inconsistent light, the flames are flickering and creating constantly moving shadows and made worse because the torch is moving too. If there is more than one torch, each creates another set of moving shadows which are crisscrossing each other. Steady shadows cast by the sun in daylight greatly aid in detecting sign. It’s a simple rule, you don’t track at night—except though snow are they’re dragging a log behind them.

 

 Giang Chu (aka "Ringo") taught me really serious tracking skills.

I learned some basic tracking skills in the Boy Scouts many many moons ago. I learned more from Cambodian mercenaries and Montagnard tribesmen in Vietnam. Believe me, tracking in a jungle or a dense American forest (it’s about the same) is a challenge. I picked up some additional tracking skills at the British and German-run International Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol School in Germany—I can tell you all about Russian and Warsaw Pact boot sole patterns.

Armando Castillo Medina of Rancho el Consuelo, one of the best trackers I've known.

Where I really learned tracking was in Mexico on my wife’s family’s ranch from the vaqueros. I think they can track a field mouse. My daughter learned from them as well. There was once a puma snatching calves on the ranch. Put-out by its marauding on her rangeland where she reigned as queen of the campo, she loaded up her horse and tracked the cat for three days before baiting it and shooting it at 30 feet. Anyway, that’s another story.

A tracker adds color to a story and of course is essential if in pursuit of the bad guys. In The Hardest Ride I made Bud, the protag, an accomplished tracker taught by an old vaquero in much the same manner I was taught by a wise vaquero—tracking kids we sent out and then tracking critters of different flavors, by foot and horse.

Okay, so what’s “sign?” Anything the trackee leaves behind. Some call it “spore.” Mostly this is footprints or hoof prints or paw prints or talons (okay, let’s not go there); scuffs, broken twigs, disturbed pebbles, cigarette butts, piss marks, and so on.

The best time of day to track is morning and late afternoon when the sun is lower to better highlight the ridges and irregularities of prints with shadows. Back to torches. Tracking at night on a horse with a torch held high, its flickering notwithstanding, does not provide the necessary low angle slat of light. In daylight the tracker walks or rides on the opposite side of the trail from the sun so the shadows in the tracks are better defined. Of course the sun may be behind or ahead of the tracker. Before setting out the tracker views the tracks from different perspectives to determine which side offers the most definition.

One can track from a horse if the sign is distinct, but if indistinct and the sun is low it better on foot. For one thing, if high on a horse you are looking more vertically down on the tracks and the low angled sun’s shadows are not so noticeable.

A tracker does not watch for sign looking down at his feet. He looks 10-30 feet ahead depending on the distance he can effectively make out sign. That distance of course changes as terrain and vegetation changes. He can also occasionally glace further ahead for sign. This way if he sees sign further on he can move along faster as it’s unnecessary to detect every track. Peering ahead may also show considerable sign when the trail passes through brush, saplings, weeds, low grass, and so on. It may be bent, pressed down, and generally disturbed. Sunlight will further highlight the differences from surrounding vegetation. Turned or bent leaves and trampled grass can reveal their undersides and this prominently stands out as the color and texture are different.

Tracking in the early morning takes advantage of dew on the ground and vegetation. If the quarry was moving at night or earlier in the morning, it will leave a distinctive trail, unless beneath dense trees.

Speed. Boot and hoof prints at a walking pace are fairly even. A man or horse moving faster makes a deeper impression at the tow and the prints are further apart. A large or heavily loaded man may cause deeper heel impressions.

                             One horse at a walk, the other at a run on a slightly damp road.

About horse prints. I’ll provide an excerpt for The Hardest Ride’s sequel, Ride Harder, a WIP. Bud and his party returning the DeWitt Ranch are overtaking an Army convoy.

“I busied myself watching the tracks the Army convoy left. I watch tracks by habit to keep in good form. Can’t let these eyes get out of the habit of looking for the uncommon things. Things that’s always there, but you might not see them if your eyes aren’t taught to look. Gave me something to do while bouncing down a trail.

I figured the mule teams were two for each of the four wagons and seven riders. Down the road a piece a bunch of riders had come in on a side trail through the mesquite from the right, from the Rio Grande. I backtracked a little and figured they were six, well mounted and traveling heavy. But there were two mules with them making light tracks. They weren’t pack mules. I could tell because they over-stepped the horses and wagon tracks and weren’t side-by-side like the teamed mules.

Some will tell you that mule and horse tracks are the same, but they’re not. Mules have a more oval track and the hind hoof steps right in the fore hoof’s print. Horse’s hoofs don’t or might over-step them just a bit.

These horses and mules were moving at a faster pace than the Army horses. Their toes were dug in more with longer strides between the fore and hind roofs. That seemed strange. Most folks keep a steady walk when traveling any distance. Something didn’t feel, or look right.”

There’s other things besides prints and disturbed vegetation that can tip off a tracker. We were tracking a VC squad once and would have missed their camp site except we found several pissmarks off the trail to the right. Just beyond this we found where they’d slept, nine disturbed areas where they had tramped down vegetation and grass to sling their hammocks. They had started moving before light in a different direction and we easily found their trail in the turned layers of dead leaves further highlighted by dew.

Horse poop of course is another sign. Yeah, some claim they can tell how old it is by crumbing it, but when it 98°F the poop isn’t going to be the same temperature when its 32°F and both samples are two hours old. You can roughly tell how old a burned out fire is, but that takes lots of practice.

Excellent places to detect sign are on stream banks, gullies—even very small ones, ditches, and fallen trees the trackee crossed over. Man or horse can’t help but leave scuff marks, gouges, dislodged pebbles and rocks. They leave bark scuffs and dirt on fallen trees. Dislodged pebbles, even tiny ones; and this applies to level ground as well, will reveal little pits and the part of the pebbles that were below ground are usually darker than the exposed portion.

You can also find where a man’s climbed over a barbed wire fence as sand and dirt will stick to the strands, if he actually climbed it. Spreading stands and ducking through will not leave sand on the wire, but you can sometimes see drooping wire or trodden down weeds and brush growing along the fence line at the point of passage.

Okay, that’s just the basics. There’s much more to it, a lot of other technics, like how to pick up a trail that you’ve lost. The key to a good tracker is an eye for detecting something different and an eye for detail. And just as importantly, patience.

A comment on one last thing you see in movies. When you drag a leafy limb behind you or sweep your trail, to even a novice tracker, it looks remarkably like someone had swept the trail with a leafy limb.