Velda: When I began working toward EBook publishing, I never dreamed I would put books so close together. Another is still on the drawing board, so to speak. It’s an exciting time to be an author.

Lori: I’ve been seriously thinking about EBook publishing myself, now that self-publishing doesn’t have the stigma that it did until recently; also, the “royalties” from EBooks are generally higher than those from books in print on paper. What drew you to the world of EBooks?

Velda: Lori, I was probably most fascinated by Ebooks when I learned I could republish all my backlist to Kindle. Once that became a possibility, I started thinking about what books I had that had circulated in New York, had some good feedback, but never sold. Why couldn’t I submit those to E book publishers and see what happened? I had no idea that two of them would sell within weeks of my submitting them. One is still under consideration.
What I like most about E books I think is that I can do almost all my promoting and marketing online sitting at my computer. I’ve been in this business a long time and am getting weary of book signings and personal appearances. Not that I don’t enjoy meeting all my fans, I love that part, but the physical effort is getting to be more than I can handle. I also enjoy the high royalties involved. Of course that varies between E book publishers and Kindle.
You should look into publishing some of your work through Kindle. There are plenty of good E book publishers out there as well, if you wanted to go that route.

Lori: I’m not sure if I want to go through an E book publisher, or self-publish through Smashwords or Kindle, but I am putting together several of my older stories (and revising them) that I intend to at least put on Kindle, although I don’t know when that will be, or how I’ll promote it! (Maybe a visit to your blog?) Can you tell me more about the E books that you’ve sold or have “in the queue” to sell, and about your published works? I know you’ve published a fair amount, and I’d love to learn more. How did you go about selling your two E-books so quickly?

Velda: Selling those first two E books was amazing for me. I had written a western historical romance which my agent didn’t like. I really thought it was good, so I did some more work on it and sent it to Rhonda Penders at Wild Rose Press. I met her at the Ozark Creative Writer’s Conference in Eureka Springs, Arkansas in October. I hadn’t even thought of submitting anything until a friend who had pitched her work to Rhonda came over to me and told me that they were looking and buying (in this case, that simply means contracting, as Ebook publishers don’t usually pay an advance) and if I had anything at all I should pitch it. So I dug around in my mind, thought of this manuscript that was gathering dust and pitched it to Rhonda. She asked for it and they accepted it in November. Said they were absolutely enthralled with the story. It will be out in February as Stone Heart’s Woman, just a bit over a year from the time they contracted it. It will also be in print.

The second book I sold around the same time, I had spoken to Rhonda about it and she asked to see it also, but it didn’t fit their strict guidelines for a romance. She told me to submit it somewhere else as a paranormal mainstream, which is precisely what I did. In this case I got online and checked out several Ebook publishers, picked SynergEbooks because I liked the books they were publishing a lot. They sent me a contract almost by return mail. We just today finished the final edits on it. My editor was concerned about one important point in the book and she helped me work out what we should do to fix it. I just Emailed the manuscript a few minutes ago. I really thought it would qualify as a romance, but I guess there was too much “other story” in it. The title is Wolf Song, and it has a mystery, a lot of shapeshifting, murder and the like. It would appear that it’s a cross genre, but they’re marketing it as a YA and Adult novel. I’m excited to see how it does. They’ve been taking pre-orders for a few weeks.

I am all over the map, so to speak, with my writing. I have five regional nonfiction books out about the Ozarks of Arkansas. My creative nonfiction, which is a biography that takes place in New Mexico, was a finalist in the WILLA Literary Awards for Creative Non Fiction in 2008. I have six western historical romances that were originally published in NY and four are now on Kindle, with the other two ready to edit and format. I have three women’s fiction novels about middle aged women meeting some sort of crisis in their lives. I plan on self-publishing them to Kindle. And would you believe I have a horror novel that’s still with an Ebook publisher that is taking way too much time to decide. I may end up publishing it to Kindle as well.

Lori: I would believe it. The stories I’m hoping to put on Amazon are horror stories. I think everybody has a few nightmares that they can get out by writing, if they try.

Velda: And that about covers what I’ve written so far. I tried straight mysteries, but couldn’t keep everything lined up, and I don’t have the patience to write one of those big thrillers with their layers and layers of story line. What’s next? Once all of these are headed in the right direction, I’ve already started another western historical romance I hope to get published through Wild Rose Press. Did you know they were chosen for the fourth year in a row as the best E book publisher by readers through Preditors and Editors?

Lori: No, I didn’t know that. But I’ll certainly be visiting the Preditors and Editors website before I approach any publisher. I think many authors or would-be authors don’t know about that site; I hope this can help spread the word.

Velda: I think it’s a good idea for you to get something published on Kindle. Promoting and marketing is a lot of work, but at least you’re not stomping around trying to get a few people to pay attention to you at a book signing. Though I do enjoy that a lot because of the wonderful readers I meet.

Lori: Thank you for the advice. I did a lot of that stomping around with my first book, Spooky Creepy North Dakota, and I didn’t enjoy it — except for the people I met that way.
Thank you so much, Velda, for visiting my blog. I hope to be reading your new books very soon.

Velda: I appreciate you having me. It was tons of fun to converse with you this way. Sort of like having coffee together and chatting.

Meg’s book doesn’t fit neatly into any genre, which to me is a good thing. The protagonist of Repeating History is Chuck McManis, 20 years old in 1959, a college drop-out, and taking a road trip to Yellowstone Park. While watching Old Faithful erupt, Chuck finds himself in the middle of a major earthquake, which throws him around and knocks him out. When he comes to, he realizes that he is no longer in 1959. He learns that, in fact, he is in the 1870s, and everything he knows can’t help him survive here — not only that, he is apparently his great-grandfather, and returning to the future means that he’ll lose Eliza, his great-grandmother from his time, but now the woman he loves.

1. I know we all get tired of people asking, “Where do you get ideas for writing?” but seriously, what inspired you in starting this book?

I actually like this question for this book, because I’ve never met anyone else who was inspired to write a time travel novel after watching a geyser go off. A few years ago I was in the middle of watching my first-ever eruption of Grand Geyser (not Old Faithful, but just down the boardwalk from it), the tallest predictable geyser in the world, when I suddenly thought, wow, this would make a terrific time travel device. I started researching Yellowstone’s history and things just kind of snowballed from there, especially after I found a firsthand account written by one of the tourists kidnapped by the Nez Perce.

2. Can you describe your experience with the setting? It’s clear you’ve been there, and love it, but tell us more!

At age four I was too young to remember my first visit to Yellowstone. I went back again as a teenager and as a young adult, but I did not fall in love with the park until I spent a week there as part of a solo 3-month cross-country road trip in the fall of 1999, when I saw that eruption of Grand Geyser and was absolutely enthralled. Geysers are said to play, and I’ve actually seen people applauding geysers because they’re so much fun to watch. Each geyser has its own personality, too. I’ve been back to the park numerous times since then at various times of the year, and have spent as much time as I could in the park archives doing research, as well as in other archives and libraries in the area. And, of course, I’ve spent a lot of time wandering in Chuck’s footsteps, and in the geyser basins waiting for things to go off.

3. How did you choose your protagonist? Is there a reason you chose to use a man rather than a woman? And do you feel that you’ve written a believeable male character?

Chuck started out as a military officer, on bereavement leave to bury his father. I keep trying to make characters into soldiers. I don’t know why that is, but Chuck rebelled almost from the beginning. For one thing, his voice kept sounding younger than I had originally intended him to be (mid-thirties, turned out he was twenty), and for another, I kept seeing him in my mind as a young blond Buddy Holly, gangly, glasses, and all. The reason Chuck is male, besides the fact that he absolutely positively couldn’t be anything else, is because in every other time travel novel I’ve ever read, either we have a man coming forward from the past to the present, or we have a woman going back from the present into the past. I’d never read one where a man went back into the past. And so that’s why I chose a male protagonist.

I like to think Chuck’s believable. I hope he is. I agonized more about him being believably from 1959 (the year I was born) than I did about him being male. I had a harder time writing Eliza, who is a very traditional woman of her time, than I did writing Chuck. But I think that’s more a function of me being about as untraditional a female as it is possible to be than anything else, which is probably one reason why it was easier for me to write a male character.

4. Who are your favorite characters in the book, and who was the most difficult to write about (and why)? And do you incorporate bits of people you know into your characters, or parts of yourself?

I’ll start with that question about the most difficult. Killing someone with gangrene resulting from a gunshot wound to the hip was not fun. I had to research it, of course, and I did, and the character really did have to die, but I didn’t have to like it.

I like all my characters, even the ones I’m not supposed to like, which sometimes makes things difficult. The character who turned out to be the most pleasant surprise was Lucy. She simply strolled onstage about two-thirds of the way in and started talking. She never tried to take over the book, but she turned Martin, who had been pretty much a pain in the neck up to that point, into a real grown-up. And she enabled plot point after plot point. I have no idea what part of my subconscious she came from, but I’m extremely grateful she showed up.

I don’t consciously incorporate bits of myself or other people into my characters, with two exceptions, one large and one small. The small exception is Chuck’s looks. The large exception is that Repeating History is based on real events. The Nez Perce did flee through Yellowstone in 1877, and they did kidnap at least one party of tourists along the way. Eliza is based on a real person. So are Martin and Anna Cooper, and William Byrne. Unconscious incorporation of bits from any source is another matter altogether.

5. Why did you choose first person over any of the other main types? (third person, multiple third persons, omniscient, etc.)

Because when I first started writing the story, I was working in single viewpoint tight third person because that’s what I’d been told sold easiest. The words had to be pulled out with pliers, and they sounded terribly stilted. So, on a whim, I started over in first person, thinking that once I had a draft I’d rewrite it in third, and it was like turning on a fire hose. The story just started running, and it didn’t stop. I never did do that rewrite. The sequel of sorts I am working on right now is also in first person, but it is not in Chuck’s point of view. It’s from the point of view of a !horrors! woman, which I fought for far longer than I should have. But she’s decidedly not traditional, which helps.

6. Do you start with a written outline of some sort(either with numbers or just a paragraph), or do you just get the ideas in your head and go for it? Will you use the same process in the sequel — if you’re writing a sequel and I hope you are?

For Repeating History I borrowed a system I had heard discussed by author Lois McMaster Bujold, who talked about plotting turning point to turning point, or, to use her term, to the next event horizon. I figured out where things were going until I couldn’t anymore, then I wrote to that point, then I figured out where things were going next and and wrote to that point and so forth, to the end of the book. The kidnapping and escape part was plotted for me, since I was writing a version of a story that really happened. For the sequel, and, yes, as I said there’s a sequel, sort of — one of the main characters in my work in progress is Chuck’s son/grandfather, and True Gold is about his adventures in the Klondike in the late 1890s with a young woman he rescues along the way, which I hope to have up on Amazon and Smashwords by June — I tried writing a full outline, using techniques I read about on author Holly Lisle’s website. At least I thought it was a full outline. It appears now, however, that I was just plotting to the first event horizon, so I am apparently using the same method I did last time, just coming at it from a different angle.

7. What is your favorite part of the writing through publishing process, including marketing, and what is your least favorite?

Call me insane, but I love revision. I feel about revising the same way I do hand quilting, which is my favorite part of making a quilt. The writing process (as I do it, at least) does have a lot in common with the quilting process, come to think about it. First I get the idea, then I figure out how to make it work, then I write the first draft/cut and piece the top, then I revise and layer in the rest of the story/do the quilting, then I proof and go over it one last time/bind the quilt. It helps to think of it that way, too. That way I don’t expect a finished story when all I’ve got is a pieced top. Because my most complete rough drafts are, to put it kindly, only about half of the finished story.

My least favorite part so far is marketing, but that’s because I have a lot to learn. This interview, I hope, is a good first step. Thank you for the opportunity.

8. Why did you choose self-publishing over the agent and book publisher route?

Honestly, if, in the seven or eight years I wasted submitting Repeating History to agents and publishers only to be told over and over that it was a good story but not something they thought they could sell, someone had offered to take me on, I would have jumped at it. But self-publishing suddenly became more acceptable and economically possible at just about the time I was ready to throw in the towel on traditional publishing, and I thought, why not? Besides, I have a fairly entrepreneurial spirit — I am an independent museum curator in my other life — so being in control of the entire process appealed greatly to me.

9. What is your favorite part of the book?

There are two, both have to do with Chuck’s realizing what’s happened to him and who he is. One is when the party of tourists he’s stumbled into tries to plug up Old Faithful (the early tourists did a lot of stupid things, but then I don’t think the early tourists had a monopoly on stupidity) and he recognizes what’s going on as one of the stories his great-grandmother told him when he was small. The other is when he and Eliza and Anna arrive at the Bottlers’ ranch and he’s standing out on the porch staring at the stars and realizing that if he really is his great-grandfather, he’s going to marry Eliza. And that he’s not unhappy about that turn of events at all. I know a lot of people look at the whole “I’m my own great-grandfather” storyline and roll their eyes (several agents certainly did so), but honestly, it’s my favorite part of the plot. What would you do if you had the chance to live the life of someone you idolized, only to find out that things didn’t happen the way you always thought they had at all? Second chances has always been the main theme of my writing, and Chuck’s story is the ultimate in second chances, so far as I was concerned.

Thank you, Meg, for providing us some insight not just into your book, but into the writing and publishing proocess!

Meg Justus clearly knows a great deal about subjects ranging from Montana history to geysers and anything in between, and I’m sure she’d be delighted to visit your blog to talk about them!

So I got the Kindle. A few times the battery has gotten a little low, and I recharge it, then sensibly (and greenly) unplug the recharger’s cord. Other than buying a case for it, and occasionally using it to read in bed when my hands just don’t want to hold up a book, I haven’t paid much attention to it for at least a month.

Today I decided to download a free story on Amazon, written by a fellow member of Women Writing the West (shall I name you, Marla? Too late! I did!). I took my baby out of its bright pink cover (the only color they had in stock; I wanted dark blue but would have had to wait indefinitely for it. Sorry, I’m in the “immediate gratification” generation), and turned it on.

Instead of one of the images I’ve gotten used to when it’s turned off, there were two big words on the screen. BATTERY CRITICAL!!! Oh dear. Where is the battery emergency room? Can I get my Kindle there in time, or will it need major surgery like a battery replacement? Horrors!

I called Acme Batteries and they said I needed to get it to their ER, STAT. I jumped in my car, Kindle with Critical Battery in hand, and drove through the snow a little faster than I should have, but reached Acme’s ER in one piece.

As I rushed through the sliding glass doors of the ER, the receptionist stood up and asked what the nature of the emergency was. Slightly out of breath, I managed to say, “Battery Critical!” I was stunned as the techs, in green scrubs, ran out with a gurney. They snatched my Kindle from my hand and took it through a swinging door into the actual ER.

I followed, but a little more slowly, and by the time I got there, my Kindle was lying on a bed with drapes around it. I stuck my head in, and the Battery Doctor, dressed in a white lab coat with an ID and an electrical cord hanging around his neck, asked me if I was the nearest relative. I admitted that I owned it. He turned stern. “Don’t you know that if you wait too long, your battery may not survive? Now go sit in the waiting room! Your battery needs all my attention!” With that, I was dragged out of the curtained area by a tech who led me to the reception area.

The receptionist asked if I had insurance for my battery. I stammered that it hadn’t seemed necessary when I purchased the Kindle. She put her lips together firmly, then said, “Hmm Hmm, child, you takin’ a big risk not gettin’ the INsurance for an important battery like this one! I’ll put it on the paperwork, but you may be in for a world of financial hurt!”

After an hour and a half of drinking bad coffee and sweating about the life of both the battery and the Kindle, the doctor came into the reception area. He looked around the room, and seeing me (the only one there), he said, “You’re lucky. Your battery is in Intensive Care, but it’s no longer critcal; its status is now stable.”

“May I go see it?” I asked, and stood up, which caused me to spill the dregs of the bad coffee all over my new winter white pants.

The doctor snorted and left, which I interpreted as a no.

Oh, it seemed like I waited for hours. I knew that somewhere my Kindle lay, its Critical Battery connected via a computer cable and a mysterious white device to an electrical outlet, a connection that should save its life, if the doctor was right.

Finally another of those techs in green scrubs came into the room, with my Kindle (and its battery!) on a wheel chair. He shook his head, and said, “Well, it’s finally up to green. Coulda been a lot worse. Next time, pay attention, and charge it before it becomes CRITICAL!”

The receptionist shooed me out of the waiting room, telling me that this time there would be no charge. Financially, that is.

I drove carefully home, through the winter early darkness (it was 3:30 p.m.) and snow, my Kindle, in its case, nestled in a warm blanket on the passenger seat. When we got home, I took it in, and, holding my breath, turned it on. Oh, RELIEF! My list of items showed up! I went through the 75 or so books and stories on my Kindle (don’t mock; when you get them they’re empty, and a lot of those books were just 99 cents!), and nothing was missing. Now I can get that story, and read a book!

Let this be a lesson to you as well, dear reader! Please recharge your e-readers before the battery goes CRITICAL. You wouldn’t want to pay for a heart transplant, now would you? So make sure you keep it charged, and then unplug that cord to save energy!

This may be a good place to add some writerly ponderings. I’ve heard via cyberspace lately that many writers don’t write — or read — blogs, because it takes too much of their creative time and energy, which they prefer to keep focussed on their real work. Well, if you follow my blog, you haven’t followed very far, have you? I’m doing well if I blog once a month. But for me, when I look at the computer screen and crack my knuckles and think about writing a novel, the blog can act as a pump primer. You know, get a little writing done, then the well will gush. I hope. And thus I blog on.

A woman I know through an organization, reading her book, and her blog, and the exchange of a few emails, has been living with her artist husband’s brain cancer for at least a year. Although initially they were very hopeful, his life is nearly at an end. She blogs each week about their journey through life, and she somehow always manages to see the positive in what she’s living. I have a deep respect for her; I don’t know if I’d do so well.

My maternal grandmother was a diabetic. She was an adult diabetic; I believe it started when she was about 40. Through the years I knew her, she managed her dis-ease (think about that word) with the help of my grandfather. He would help her check her bloodsugar (no handy bloodsticks then; it was pee and a paper strip), and give her insulin injections. It took me a few years to understand why she didn’t eat some things, and why she did eat others, and why she always had orange juice in her refrigerator (and we had it in ours when she visited). She never complained, at least not in the presence of her grandchildren, and was a wonderful grandma to us all, the best grandma any child could ask for.

When she was about 82 or 83 (my memory isn’t what it used to be), she had a stroke, related to her diabetes. It completely changed her life. She became immobile (though not paralyzed), and lost most of her memory. Her doctor suggested that my grandfather should place her in a nursing home so that she’d have around-the-clock nursing. He refused. He kept her in her home, in surroundings that were somewhat familiar to her, and not at all threatening to her.

He took care of her much as my friend is caring for her husband. He gave her spongebaths, changed her diapers, fed her, and continued her diabetes management. She couldn’t remember his name; she called him “Mister.” He had some home health care assistance, but he did almost everything for her, and continued to sleep beside her so that he’d wake up if she did, and could calm her when she was confused. He made sure that someone from the “beauty shop” came in every week or so to wash and set her still-dark hair.

Over a year or so she slowly faded away until her physical body was gone. My grandfather had, by then, lost most of his friends, and his home was a lonely place. My mother and her sister convinced him to move to Bismarck, where they both lived. He did, but refused to move in with either of them. Ever independent, he rented a small apartment.

I wasn’t living in Bismarck then. I was off somewhere else, Kansas, I think, going to graduate school and living my own life. When he died in his sleep, it was a long trip home to his funeral.

Neither of them were authors or artists. My grandmother taught before she married, and my grandfather held a variety of jobs, the last as the manager of the clinic in their town; he had that job for as long as I can remember — not bad for a man with an eighth-grade education. There is nothing to memorialize them except their gravestones, and the memories of those who knew them.

In my memory, there are car trips with my grandmother, and sometimes both grandparents, to the lake cabin they built in the 1930s (it’s still in the family, and I try to get there each summer). Grandpa always drove; he’d back (fast!) down the dirt road that led from the highway to the cabin so that he could back into the driveway. He drove backwards better than I have ever driven forward. He would tell us stories and take us fishing, and he loved to recite (from memory) the “story” poems by Robert Service. My grandmother taught us the songs from her childhood, and we’d sing them loudly in the car on the way back to Rugby, their hometown.

We always shared Christmas with them; when my sisters and I were young, our mother would pack the whole family into our car and our father would drive us to Rugby. I can vividly remember the thick pine trees they always chose as Christmas trees, the piney scent filling the house. Their tree was usually decorated by the time we got there, but every ornament had a story behind it, and each of us had an ornament with our very own name on it. Awesome when you’re six. I have some of those ornaments, as do both my sisters. I treasure them, although these days I rarely put up a tree. I tried, when I first moved back to Bismarck, but over the years it’s become too much work, and somehow the memories that are so happy as I write this become sad when I see a Christmas tree.

When we were older, they’d drive to our house, and stay with us for Christmas. My grandfather’s turkey dressing (or stuffing, or both) remains the best I’ve ever eaten. Despite having watched him make it so many times, I can’t even make it taste close to what he accomplished. And Grandma’s cookies and Norwegian Yulekage? Words can’t describe them! We inhaled the cookies, and the Yulekaga (a bread with colored fruit in it) was always the first stage of Christmas morning breakfasat. And we’d all sang Christmas carols around a piano, in Rugby or in Bismarck.

There are so many memories that I couldn’t write them all down if I tried. I will say that it was them who instilled in me a desire to garden, and what plants to put in that garden. My mother added to that desire, and although some years my garden looks more like a weed patch (they grow faster than I can pull them! And they grow faster than anything I plant!), I try to keep it in shape. (The bunnies who eat my hostas aren’t helping, either.)

One thing my grandparents did write: Letters. When they were courting, and were almost always apart as my grandfather traveled for a grocery company and my grandmother was teaching, they wrote almost every day. Some of the letters are, well, mundane. Others are true love letters. And those letters provide me, as an adult long after my grandparents have moved on to some other plane, some insight into how their relationship developed, and why so often they communicated by shouting. That they loved each other couldn’t be doubted by anyone who saw them together, or read their letters. But as a child I didn’t understand why they always yelled at each other. I get it now, and I understand my late mother’s frustration when, rather than argue with her, my father would leave the house (usually to golf or bowl), then return a few hours later and act like nothing had happened. And I laugh at myself when I realize my last husband did the same thing, giving me the same frustration my mother felt.

My grandparents didn’t just express their love of each other, or of us, in words. They were a hugging and kissing family, and my mother carried on that tradition as well. I think my father was a little baffled at first, but he gamely tried through his life to get a little more demonstrative. Some people are shocked to realize that we all always kissed on the lips, but that was our way. Hugs are tight and warm, and as a child, made me feel safe and loved.

But I’m digressing a lot. There are a few threads to this post. One is the comparision of my friend’s life right now to what my grandparents went through, although for them it was later in their life. One is my conviction that even if my grandparents left behind them nothing that can be seen, touched, or read (except those letters… there’s a book in there, if only for my family), they still left something of themselves behind, at least to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Another is that perhaps compared to what both couples endured and endure, my own illnesses, and the way my life is now, are pretty inconsequential, although my doctors tell me never to compare — each human being is unique, and all our dis-ease matters. And eventually, we all move on from this life to whatever the next beginning will be.

I wish my friend’s husband an easy transition to that new beginning, and an amazing trip. I wish my friend the strength and courage to celebrate his life and his accomplishments, and the love they shared. I’m pretty sure she already has them. And I wish myself the courage to begin each day with the love from all these people in my heart and in my mind, and to make each day matter, even if it only matters to me.

We’d been camped out near a cattle tank, miles and miles of bad roads from our main camp, to work on — you know, I really don’t remember. Might have been a road, might have been a pipeline — but that doesn’t matter. What does matter was that our tent, which was co-ed, was one of the ones we called the “Custer Tents.” University of North Dakota lore says that when the 7th Cavalry headed out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, there were some tents that were in such bad shape that they were left behind, to be scooped up later by the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at UND. And ours was one of those giant canvas tents, with no floor, that reeked of must and mothballs, and leaked on the (very) rare occasions that it rained. For those of you who’ve heard my story about feeling so dirty that we bathed in a cattle tank, this was the place.

It was one of the hottest times in the Badlands that I can remember. The tent was stuffy and filled with the extra scent of sweaty men. I, and my bff Jeani, could not stand it anymore, and took our sleeping bags out under the stars. For those of you who live in cloudy places, or in large cities, I pity you. You can’t really see the stars. In the Badlands, and in the New Mexico desert, the entire night sky is filled with stars, more than city dwellers can conceive of.

So we lay there, comradely, (and no, not drinking beer — we left that to the boys), talking about the work, our love lives, and whatever came to mind. The moon was full, and it seemed so close that you could reach out and touch it. Near the moon was a round bright light. When I first noticed it, I thought it must be one of the planets, or maybe a satellite, because it didn’t twinkle like stars do, as their little light makes it through Earth’s atmosphere. Jeani and I said to each other, at the very same time (great minds truly do think alike), “Look at that!” We agreed we were looking at that bright round thing that looked like it was next to the moon, and I said it might be a planet, and she said it was too late for that, the planets had already set, or hadn’t yet risen. “Maybe a satellite?” I asked. No, she said, those usually are moving. I think. Suddenly the bright round light sped to our right, and the stopped as suddenly as it had started. “Did you see that?” we chorused. How could anyone have missed it? It was big, and it was obvious.

As we watched, it appeared to make a 90 degree turn, and sped off towards and behind us. We sat up to watch. It stopped again, as abruptly as it had the first time. It was still for about a minute (Jeani had a watch with one of those green light features), and then it did a 180 and and sped over us and out of view.

We were baffled. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. The movement indicated that it couldn’t have been a star or a planet, and I don’t know of any satellites that do that, although it may be a possiblity (but bear in mind that this was pre-1980, and satellite technology has come a long way since then, so what they can do now may not have been possible then). I don’t know enough to say for certain that it wasn’t, but at the time, we didn’t believe it was. Satellites usually orbit, right?

So what was it? Not an airplane; no aircraft, with the exception of helicopters and Harrier jets, hover like that. And it was up much too high to be a helicopter, and the closest air base, in Minot, ND, didn’t have any Harriers. Besides, it was completely silent. Since it was an object, and it was flying, and we didn’t know what it was, we called it a UFO.

When we finally got back to our base, showered and dressed in clean clothes, we discussed it with the project manager, who hadn’t been with us in the Custer Tent. We (Jeani and I) wanted to report it; the question was, to whom? The county sheriff’s office would probably have laughed at us, so we skipped that option. We ended up calling the air base at Minot. A pleasant if slightly skeptical young officer took our call, and said he was making a note of our observation, and no, they hadn’t been doing any exercises in that area at the time. That was it.

We still talk about it from time to time. Neither of us have every seen anything like that since, although we’ve both spent plenty of time outdoors doing our different jobs. Was it a UFO? Well, yes, by definition, but was it an alien craft? I have no answer for that.

What do you think?

The Black Hills

When you think of “the fastest gun in the West,” do you think of Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, or the Earp brothers? Think again. The fastest gun in the old west may well have been Boone May’s rifle.

Boone May was born in Missouri in 1852, the seventh of nine children of Sam and Nancy May. Christened “Daniel Boone May,” he decided early in life to drop the first name, so history knows him simply as Boone. Sam May moved the family to Kansas some time before 1860, and Boone and his brothers farmed with their father, and learned to shoot while hunting. Perhaps because of the cost of bullets, Boone learned early to make every shot count. Boone was always described as a fearsome man; he was lean, dark-haired, and quiet, with unusual eyes of yellow, green and gray.

Around 1876, Boone May and two of his older brothers, Jim and Bill May, moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, to work in freighting. Towns didn’t get much wilder than Cheyenne in the 1870s, and freight wagons and coaches were always the prey of “road agents,” the outlaws who held them up. Hostile Sioux and Cheyenne were also a problem in the Black Hills, raiding ranches and travelers for horses and weapons.

Despite the dangers, Boone did well in his business, and bought himself a ranch between the Platte River and Deadwood, then part of Dakota Territory. The Cheyenne and Black Hills Stage and Express Company, a freight company that brought supplies into the Black Hills and took gold out, heard of Boone May’s reputation as an honest and hard-working man, and also of his prowess with the rifle he always kept sheathed at his side. In 1877, they offered him a job as a “shotgun messenger,” or coach guard. In four or five years as a messenger and the manager of a stage station, he killed at least 8 robbers, and arrested even more.

Despite the fact that he worked on the right side of the law, Boone was arrested, along with U.S. Department of Justice special agent W.H. Llewellyn, for the killing of Curly Grimes, a notorious stage robber. While out on bail and awaiting trial, Boone continued to guard the stages. One memorable trip was recorded by author Ambrose Bierce in his story, “A Sole Survivor.” May and Bierce, driving a wagon with $30,000 in gold, were stopped between Deadwood and Rockerville on a dark and rainy night. When an outlaw’s shout to stop the wagon and raise their hands came out of the darkness, May, with “the quickest movement… in anything but a cat.” threw himself across the seat, drawing his gun at the same time, and shot the robber in the chest before the robber could pull the trigger on the gun he held. May and Bierce continued to Rockerville, the gold still safe in the coach.

When the trial for the killing of Grimes took place, the jury didn’t even leave the courtroom to deliberate before declaring the defendants innocent. Despite the verdict, the outlaw friends of Grimes were determined to get revenge, but their attempts came to nothing but the deaths or arrest of more of them.

As the gold rush in the Black Hills slowed to a trickle, Boone May, always restless, went to South America. He worked as a guard at a gold mine in Chile, but rumors said he left in a hurry in 1891. He had fallen for the wife, or possibly girlfriend, of a Chilean army officer, who died quite suddenly. May re-appeared at the gold mines of Brazil, and is said to have died there of yellow fever. It took an illness to do what no armed men could. Rumor says that May’s rifle was buried with him.

Never as famous as he should have been, at least outside the Black Hills, Boone May was definiely one of the fastest guns in the West.

(Sources: Fifer, Barbara. Bad Boys of the Black Hills… and Some Wild Women Too. Helena: Farcountry Press, 2008. http://mayhouse.org/family/trees/may/JS1816SM7.html, http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/deadwood3.html, http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-boonemay.html, http://www.legendsofamerica.com/we-triggerfingeritis.html )

Before I start with Anna’s life, I need to provide a little backstory (don’t worry, it’s interesting and I’ll try to keep it short!). Anna’s father was Sivert Sivertsen, following the Norwegian custom of using your father’s name as your last name. However, he changed it to Moen, the place he spent most of his life in Norway. He was born in 1862 in Surnedalen, near Trondhjem. He married his first wife, Mali, in Norway and they had four children: Mikkel, born 1889, Ida, born 1892, Marie and Selma, born around 1893. In 1894, the family emigrated to the US, settling in Minnesota. Mali was extremely unhappy, and she and Sivert divorced. She left the older two children with him, and returned to Norway, telling everyone that she was a widow.

Sivert wasn’t much of a farmer; he was better at talking and at carpentry. He started leaving his two children with friends and traveling around the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, preaching and singing, and taking whatever people gave him. He apparently had a silver tongue. In his travels, he met Christine Thompson, a young woman who was living with a foster family in Abercrombie, ND. He convinced her to marry him, and they settled for a while in Windom, where their first child, Anna (also called Annie) was born in 1898. But Sivert got itchy feet and started traveling again, hauling his growing family with him from job to job, until he finally settled near Grand Forks, ND, where he worked for a building company. By then they’d had four more children, Sarah (1901), Alfred (1902), Waldimer (born and died in 1904), and Ingeborg (1906).

In 1907, Sivert died of typhoid, leaving Christine with his two older children, and their four living children. Mikkel may have left around then to go out on his own, and Ida seems to have married about that time. Christine took the rest of the children, from 9 year old Annie to baby Ingeborg, and bought a house in Edinburg, ND, which she shared with her brother Albert (“Uncle A.C.” to her children). Albert worked at a store in town, and Christine used the house to board teachers. She and Annie also started working then, cleaning other houses and doing laundry for other families, Annie working after school, as she belatedly started first grade (the delay was not because of her intelligence but because she was needed at home). Summers, Annie worked in a “cook car” with a threshing crew that started in Texas or Arkansas and worked its way north with the harvest. She earned $4 a day, a large amount in 1908!

Annie took some extra classes in 8th grade (while still working) so that she could finish her “high school” in 3 years instead of 4. She went to the Walsh County Agricultural and Teacher Training School in Park River. Since that was far from Edinburg, she had to board; to pay for her room and board, she cleaned the home she was staying in, and did laundry, ironing, and cleaning for other students. She also sent money home to Christine and her siblings whenever she could.

She graduated in the spring of 1917, and went to work in a country school. She boarded with a town family (paid by the school district to house and feed her) and traveled to the school with a horse and buggy. Because of northern weather conditions, and the not exactly weatherproof condition of the school, her school year ran from April through December. Typical for Annie, she worked doing cleaning and laundry from January through March. At some point in her life, she learned to play the piano and the organ; we don’t have a record of it, but once she graduated and started teaching, she played piano or organ in whatever church she was able to attend. I remember listening to her play her piano when I was a child, and I was amazed at the beauty of the music as her fingers were gnarled with arthritis. She told me she kept playing so they could keep moving.

After two years of teaching in rural North Dakota, she took a teaching job in a remote area of northern Minnesota, near International Falls, now part of Koochiching County. She started in 1919. Back then, there were no decent roads in the “big woods” of northern Minnesota, and few people or towns. The road she took to work was a “corduroy” road — stripped logs laid side by side, long sides touching, to keep from sinking into the swamp that was the undergrowth of this very wet forest. She also had to carry a lantern to be able to see in the mornings and evenings, and a gun to fend off wolves, which were much more numerous then than now.

At some point, she met a man named Oscar S. Melson. On the 1920 census, Oscar is reported living with his family in Odin, Watonwan County, Minnesota — over 350 miles from Greaney Town where Anna was working. We have no records for that time, but we believe he was probably working on the railroad that was being built through that part of Minnesota, and that he may have met Anna at church or a country dance. However they met, she fell in love with him. He was offered a job with the Northern and Chicago Railroad in Wyoming, and he told her that he’d go work there, and save up his money, then return and marry her. But apparently their relationship went a little beyond kissing, because in January of 1921, after the school year ended, little Oscar Vernon Melson was born.

Sadly, in March of 1921, Oscar S. Melson was killed in a stupid railroad accident — he and some other men from the railroad camp had been to Lander to see a movie, and went back to the camp in a “speeder,” a car designed to run on railroad tracks. It hit a deer, throwing three men from the car. Oscar was seriously injured (it was a neck and spine injury) and he died the next morning; one other man was also seriously injured and in the newspaper report from Lander, it was reported that he was not expected to survive. Oscar’s brother Alfred, younger than Oscar by a year, had a minor hand injury. He filled in the personal information on Oscar’s death certificate, and listed Oscar as single. He escorted Oscar’s remains to St. James, MN (nearest railroad stop to the Melson home in Odin, MN), and his obituary was published in the Butterfield paper (another small town in Watonwan County, as Odin had no paper). In that same paper, his parents and siblings thanked those people who had come to the funeral. Nothing of Anna was mentioned. Apparently Oscar never told his family about her.

Because of her condition, Anna was not asked to stay in Koochiching County. Her mother came to help her, and the two women, with baby Vernon, moved to Colgate, ND, where she started over. She called herself Mrs. Melson, a widow, and took a job teaching. In Colgate, she met Loyd Orser, then a good-looking veteran of WWI, with plenty of medals to prove his courage, and a large hard-working familyor brothers, sisters, and cousins. They married, and he raised Oscar Vernon Melson (always called Vernon or Vern) as his own.

The rest of her story is perhaps not as exciting as scrubbing floors to get to school, fighting off wolves in the North Woods, and making a life for herself and her illegitimate child (did you know that in 1921, there was a box on birth certificate labeled “Legitimate” that needed to be filled with a “yes” or a “no?” Anna filled in the “yes,” but she listed her son’s father as Oscar S. Melson, who never did get to see his son). However, she never quit trying to improve herself and her children. She went back to school, and eventually became the first woman county superintendant of schools in Steele County, ND — possibly the first woman with that post in any county in the state.

She also made sure that all of her children were educated, and all of them were successful in their chosen fields, largely due to her insistence that they make something out of themselves, doing whatever they were best at. And as far as I’m concerned, that makes her a woman worth remembering.

1. I hate March. It’s nice, then it sleets and snows, and the wind howls, then it’s warmer and sunny, but the wind is still howling and streets and parking lots are filled with slushy ponds and my car’s color is unrecognizable. Spring? I think not.

2. I get catalogs from flower and seed companies every single day, starting in November. Seriously. Some of them I’ve bought from in the past, so I can sorta understand, but some are from places I’ve never heard of. Maybe they think showing me beautiful flowers (that only grow in zones 8-10 and I’m in zone 3…) will make me think of spring and planting my garden. They could not be more wrong.

3. A confession. I’m a process knitter. I LOVE choosing a pattern, finding the perfect yarn, casting it on, doing the first three or four rows — and then I’m ready to start again. This is probably the reason that right now I have 6 “UFOs” (UnFinished Objects, in Knit-Speak) just in my living room. I won’t mention the number in my yarn/stash room. However, I believe I have enough yarn to survive the apocalypse and make scarver — excuse me, START scarves — for the other survivors.

4. I’m really, really afraid of zombies. I know, they aren’t real. And in old movies, they weren’t particularly scary (although how running people could be captured by shuffling zombies did and does baffle me…). Have you seen the AMC series “The Walking Dead?” Even if you weren’t afraid of zombies before, you will be if you watch it. I taped them, and watched the first two episodes during the day (I am prone to nightmares). They terrified me. The story was good, but the special effects were really, really amazing. They didn’t look like effects; they looked real (which is, after all, the point…). And they run (if they still have legs; otherwise they drag themselves by their rotting arms…). OMG. I couldn’t watch anymore, even by daylight. Nightmares? Still having them.

5. My dog, Kimiko, loves to play in the snow. However, she is appalled and offended if snow falls onto her. I can’t understand the difference between getting snowy because you’ve been rubbing your big furry head in it and rolling in it, and getting snowy because it’s falling on you and sticking to your outer coat, but apparently in DogLand it’s a huge difference. I’m baffled.

6. I’m a “what’s that song????” junkie, for TV background music. Whether it’s part of the background in an episode of a favorite show, and I think, just maybe, I sort of recognize it, or I don’t but I think I want to download that song; or if it’s in a car commercial or an insurance commercial — I run to the computer to Google “what’s the song in…. [fill in the blank]” and if I get the answer, I find it and download it. If I don’t get an answer, I’m totally bummed. There was an ad last summer for a TV show that came back in the fall, and it had a line about “I love you enough for the both of us” or words to that effect — but I couldn’t find it. Not nowhere, not nohow. I am STILL haunted by it. I want to listen to it 10 times a day!

7. Apparently I talk about my dog more than most parents talk about their children. What can I say? I don’t have a husband or boyfriend or children, I don’t get out much, so it’s just the two of us. And I love that song I heard on NCIS — The Dog Song. “I’m just a-walkin’ my dog…” — about a poor sad lonely girl who decided to give up on men and get herself a dog, and now she’s happy. (It could be autobiographical had I written it…)

So, that’s my seven things. I dare any blogger reading this to do your OWN Seven Random Things blog — at least seven of you! Please!

The shopping in the downtown area was mainly of the small boutique variety, but the stores were all delightful. My favorite was Mrs. Murphy’s Irish Gifts. Found a lovely Celtic Cross necklace (silver) and Trinity Knot earrings.

The falls for which the City is named isn’t far from downtown, and is the centerpiece of a large park and recreation area. Atop a building next to the ruins of the old mill (it burned, so only the outer stone walls remain) is a restaurant that has outdoor eating with a great view of the falls, which are not one big waterfall, but a series of falls that have been carving the rock since, well, probably since the last ice age ended. Past what I think was a hydroelectric plant was a still pond with a little island. There were plenty of water birds in the pond, and a lovely mallard couple swam over to get a good look at my sister and me before going about their business.

The opera house in Sioux Falls has been restored beautifully, and houses an active community theater. It is alleged to be haunted, according to the Internet and some book entries, but no one could (or would!) confirm or deny those rumors to me.

Outside the city is a wooded area through which a fast stream has dug a deep canyon, about 20 feet across. It’s a park called Devil’s canyon, and there’s a wobbly plank bridge over the canyon. A sign tells visitors that at that point, the canyon is over 60 feet deep, and that at its deepest part, they were unable to find a bottom. The canyon walls also have several small caves in them. According to Devil’s Gulch lore, Jesse James went there on his escape from robbing the Northfield bank in Minnesota. When he reached the gulch, they say, the pursuers were close behind, so he and his horse jumped the gulch. Skeptics say that even a fresh horse couldn’t have leapt that distance, and James’ horse would have been anything but fresh at that point, but believers cling to the legend. Of course there are rumors that Jesse James haunts the gulch, but seriously, why would any reasonable ghost haunt a place he visited exactly once in a long and excitement-filled life? Who knows? I didn’t see any ghosts there, nor did I feel anything but the thousands of no-see-ums determined to suck all the blood from my body.

On the way home we visited a county museum said to be haunted. It wasn’t hard to debunk the “proof” offered in a certain book about haunted places in South Dakota, and I promised the county historical society that if I included it, I would be sure to tell people that it was NOT haunted at all, but rather a great place to see what the lives of the first white settlers in the area were like.

North of there, we ran into bad weather, of course. I have yet to take a trip into South Dakota and encounter only good weather. The clouds filled the sky, the wind picked up to about 30 mph, gusting to around 60, and it started to rain (mixed with snow. In late June. Humph.) We spent that night in Fargo, skipping some of the sites we’d meant to visit (do Ma and Pa Ingalls haunt their graves? I have yet to find a graveyard that’s haunted, other than St. Patrick’s in Dickinson, and that’s a residual haunting, not an intelligent one!). So I didn’t feel bad missing them. I was cold and wet from trying to take photos in the rain and wind (that wind nearly blew me over, and I have a fair amount of ballast!), and I just wanted to go home! We had a good dinner in Fargo, spent the night, and had a pleasant drive home the next day. Leaving just one more trip — that turned into two or three, but you have to do what you have to do when you must illustrate each of the 160 or so pages of the book (even when the contract states 10 to 20 photographs…)

And now it’s January, and I’m still trying to organize and write. Wish me well. Or wish a premature burial of the book. I’m not sure which I’d prefer at this point!

Goss Opera House, Watertown SD

We set off on a very breezy day, to put it mildly. We didn’t take any back roads (sigh. but the driver picks the route) so we flew east on I-94, with limited traffic and a speed limit of 75 (and despite that high limit, people were passing us like we were at a dead stop), then turned south on I-29. After stopping for lunch at the Granite City Brewery in Fargo.

South Dakota’s first rest stop, as you’re heading south on I-29, is a wonderful place. Not just restrooms and vending machines, but real people and racks of brochures, maps, booklets, and so on, about pretty much everything in South Dakota. Without the help of the very pleasant man who welcomed us and overwhelmed us with suggestions about where we should go, we would have missed a lot. Like Watertown.

Now Watertown isn’t exactly a booming metropolis. but with a population of just over 20,000, it holds its own against larger cities. The downtown area was alive and blooming. Lots of fun little shops, places to eat, and only a few empty store fronts. But the real prize of Watertown (if you don’t count the enormous art center with it’s incredibly beautiful park, right off the highway) is the Goss Opera House. If I’m remembering correctly, it was built in 1888, and held its first performance in 1889. It’s a 3-story brick and stone building, and after being empty for many years, managed to make it onto the National Register of Historic Places, and with help from the local population, it’s gradually being restored.

The building sits on a corner, and on one street, you can enter via a coffee shop, with wonderful coffee and pastry smells wafting through the air and tempting us to sit down and enjoy a snack. But from the coffee place, you can go into the store that fills the corner. It’s filled with jewelry, knick-knacks, books, humorous items, Native American items, and more. If you turn left after entering from the coffee side, you’ll walk into a room defined more by racks than walls, where clothing and accessories are sold. From there, you can enter a restaurant that is open for dinner, although it appeared that the bar might open a little earlier. I found it interesting that the only way to get into the store was through one of the two eateries. Hmm.

As we wandered through the first area of the store (where Shari found a few things to buy!), I talked to the clerk there and told her the reason for our trip, and asked her first, if they’d be interested in stocking my book when it’s out, and second, if there were any spooky stories about the opera house (the top two floors are still being renovated; at some point, it will, they hope, be an opera house and live theater again). She gave me the card of the woman who does the buying, but said that she really couldn’t talk about whether or not there might be haunted (or haunting?) stories. My sister figured that meant that there probably were, but who really knows?

I do know that in the coffee bar area I felt welcome and comfortable. I was less comfortable in the main room of the store, but I put it down to the sheer volumer of stuff that filled the room. Then I walked into the room where the clothes were hanging. Immediately, the hair on the back of my neck rose. I don’t know, dear readers, if you’re aware of the effects of electro-magnetic fields on humans. EMF can come from any electrical device, from your refrigerator to a computer, or from poorly grounded wires. And the effect can be that rising hair, feelings of paranoia, nausea, and headaches (there’s a copper pipe over my laundry area that has a ridiculously high EMF level, probably it’s a conduit for wiring, but I know that I always feel like I’m being watched when I do laundry. Now I know it’s just the high EMF, so I’m not as nervous about it). I didn’t see anything in that room that could be giving off EMF. Nada. I passed rather rapidly from the first feeling, that feeling of being watched, to a headache and a growing nausea. I walked across the room and stood by the large window in the sunshine, and felt a little better. But I didn’t stay inside to wait while Shari paid for her purchases; I went outside and waited on the sidewalk. Haunting? Natural EMF? I don’t know. I do know that I tend to be overly sensitive to both, but I couldn’t tell you what caused that feeling. Shari and the clerk were both oblivious to it. Hmmm.

Our next destination in Watertown was the Mellette house. It was built in the early 1880s by Arthur Calvin Mellette (up until then, the family had lived in a tent next to a nearby lake, then in the apartment over a store Mellette owned; imagine Mrs. Mellette’s delight in having this huge house for the couple and their four growing boys!). Mellette was the last governor of Dakota Territory, appointed by his old friend, President Benjamin Harrison, then in 1889, was elected the first governor of South Dakota. He served two terms before retiring, in part for health reasons. While he traveled the territory mainly by train, Mrs. Mellette and the boys stayed in the house. It’s a large beautiful brick and wood house, with gorgeous woodwork in the interior. Built on Prospect Hill, Watertown’s highest point, its outstanding feature is a three-story tower, in which a spiral staircase leads you to a platform at the top, where you can see about 3 miles in every direction. I started up the stairs, gripping the beautiful wood railing, but the spiral and the height overcame me, and I let Shari go up to see what she could see, while I stayed at the bottom of the stairs, enjoying the sunlight that came through the round stained glass window in the tower’s front side.

Outside, lilacs were blooming, birds were singing, and it seemed like a wonderful place to be. Honestly, I could have spent the night there (no, you can’t spend a night in the Mellette house; it’s a museum with guided tours, sadly). The house doesn’t seem to be haunted at all, although it had fallen into almost irredeemable ruin over the years since the Mellette’s had left it behind. The County and State Historical Society held many fundraisers and applied for grants left and right, and the house is now restored to its former glory. There is a rumor that frightens the children of Watertown (or at least, used to, according to our tour guide who grew up in Watertown); it’s said that during the unoccupied years, a “bum” (their word; I’d say homeless man) got into the house one night and hanged himself in the tower. There’s no documentation for the story, in newspapers or books, so it’s probably one of those things that children make up about the spooky decrepit house on a corner in any town. The house still seems to belong to Margaret Mellette, and she wants it clean, shiny, and filled with happy visitors. And that’s just what it is.

Stay tuned for part two of Trip 2! And Trip 3 (the final trip, I hope…) will happen in a couple of weeks, as I write along.