Rediscovering a “lost” puffin story

In mid-December, my wife and I had an unexpected discussion about puffins. She was scrolling through Netflix or Hulu, and there was a special about the sea birds, and I declared my fascination with them, even though I’ve never seen on in the wild.

She seemed surprised, and I explained it was because of a book my mother bought for me when I was seven. We were living in Cyprus, and we hadn’t brought many books with us from the States. The few she could find in English for kids my age were mostly nightmarish British fairy tales, which tended to end horribly for the children involved. (One was about a girl who finds magic dancing shoes that force her to dance herself to death. Not exactly the nice bedtime fare Mom had in mind.)

One day she came home with a new paperback —  my first chapter book. I couldn’t quite read it myself, so she read it to me. And I was captivated by the puffins that featured prominently in the story. I couldn’t remember much else about the plot. As I recounted this to my wife, I couldn’t even recall the name of the book. I’d kept it for years but discarded it at some point as I got older.

I remembered it was about four kids who had an adventure with a family friend. They were supposed to be going on holiday, and they went to some bird-filled islands off the northern Scottish coast that were uninhabited by humans. Mostly I remembered it had details about how puffins nested (or burrowed), how they behaved, and how they were unafraid of humans.

I thought perhaps the book was called Puffin Island. The only other thing I remember was that it was written by a well-known British children’s author that one of my father’s British colleagues was familiar with.

I also vaguely remembered the cover — yellow with a boat. The more I described the book to my wife, the more determined I became to find it.

I searched on British YA authors and puffins but came up empty. I tried “best-known British YA authors.” Nothing. I narrowed the search to books from the late 1960s to early 1970s. Still nothing. Finally, I searched images instead of text, and there it was — The Sea of Adventure by Enid Blyton.

Looking at the cover, I saw the name of the boat on the stern. “That’s right!” I said. “The Lucky Star. And it gets smashed up somehow and one of the kids made a comment about how it  wasn’t so lucky.” 

My wife looked on, amused that I was spending so much time chasing down an obscure book from my childhood.

Originally written in 1948, I was able to order the 1969 edition, the same one I’d had in Cyprus. Blyton wrote more than 700 books that have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 400 million copies, making her one of the most successful children’s authors of all time. The Sea of Adventure is part of a series of eight books involving the same four kids who get caught up in various forms of intrigue. Not only is The Sea of Adventure still in print, MacMillian is coming out with a new edition later this year.

There was even an Enid Blyton Adventure Series TV show in the 1990s that included an adaptation of The Sea of Adventure, though apparently penguins were substituted for puffins.

Over the holidays, I relived my childhood by re-reading the book. Sure enough, there was a lot about puffins. (My recollection of “Puffin Island” wasn’t too far off — it was the name the kids gave to one of the islands they visited.) Two of the birds  — Huffin and Puffin — befriend the kids and follow them on their adventure. I had forgotten about the comedy-relief parrot, Kiki, and many other plot points.

Even as an adult, it’s an enjoyable book, and it was all the more delightful because of the memories it conjured of a special time in my childhood. As I turned the pages, those memories came flooding back — my mother and I, sitting on the couch, the Mediterranean breezes blowing in from the balcony, my mind awash in images of these strange seabirds.

I’m sure the islands of northern Scotland aren’t as a remote as they were in 1948, but the book has rekindled my desire to go and see some puffins for myself. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even find Puffin Island.  

The shock of Enron 20 years later

Today marks the 20^th anniversary of Enron’s bankruptcy. I helped cover the company’s demise at Bloomberg News, and later, the various trials as a columnist for the Houston Chronicle.

In the past two decades, books, films and musicals have all explored the impact of Enron, but 20 years removed from the company’s collapse what we tend to forget most often is the shock. Enron was the seventh-largest company in the U.S., and it unraveled in about a month. America had never seen corporate malfeasance on such a large scale. We had never seen company executives working against the interest of the corporation and its employees to the degree we did with Enron.     Enron touched off a wave of corporate accounting scandals in the early 2000s. Its bankruptcy, the largest in history at the time, was later eclipsed by WorldCom.

I’m often asked about the difference between the two frauds. WorldCom was the result of blatant greed. Two top executives simply abused accounting rules to line their own pockets. Enron, however, was more subtle. Executives like Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling weren’t interested in more wealth. They wanted to take risk out of the corporate equation, to find a way, essentially, to guarantee rewards. And the reward they sought was that Enron would become the greatest, most-admired company in the world, they would be heralded as business geniuses, and, sure, be rewarded financially.

The main motive for Enron’s fraud was hubris, not greed.

Accounting rules were seen not as barriers but as speed bumps that executives constantly maneuvered around. As long as everyone — including shareholders and, yes, the business press — believed what the company was saying, the stock would keep rising and all Enron’s schemes would remain hidden. It was only when the stock began to fall that the intricate web of partnerships, with all their interlocking debt agreements, began to unravel and posed a threat to the company itself.

Enron, in other words, revealed in the starkest terms how the short-sightedness can blind businesses to long-term consequences. We know that business can’t always see what’s best for itself. If you read congressional testimony surrounding the passage of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, you’ll see a parade of executives warning that Congress was about to kill capitalism. Instead, that law laid the foundation for the most trusted markets in the world and led to the creation of trillions of dollars in wealth for millions of investors big and small.

Enron, though, was certainly the first time we’d seen a company and its executives work so blatantly against its own future. Sure, they assumed they would succeed, but their accounting methods were cavalier, and often, outright falsehoods. That lack of regard for transparency and honesty cost the company its future.

I tried to capture this notion of the disbelief about executives working against the good of their own company in my novel, The Big Empty. I hadn’t planned on it, but in one of the later revisions, my editor pointed out that the character of Blaine Witherspoon needed more motivation for the actions he takes at the end of the book. Given that the novel is set in 1999, before Enron’s demise, it allowed me to use this sense of disbelief for executive malfeasance. I don’t want to give too much away, but the Enron homage turned out to be a critical part of the plot.

Favorite first lines

My novel, The Big Empty, is featured in a book blog tour put on by Lone Star Literary Life. One of the cool things they did was ask me for the first line of book, then created this spiffy graphic. 

I worked really hard on that line, and it wasn’t how the book originally started. What’s now Chapter 2 was the original beginning for the book. In those early drafts, the first lines were:

Trace Malloy’s fist landed firmly in the middle of the other man’s nose. He could feel the bridge give under the force of his knuckles, and he knew he’d broken it. It wasn’t much of a punch, just a quick jab that he pulled back instantly, as if to say he was sorry.

While that opening was dramatic, it didn’t give the readers a chance to get to know the characters. The punch in the nose represents an unusual lack of control for Malloy, and the punchee, Blaine Witherspoon immediately crumples to the floor, calls Malloy a bully, and threatens to sue him. 

I wanted to give the characters more time to introduce themselves before I jumped into the conflict between them, so I added the preface and the first chapter. 

I think the new first line is still dramatic, and hopefully catches the reader’s attention. It gave me a chance to introduce both men and show a little bit about them as they sort through the aftermath of the collision. 

Lone Star Lit’s first lines exercise got me thinking of other first lines that I like. One of my favorites is from Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side:

From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five.

It sets up the moment when New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor sacks the Washington Redskins’ quarterback, Joe Theismann, breaking Theismann’s leg so horribly that the fracture could be heard on national television. It was a dramatic moment, and one that forever changed the game of football. (Taylor came from Theismann’s blind side.) That one moment defined the reason that the National Football League started looking for bigger, faster offensive tackles like Michael Oher, the subject of the book.  

Another of my favorite first lines is from a very different type of book, Douglas Adams’ The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: 

The story so far: in the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

And, of course, Hunter S. Thompson’s opening to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.

I also loved the first line from The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books,Edward Wilson-Lee’s epic story of Christopher Columbus’ son and his efforts to build the world’s greatest library. 

On the morning of his death, Hernando Colón called for a bowl of dirt to be brought to him in bed.

I just started reading The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak. Much of the story is set in Cyprus, which is a place near to my heart. The opening resonated perfectly with my own feelings:    

Once upon a memory, at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea, there lay an island so beautiful and blue that the many travellers, pilgrims, crusaders and merchants who fell in love with it either wanted never to leave or tried to tow it with hemp ropes all the way back to their own countries. 

It’s a wonderful, magical book that I’m sure I’ll be writing about in the future.

This is far from a complete list, of course. What are some of your favorites? 

Writing versus ranching

In 2015, I was driving around a cattle ranch near Flatonia, in Central Texas, while working on a story for Texas Monthly. The owner’s son was giving me a tour of the place. As we pulled under a stand of oak trees to look at some of the herd, he asked me what it was like writing books.

I described the nature of traditional publishing contracts: you devote your life to a project for a period of years, then you try to sell it in hopes it will pay off, but it usually doesn’t. In the process  you sign away about 80 percent of your potential earnings so that a bunch of people who are far less committed to the project can make money off subjective decisions about your work, many of which you won’t agree with. 

He sat stoically and stared out the window for a few moments.

“So, it’s a lot like raising cattle,” he said finally.

“Yes,” I said, “only with more risk, disappointment, sleepless nights, and bloodshed.”

Facebook recently reminded me of the exchange. At the time, I thought I was being clever. As a writer, I’d certainly experienced my share of disappointment and sleepless nights, but the risk associated with what I did was in the writing itself — taking chances with story structure and so forth. (Bloodshed was hyperbole, mostly.)

Now that I look at the process as both a writer and a publisher, I find my assessment more accurate. I take on much more risk as a publisher than I do as a writer. As for disappointment, a writer is disappointed if a book or an article falls flat. For a publisher, disappointment can be costly.

My tour guide that day wasn’t wrong in his initial observation. Ranching is plagued by uncertainties — weather, the health of the animals, commodity prices, feed costs, and the sheer randomness of how the cattle will turn out or be perceived at auction. (That’s why scientists West Texas A&M University are looking to clone cattle from the perfect steak.)

Like writing, you don’t really know how things will turn out, and a lot can go wrong along the way.

Obviously, writing is much less physically demanding, but both professions share something else: the people who do them love what they do. One of the themes I explored in The Big Empty was Trace Malloy’s inability to leave his lifestyle behind, even though logic told him there were better ways to make a living. And, of course, he wrestled with the idea that his son might take up the same line of work — he’s both proud and worried.

Writers are much the same. Given the hundreds of new books published everyday, most of us have much better ways to make a living — in fact, most authors don’t support themselves with their books. But the books keep coming.

Writers write for themselves first, and the need to do that means they will keep publishing books regardless of the economics. Most ranchers I’ve talked with have a similar view. They love the way of life, even though they know it’s hard, risky and financially challenging.

Does any of it make sense? Maybe not, but we’ll keep writing until the cows come home.

Rock to write by

Music plays a key role in my novel The Big Empty. The main character, Trace Malloy, isn’t a rock n’ roll fan, but a line from Bruce Springsteen’s The River, which he heard as a young man, sticks with him: “Is the dream a lie that don’t come true?”

(When I first used that line, I thought it was “Is the dream alive that don’t come true.” Fortunately, I have an eagle-eyed editor.)

In the second chapter, Trace’s son, Colt, listens to Robert Earl Keen’s Rollin’ By, which sets the tone for Malloy’s frustrations with Witherspoon and the changes in Conquistador, which boiled over earlier in the chapter.

And finally, Witherspoon, in reflecting on childhood arguments with his parents, makes a passing reference to Rush’s Freewill.

Recently, I was asked if music was an important part of my writing process. The answer is sometimes. When I’m writing, I usually prefer my office to be quiet, but some days it seems too quiet or there’s too many distractions from social media, email and so forth. On those days, I prefer a little background music.

But if I’m trying to write, I don’t like a lot of lyrics. I tend to get distracted by the words and then I’m thinking about the song instead of what I’m supposed to be writing. (When I’m editing or revising, it’s not a problem.) I’ve assembled playlists of classical and jazz, and I find jazz can be particularly good for writing depending on my mood.

Them problem is, rock is my genre. And it generally find it a better lubricant for the muse. So I assembled a playlist of rock instrumentals that I call Rock to Write By. It skews toward classic rock, (and yes, I know that grammatically speaking it should be “Rock By Which to Write.”). Here’s the list in case you want to test it out:

What am I missing? Are there any other good rock instrumentals I should add?

In defense of Trace Malloy

Earlier in the week, I posted an excerpt from The Big Empty. It was the opening to Chapter 2, in which Trace Malloy punches Blaine Witherspoon in the nose. 

My wife read it, and she was genuinely upset. 

“Why did you post that?” she asked. “It makes Malloy sound mean. It makes Witherspoon seem like the victim.”

I was surprised by her reaction. 

“You didn’t put in the part that explains why Malloy punched him,” she added. “Witherspoon insulted Malloy’s mother. That’s not in the post.” 

I hadn’t even considered that. I was simply trying to post an excerpt that wasn’t too long, but my wife is, of course, right. Without the context that comes later, the scene portrays Malloy rather harshly. 

As a writer, I found it both amazing and gratifying that my wife was defending one of my fictional characters. Granted, she’s my most loyal reader, but I’m still amazed that she identified with Malloy so much that she worried how blog readers might feel about him based on that one scene. 

That scene, by the way, was originally the opening for the entire book. I later added the preface and another chapter ahead of it because I felt the characters needed to be developed a bit more before we got to that point of conflict.   

Anyway, in Malloy’s defense, here’s another excerpt, from later in the same chapter, that provides more context: 

The battle had intensified as more homes were built in the subdivision, and each owner seemed to want — or to think they deserved — a pool. It was the stupid pond, though, that stuck in Malloy’s craw. For all Witherspoon’s self-proclaimed environmentalism, he didn’t seem to appreciate the water situation. It was as if they thought all their statistics and Internet-gathered data meant more than local knowledge. Malloy had tried to explain the interaction between limestone and low water levels and what would happen when the aquifer dropped below a certain point.

Around Conquistador, people his parents’ age still talked about the drought in the early Fifties, when the water smelled like sulfur. The aquifer could still hold plenty of water, but once the homies drew the water table down, nobody would want to drink it or swim in it or smell it in their precious little pond. They were coming off of two years of drought and possibly facing a third. Malloy hadn’t seen it this dry in years, and the old-timers were talking about the Fifties again half a decade later.  

Ranchers, like farmers, don’t forget droughts. It was that simple. A drought was a blatant reminder of how little control a cowboy has over his own livelihood. If there’s one thing the Big Empty teaches you quickly, it’s that you don’t make the same mistake twice. When it came to the weather, the land, or the livestock, Malloy had learned to listen to the elders. Witherspoon’s ears were clogged with arrogance, and Malloy had run out of patience. Tonight, he’d allowed the months of exasperation to get the best of him. Still, Witherspoon had that pop coming, and more.

[…]

As a representative of the town’s original—and biggest—employer, the Conquistador Ranch, he needed to work with Witherspoon. Instead, the cowboy in him had won out. He felt torn between his job and his livelihood, two things that had always seemed the same until the first wood frames of Rolling Ranch Estates started appearing on the horizon.

Witherspoon didn’t understand that, of course. He couldn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand Malloy’s frustration, his growing feeling of obsolescence. Malloy had felt like the homie was baiting him. The conversation replayed itself in Malloy’s mind.

“I think we all understand the need for water,” Witherspoon said, in a tone so condescending it immediately reminded Malloy of the first ranch supervisor he’d worked for in Kansas.

“If you understood it, you’d turn off that damn fountain,” Malloy had fired back.

“Mr. Malloy, the people here are trying to build homes. We want to build a community. We moved here to get away from the city, the crime. We want our community to be safe and attractive, and our lake is a big part of that.”

“Well, first of all, your ‘lake’ isn’t much bigger than a stock tank, and secondly, some of us make our livings out here, and a big part of that depends on water. On a hot day, a cow can drink twenty-five gallons of water, and we’ve got about twelve thousand of them out there.”

Both men had pushed to their feet, staring across the table while the ten or so other board members for the Rolling Ranch Estates Homeowners Association stared in silence.

“Mr. Malloy, we all know how ranchers have misused this land for more than a century. You overgrazed it, you exploited it, and now you want us to feel sorry for you.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with grazing practices. It’s got to do with the fact that pumping water out of the ground for your little show pond out there, just so it can evaporate, is a huge waste. And that doesn’t count all the water you’ll need for your swimming pools and lawn sprinklers and God knows what else. If this keeps up, none of us will have enough water to get through the summer.”

Malloy flung down the preliminary statistics he’d gotten from the county water district. It wasn’t just the lake, of course, the whole subdivision was putting a drain on the water table. The number of houses grew with the developers’ ambitions, and now they felt a golf course was a necessity because of the “high caliber” of homeowner they planned to attract. And that was before the factory began production and sopped up hundreds of millions more gallons a year. Malloy never knew computer chips needed so much water–-ten times as much as cows. 

The lake, though, seemed to make a blatant mockery of it all. It was as if the homies had just moved in and decided to help themselves to all the resources. The lake hadn’t been included in the original plans for the subdivision. It had been slipped in later, an “aesthetic enhancement” the developer had called it.

“There is plenty of water. I’ve studied it myself. These people,” Witherspoon said, motioning to the other board members, “will tell you no one is more concerned about environmental issues than I. But I hardly think one lake is going to suck up all the water.”

“I don’t know how much studying you’ve done of what, but this isn’t some Ivy League class project. Have you considered the evaporation rate for that fountain? We’re looking at a third straight year of drought. I’ve lived here all my life. I can remember my mama not washing clothes so we’d have water for the cows. This isn’t something you want to mess with.”

By now they were leaning across the table, noses inches apart. Everyone else in the room was frozen. Then he said it. Witherspoon crossed the line.

“Your ‘mama’s’ bad hygiene doesn’t have anything to do with us.” He bobbed his head derisively to accent the word “mama.”

The fist flew before Malloy knew he’d let it go. Or at least that’s what he told himself. Truth is, he’d never expected Witherspoon to just stand there and take it. Anyone in Conquistador who’d ever dared to say something like that would have thrown up their guard before they finished talking.

From The Big Empty, copyright 2021 by Loren C. Steffy. Stoney Creek Publishing Group LLC.

Get your copy of The Big Empty online, at your favorite bookstore, or save 25% by ordering directly from Stoney Creek Publishing.

On the banks of Lake Nosebleed

It’s been a while since I posted anything from The Big Empty, so here’s another excerpt from the novel. You can get your copy online, at your favorite bookstore, or save 25% by ordering directly from Stoney Creek Publishing.

Trace Malloy’s fist landed firmly in the middle of the other man’s nose. He could feel the bridge give under the force of his knuckles, and he knew he’d broken it. It wasn’t much of a punch, just a quick jab that he pulled back instantly, as if to say he was sorry.

       But he wasn’t sorry. As the anger and adrenaline coursed through him, Malloy felt no regret for hitting Blaine Witherspoon. God knows, the arrogant son of a bitch had it coming. He was sorry, though, about the implications, about the long lectures he’d receive about building bridges or mending fences or whatever other type of psychological construction was supposed to be going on.

       Witherspoon lay in a crumpled, whimpering mass on the floor. Several of the other newly transplanted homeowners who’d attended the meeting hovered around him, one or two shooting hateful glances at Malloy. Witherspoon’s glasses were shattered, and blood gushed from his nostrils. He tried to cup it with his hand, but it flowed around and through his fingers. His head hung limply on his chest, which heaved as he gasped for air.

       One of the homeowners wheeled around, locking his sights on Malloy. He took a step in Malloy’s direction. Malloy stood still, looking down at Witherspoon and not saying anything.

       “I think you’d better leave,” the man said, trying to stare Malloy down. Malloy looked back at him calmly. He could tell the man was scared, and he knew he could send him into the corner with Witherspoon if he had to. Then again, Malloy hadn’t come to the meeting looking for a fight, at least not a fistfight.

       Others from the group were staring at him now, too, and Malloy rested his eyes on each one. The man in front of him was pasty and fat, about five foot four and wearing the open collared Oxford shirt that the homeowners seemed to favor. Malloy tried to recall his name. Swan? Swail? Swain? Howard, he thought, Howard Swain. He’d met him a half dozen or so times in the months since he’d first collided with Witherspoon and the others had begun arriving in town. He remembered Witherspoon’s name, of course, because of the collision. He’d learned it during the insurance settlements. But it was hard to keep the other newcomers straight. The homies — as Malloy had started calling them, largely as an inside joke with himself — pretty much kept to themselves. They didn’t come to the feed store or the propane shop or take their cars to Terry Garrison’s garage, so most of the townspeople in Conquistador hadn’t gotten to know them. They didn’t go to church, didn’t wave when they drove past you in town, didn’t say hello on the street on the rare occasions when they actually came downtown.

       Beads of sweat had broken on Swain’s forehead, and Malloy stood motionless, returning the stare. He looked to the others lining up behind Swain. Several were wearing coats and ties, representatives of the developers from Lubbock who were building the housing subdivision at AzTech’s request. Technically, they still controlled the homeowners association, and Malloy had hoped they would understand his concerns.

       They understood only money, and right now, the money was coming from Witherspoon and his burgeoning band of geeks. The developers were willing to do whatever Witherspoon wanted, as long as he paid for it. So they now stood with the homies, aligned with the flow of money regardless of whether they understood the issues. The moment hung silent and pregnant between them, Swain pointing toward the door, frozen except for his moistening pores. Malloy had no intention of continuing the confrontation. It had already slipped from his grasp.

       “I said, you need to leave,” Swain pressed again, finding courage amid the fear that floated up from his corpulent frame, carried on the acrid odor of his perspiration.        

       “I reckon,” Malloy said finally. As he opened the door of the community center, he heard Witherspoon’s shaky voice coming after him.

       “I’m going to sue you, Malloy. You can’t get away with this. You’re nothing but a thug, a…a…bully. That’s what you are.”

       If the homeowners had been able to see Malloy’s face, they might have spotted the row of white teeth breaking through the bushy overhang of his mustache. He didn’t laugh out loud, but he couldn’t contain the smile.

       A bully? Malloy thought, as he ground the key in the ignition of the pickup. So now he was the bad guy. The homies had gotten everything they wanted, and it still wasn’t enough.

       He wound the pickup around the carefully paved road leading to the main entrance. To his right, the fountain spurted shamelessly, illuminated by the spotlights planted just under the surface. The flow of its fingers seemed to dance in the light before hitting the sprawling expanse of the surface. After tonight, they might want to call it Lake Nosebleed, Malloy thought, chuckling to himself. He was still too angry to feel bad about what had happened.

       The headlights of the pickup settled briefly on the massive limestone sign with “Rolling Ranch Estates” carved into it. He waited for the electric gate to roll back. Yet another annoyance. Most people in Conquistador didn’t lock their doors at night. These people were locking their neighborhood. The town didn’t even have a full-time policeman. It had never needed one. Yet these people, beholden to their city-spawned fears, felt they had something so precious that even out here it had to be protected, even if it inconvenienced everybody else.

Malloy understood the desire to protect property, but these people weren’t interested in what he considered property. They had no land, and they didn’t want any. They built huge houses so close together that two people could barely walk between them. Their yards were little bigger than the pools they all had to have. The gate was supposed to keep out undesirables or protect all the fancy stuff inside their slapped-together houses. What thief would come all the way out here for that? And if he did, where would he sell the stuff he stole? The town of Conquistador was protected by the greatest of crime prevention tools—apathy. No one in Conquistador cared what the homies hoarded in their houses, and no one outside of Conquistador thought much about the town or the people in it.

The new chip plant could change that. Hell, if it succeeded, it might even make Conquistador the focus of national attention, of business interest—business investment. But it came at a price he was just beginning to understand. Progress meant economic opportunity, but it also meant imported habits, demands, and fears that he hadn’t really anticipated.

[From The Big Empty, copyright 2021 by Loren C. Steffy. Stoney Creek Publishing Group LLC.]

A random encounter with a grumpy cowboy

On the second day of our Colorado vacation, I met a grumpy cowboy. 

As we came down the road from Cottonwood Pass, between Buena Vista and the Taylor Reservoir, my wife suggested that we take the back way, turning north and looping around past Spring Creek — the first place we camped in Colorado some 30 years ago. 

Soon after the paved road turned to dirt, traffic was stopped by a small cattle drive. The herd was being driven by one cowboy and one cowgirl on horseback, another man in an all-terrain vehicle, and two cow dogs. We watched them work. The dogs, in particular, were incredible. As soon as they spotted a straggler, they would spring into action, nipping at the heels of the wayward cows and bringing them back to the group.   

Because of the hills on one side of the road and a creek on the other, the cowhands had to drive the herd up the road, toward the waiting traffic. As they moved forward, the cars behind them, where we were, began inching up. At one point, the camper in front us pulled forward, basically splitting the herd. Suddenly, we found ourselves with cows on both sides of us, and the dogs and cowhands frantically trying to collect the stragglers amid the cars.

I could hear the lead cowboy cussing as he road toward us. It was a warm sunny day, and his felt hat was soaked through with sweat.  

Unsure what to do, I started to inch forward, thinking it would allow them better access to the separated cows. Then, one of the dogs ran close to our Jeep, and I stopped. The cowboy turned toward me. I nodded. 

He wasn’t pleased. He pointed at me and said, “That dog is worth more than your life.” 

I told him I was watching the dog. After all, that’s why I stopped. It wasn’t a situation that lent itself to a lot of explanation, but I felt bad to be adding to his obvious frustration. 

I had to think that if they had more help, they might have been able to manage the traffic as well as the cows, or at least communicated with the motorists. But, of course, the economics of ranching don’t allow for an abundance of labor. Ranches, like many other businesses, are shorthanded these days, and the day rates they pay cowhands has been declining for decades. 

I could sympathize with the difficulty of moving cattle down a public road in an area that attracts tourists, including dirt bikes and loud off-road vehicles that can spook the cows. But mostly, I found myself replaying the scene from The Big Empty in which Blaine Witherspoon gets too close to Trace Malloy’s cutting horse. Witherspoon is imagining himself adjusting to his new surrounding, resting his foot on the corral fence. Just as he begins to feel confident, Malloy’s voice cut into his thoughts. 

“Son, you’re in about the worst place you could possibly be.” 

When the cows were finally clear of the road, I drove on, feeling rather Witherspoon-ish for a few miles. But something else bothered me. Writing a book means making thousands of little decisions, and often, you find yourself surprised at something you overlooked. Now, as we wound along the dirt mountain road, I thought: I should have given Malloy a dog.   

Why name a ranch ‘Conquistador?’

The Big Empty, New Mexico version: sunset outside Taos (photo: Laura Steffy)

I recently wrapped up a vacation in Colorado and New Mexico by spending a few days in Taos. For most of my trip, I’d been wearing one of the Conquistador Ranch hats that I’d had made for The Big Empty. 

When I got to Taos, I found myself rethinking my choice of headgear.

The region is home to eight Native American pueblos, including the Taos Pueblo, which has been inhabited continuously for 1,000 years. In the late 1500s, the conquistadors, sanctioned by the King of Spain, moved into the area and, true to their name, conquered the pueblo people, leading to 100 years of conflict. As part of the process, the Spanish forced the native peoples to convert to Christianity and introduced diseases such as small pox. 

Given that history, and assuming that many New Mexicans weren’t familiar with The Big Empty—at least not yet—I decided perhaps wearing a Conquistador Ranch hat wouldn’t be respectful to the place I was in. 

I also thought about a few critical comments I’ve received on social media about the choice of the name. 

Why did I pick a controversial moniker for my fictional ranch in the first place? Well, I wanted something that captured, if you will, the vast history of the land and of Texas. And I thought the name accentuated the conflict between the past and the present that was a theme of the book. 

At one point, I had a scene in which Blaine Witherspoon criticized the ranch’s name and suggested it be changed because of the repressive history of the conquistadors. 

I wound up cutting that scene, purely for reasons related to the overall structure of the story itself. Witherspoon was already enough of a jerk. Indeed, much of the rewriting in recent years had focused on making him more sympathetic. So in an effort to soften his character, I decided to limit his indignations to the issues that tied directly into the plot. 

The other reason for the cut was pacing. The scene occurred when Witherspoon was visiting the ranch during the roundup, and I felt that it distracted from the other events of that chapter. 

But in light of my time in Taos, where the impact of the Spanish conquest remains important social context, I found myself thinking about that scene. So I dug it out of an early draft, and here it is: 

Witherspoon looked around and took a deep breath. Despite the desolation of the place, and the mounting heat of the late-morning sun, he couldn’t deny there was a beauty to it. 

“It’s sure is amazing out here,” he said to Malloy, trying to play on the cowboy’s sympathies. 

“It grows on you,” Malloy said. 

“It’s too bad the name detracts from the beauty,” Witherspoon said, before he could stop himself. 

“The name?”

Witherspoon winced. He’d only been in Malloy’s presence for a few minutes and he was already stirring up conflict. But he couldn’t stop himself. How could the cowboy be so obtuse as to go to work each day in a place whose very name represented what amounted to genocide?

“Conquistador,” he said. “They, uh, weren’t very nice people. They conquered, they basically enslaved people in their quest for gold, they brought disease, they suppressed native religions and forced the indigenous peoples to convert to Christianity. Thousands died. Entire culture were nearly wiped out. Not exactly a heroic namesake.” 

Malloy stared at him for a minute. It was bad enough he had to conduct this little slicker show, now he had to defend the name of the ranch itself?. He bit his lip. 

“I didn’t name it,” he said flatly. 

“I understand, but it seems like the owners of the ranch might want to change the name.”

“Change the name?” Malloy said incredulously. “Do you know what that would cost? The name is known all over the West. The brand is recognized. It’s been the name for over a hundred years. You can’t just change it because someone shows up from Silly-cone Valley and decides they don’t like it.”

“I guess it just depends what you want your name to represent.”

“It represents all this,” Malloy said, waving his hand across the expanse of the land. He took a deep breath, and added. “It was named by a bunch of Scotsmen a hundred years ago. You’d have to take it up with them.”

Besides, he thought to himself, how much longer would the brand endure? What would be the point of changing it now?

Droogs, telephony and, yes, bar ditches

Milkbars, but no bar ditches

My post on bar ditches generated a lot of response on various platforms. The consensus was that I was right to use the term, though some people suggested I should have defined it. Honestly, I didn’t think about defining the term when I used it, and even when my editor suggested people wouldn’t know what it was, I was unmoved. 

When you’re introducing readers to a place they aren’t familiar with — and by that I mean the fictional world of your story — it adds a bit of mystery to throw out unusual terms. You have to do it sparingly, of course, otherwise it’s just becomes confusing. 

But as a reader, you’re jumping into this world; it’s not going to stop for you. That, by the way, is how the real word works too. Move to a new place or start a new job, and you have to learn how things are done there, or you have to pick up on the unique customers or language that helps define the place. 

The first time I read Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (the American version), I just jumped in. I “learned” Nadsat, the Russian-influenced English slang spoken by the gangs  from the context. Only when I finished it did I discover that the publisher had put a helpful glossary at the end, defining all the terms. 

But to this day, I’m glad I didn’t know it was there. Part of what Burgess wanted to achieve was a sense of alienation. The language barrier created a distance with the characters and may even have helped make them more palatable to readers, who typically might not have identified with youthful murders and rapists, let alone cheered for them to be able to continue murdering and raping. 

Of course, The Big Empty is tamer fare. We have bar ditches, gimme caps, and the occasional bois d’arc tree, and there’s some tech jargon like telephony, but for the most part, it’s written in plain English (I hope). 

I should also note that fiction differs from nonfiction in this regard. For nonfiction, it can be completely appropriate to define terms as they’re introduced. You can also use footnotes or a glossary. In fact, I added a glossary of ship terms to The Man Who Thought Like a Ship, which a number of readers said they found helpful. (That glossary was actually my father’s. I used an abridged version from his textbook Wooden Shipbuilding and the Interpretation of Shipwrecks. I was able to do that because we had the same publisher.) 

I know why I made the decisions I made on the language in The Big Empty, but from a reader’s perspective, how do you feel about coming across unfamiliar terms? Is it off-putting, or does it make you feel like you’re listening into to a conversation?