If my second book takes as long as the first I’ll be 129 when it’s published. I’m setting a launch date.

Once This River Ran Clear began as a two page character sketch in a college creative writing class. When I retired in 2005 I thought it was time to work that two page study into a book. Ten years later I started writing. Six years and thirty drafts after that, the book was born, screaming for release from the womb. In case you’re wondering, Um Um is one of the survivors. He’d have to be since he’s the one telling the story.

I’m misleading you about the number of drafts, of course.  It was more like fifty.

I’m also misleading you about the gestation period. In a sense the book was born in my youth. I grew up on Lake Pepin, the widest part of the Mississippi River, in Lake City, Minnesota. We fished a lot. We thought the walleyes from the Wisconsin side tasted better than Minnesota fish, so we’d motor across the river and start trolling. We were careful to avoid the fish nets which were tended by a gnarly old man. He looked robust enough to stand out on the frozen lake in winter to catch one walleye. Seventy years later he became Urs, a lonesome man who netted fish and sold them to a restaurant in a nearby small town, a man who was destined to be run over by progress (read “capitalism”), which was beginning to wreak havoc around 1950. I guessed at that last part.

So I’m not much of a writer. But I have written a few things: a dozen plays, designed for huge casts of young actors to present to family audiences; a couple silly melodramas and a vampire spoof, meant to be funny but mostly meant to place me and my wicked laugh in the villain’s role; newspaper articles that are witty or snarky, depending on your interpretation; about 15 hour-long sets of songs and scenes meant to make people laugh or cry about Minnesota history; and of course this one novel, which will spawn a sequel (more likely a prequel) in 2076. Since that will be America’s tricentennial year, it should have a patriotic flavor, which, to me, means it should advocate for kindness to all people and the elimination of nukes and guns.

I’m told this blog will help sell some books. I doubt it. What it might do, though, is get me writing about some of my favorite things, such as gardening, whole food plant based cooking, pacifism, and exploring southern Utah’s canyons.