James Best – The Shopkeeper
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What excites you most about your book’s topic? Why did you choose it?
Author: The Old West represents a new beginning in a fresh place away from home. Steve Dancy was disappointed with his life in New York City, and the West offered him a new start. Gunplay dominates Westerns, but I believe the overriding appeal of this genre is a frontier with no rules, no fences, and no referees.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: How long did the book take you from start to finish?
Author: I wrote the first draft rather quickly, probably in about four months. Research and revisions took another six months. With another couple of months responding to editing and proofreading, I have about a year invested in The Shopkeeper.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What aspect of writing the book did you find particularly challenging?
Author: For me, dialogue comes easy. The hard part is description. I find it difficult to describe a scene so it doesn’t interfere with the progress of the story. This is where I spend the most time in revisions.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What surprised you the most about the book writing process?
Author: How it’s never done. When I think I’ve got it just right, I print it out and find all kinds of things to change. I relate writing to restoring an antique car. There’s always another nook or cranny that needs to be polished.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What do you hope your readers will gain from reading your book?
Author: First and foremost, I hope they enjoy the story. I also hope the reader gets a better grasp of life in the Old West. Not everyone was a cowboy. Miners, politicians, shopkeepers, bankers, teachers, and many other professions inhabited frontier America.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What projects are you currently working on?
Author: I’m working on another Steve Dancy story that is tentatively titled Murder at Thumb Butte. I’ll also publish Tempest at Dawn in late 2009. This is a different type of historical novel. It tells the story of the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: Is writing your sole career? If not, what else do you do?
Author: I consult in the travel industry. Since I travel to Boston regularly, I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms. I write in the evenings because it relaxes me and there is nothing else I’d rather do.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: Did you do any research for your books, or did you write from experience?
Author: My books are researched extensively. I view Westerns as another form of the historical novel, and as such, there is an obligation to be factually correct. I also find I must walk the ground of my stories. Being there, allows me to take the reader there.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: How did you come up with your title?
Author: The Shopkeeper was originally a short story that I decided to expand into a novel. In the short story, the title was purposely misleading. Even though the background of the propagandist becomes clear early in the book, I retained the title because I thought it signaled the reader that this was a different type of Western.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What books have influenced you the most?
Author: The Virginian by Owen Wister and Roughing It by Mark Twain. Both books are about the Old West by authors that actually experienced it.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What inspired you to create a work of fiction?
Author: My first book was The Digital Organization. Previously I wrote a column for a computer industry magazine and I wanted to write a book about how to manage technologists. The publishing cycle was so long that the book was obsolete by the time it hit the bookstores. At the time, I swore that if I ever wrote another book, it would be one with a very long shelf-life. The great thing about historical novels is that they never become dated.
FASCINATING AUTHORS: What can we look forward to in your next book?
Author: The sequel to The Shopkeeper is Leadville and it’s available now. Any character I didn’t kill off in The Shopkeeper returns in Leadville. I like these people and they’re now part of my life. So … they’ll all return in Murder at Thumb Butte.
To learn more about the book and Author, please visit: http://www.jamesdbest.com/
