I’ve written what might be the beginning of the Western. If not the beginning, a starting point (and it’s true, you do have to start somewhere).  I have a long way to go with the research, and I’d rather be farther along with research before starting. Details are coalescing, year, setting, character…Texas Gulf Coast, 1888..but a lot to be determined. Like, most of it.

No title yet. Sometimes I have a title before I start, sometimes I can’t think of one at all. I might give this a one word, character’s last name title, like a Louis L’Amour Western. I just read his novel Matagorda, which was a lot like a lot of his books: Good Honest Man Gets The Job Done, with lots of repetition about how he came to Texas to be a partner on a cattle drive, not get involved in a feud, but, would you believe it—he got involved in the feud, and his fiancé came from Virginia to Indianola right before the hurricane destroyed the town, and somehow, she knew about the feud before she got there, but he hadn’t. Still, I’d love to be able to write about landscape the way he did.

First person or third? I started with third person, but I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op stories and like the style of having anonymous first person narrator (though that would interfere with the idea of a last-name title—or would it?).