Over the last seven years I have been writing, what I consider to be, a collection of love letters.  An epistolary which uses the epistle format at times, but primarily exists as a collection of novels revolving around a family of characters who learn to live and breathe, fight and die not only for the sake of the world, but for the sake of each other. Because in the end, each other is all we have. 

But let’s not take the big swing too early. My friend John Hornor Jacobs rightly attests that the sign of a great writer is not found in the overwhelming application of power, but rather in a writer’s ability to apply restraint to power. I admit, this is one of my great challenges as a writer, having to take great precaution, so as to not weary the reader too fast or too early in a story. Every good writer, in my experience, feels within themselves the longing to write sentences and passages and entire books which can do more than move a reader, but move the world residing within the reader. No single book can move all the world by itself, but, when you can move the world living inside enough readers, well, that proves to be a lever that the world is required to contend with. Wrestle. Measure itself against. No single writer can hold province over all the Earth, but if the writer manages to capture enough eyes with stories that enchant the hearts connected to those eyes, we stop talking about a book as fiction and we start talking about it as force. 

Amid the Vastness of All Else is a love letter, a saga, a mutt of pulpy genres, a theology of Other, an argument, a reformation, a dream. 

That’s the big swing I said I wouldn’t take. Sorry, John. To try and make up for the inevitable big swings I will be taking in this piece, I have decided to provide “intensity breaks” with fun pictures featuring my dog Howard. 

(Example: “Howard is a Siberian Husky, and at times, is a very mouthy, dramatic-ass bitch.) 

The most common question I get as a writer is, “Why did you write a Western series?” and while people ask the question in good faith, there is a hint of “Seems like a bad idea,” in their voice. The genre is old, all worn-out with tropes and cliché which feed a mendicant population of white, male readers whose fathers, and grandfathers, grew-up reading about a West that never was. This terminal nostalgia is well known to us. A frontier tamed by strong, silent and lonely men, riding tireless steeds, putting right the ills of every big, little pioneer town, holding caricature minorities, or worse, places which made invisible the broad spectrum of humanity. All the heroes who make virtues of their Honor/Shame flaws, perpetuating one of the great American lies of how the West was won. In perpetuating that lie over generations, the Western genre doomed itself to the vast readership who are not White men, but who love the setting. All of its intrinsic potential, all its romance, all its dash and élan polluted by the ham and corn of radio serials, black and white screens big and small, and yes, even by the Technicolor glory of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. All of the work poured into the genre made malignant by an American Character which saves all of its shame within the period and kills all of its glory.

There are of course exceptions to this personal position of the genre, but generally, I believe it to be a fair assessment. When I decided to start writing novels, I was deeply inspired by Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and, being a Texas son, I felt it within myself to say something within the genre that I was not hearing. The writers who I most admire have been heralds of their time, some of them prophets: James Baldwin, John Steinbeck, Flannery O’Conner, and in my time in learning my voice and the craft itself, I knew that I wanted to say something worth hearing. I wanted to show people not the historical West, but a mythological West spilling over with every watery shape of human identity. Because I love a dark, fantasy frontier filled with secret cults, mountain-hidden vampire kingdoms, and southern aristocrat werewolf packs, with love stories and action and adventure and, to steal from Tennyson, life piled on life. I wanted to populate those lush frontier landscapes with the beauty of Texas dawns and take readers across all the illimitable hues of the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Missouri; transport them to the Astolat Mountain Range, a place that has never been real, but is the most vividly true landscape my imagination has ever known. I wanted to build characters who previously had been underserved in the genre. And there have been incredible strides in representation in the genre by other writers: Victor LaValle, Molly Tanzer, John Hornor Jacobs, Josh Rountree, Jo Kaplan, K.C. Griffant, Stephen Graham Jones. And it’s a fact that Amid the Vastness of All Else, what I see as my primary contribution to the Western tradition, could have been made by those others. And had it been so, well, they might have been better. But certainly they wouldn’t have been mine.

(Feels like we needed a Howard break right about now. Seriously, this guy)

The problems of the genre aside, the purpose of the saga was to create a place that felt more true than it could possibly be real. Which comes to the real heart of the matter: if I was writing a love letter, who, then, was its recipient? 

Stephen King often talks about writing for the Constant Reader, that person inside your head for whom you are building the narrative. The person who the writer believes will feel most attuned to the themes and plot and characters. The object at which the book’s subject is directed. 

If you were wondering when I was going to take the next big swing, well, here we are. Vulnerability time. But first…

(Okay, he was a puppy in this one. And I felt like we, as a community, needed that before this next section, because it’s a doosie.)

Amid the Vastness of All Else is an attempt at reformation; more treatise than angler fish, but an angler fish all the same. I wanted to draw in readers who looked like me, who still think the way I was raised to intolerantly think about race and gender, justice and identity. The saga is a honey pot trap for toxic men who live beneath a patriarchal system that promises primacy at the expense of a greater masculine beauty. These are books written with a Virgil-like understanding of patriarchy, because I have (and still do) benefit from patriarchal systems which have lorded over our human population since the genesis of society. The novels begin as standard-fair Western ideas, which then slowly escalate into an ideology that espouses a truth I hold dear: The very best thing a man with power can do is give it away, even when it comes at the cost of himself.

There is a particular section from the saga that, and again, this is me being vulnerable, that I say to myself each and every time I sit down to write. It is a part of a kind of ritual I use to dive down into the wellspring of my heart. Center my voice on what matters. The line proved to be the perfect summation of the saga, and how the saga got its name -  

“...Annie followed the trembling line of Carson’s arm. The fingers ruined by his enemies were outstretched, as if he were trying to grasp the glowing orb set high above them in a sky full of stars. 

The moon, though full, seemed such a small thing amid the vastness of all else. But the moon shined. It shined down to color everything in a tangible radiance Annie had never seen before. 

That light sublime.”

I have, the whole sum of my writer life, been trying to find the very best way to express the sublimity I found when I all at once realized who I was versus who I could be. The pure, unassailable liberty which is only found when a man decides that he might all at once be something and then, in only the infinity of a single moment of choice, become something else entirely. Amid the Vastness of All Else is about people coming to those fulcrum moments and, ultimately, deciding the fate of their lives by how they respond to that conversion opportunity. Not always for good, sometimes for evil, but always at a cost and nothing about the choice guaranteed. But the reaching is worth the effort, and the vision of the moon worth the cost. 

This saga attempts to do more than give a reader passage to another time, another place. It strives to do more than just the all-together-important work of giving vision to the under-represented populations who are too rarely given their due in the narrative sunlight of the genre. Amid the Vastness of All Else seeks to make a witness of those who love the Western, as their fathers and their fathers before them did, but have not yet understood that it is a better genre when it is shared with the people unlike them. Those were the hearts of the readers I wanted to touch, the worlds within those readers I wanted to move; that I might, with outstretched fingers, touch a little portion of the unfair world, pushing it closer to the dream it can be. 

And all of that is much too long of an answer for those who ask, “So why did you write a Western series?”

Which is why, when they ask me that question in person, I simply say some variation on, “Because I love the genre, and people, too.” That is what makes Amid the Vastness of All Else the multitude of the things it became: a love letter, a saga, a mutt of pulpy genres, a theology of Other, an argument, a reformation, a dream.

Amid the Vastness of All Else is available now in eBook and paperback everywhere books are sold, including our direct shop.