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A Christmas invitation
There was no reason Ronin couldn’t find his way out of Carson City for the holidays. No physical constraint was keeping him. No emotional attachment either, though there was the annual expectation he’d attend services at the Indian school south of town. He’d been a part of the American Gospel Mission’s “Christmas supper and show,” as he put it, since 1877, when he first came to Nevada’s Eagle Valley, fresh out of employment with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. A couple of missteps and they had severed their relationship with the handsome ex-preacher. He’d gotten involved with a Spiritualist client—the beautiful and shapely Madame Bovary, a pseudonym it turned out, taken from a French novel he never read. He didn’t know her real name. The work since—here a bad guy, there a bad guy, a few more bad guys and gals in-between—had been surprisingly enjoyable. He had nothing else to do. So when the mission called, via the usual holiday card and Christmas gift—a fruitcake, of all things, but it was better than a Bible he’d never pick up or let alone read—the gunfighter hesitated. He’d attempted to back away from the Presbyterian woman’s mission school a couple of years ago. Their relationship had changed—it needed to. He had no regrets, and she’d gotten married to a decent Mormon man who’d made a name for himself in eastern Nevada, when Ronin and an Ormsby County deputy hunted a short son of a bitch who’d killed a woman he’d loved in Virginia City, not that anyone knew of the relationship between Ronin and the ball-gazing twin, an eye-catching fortune teller also. He held an attraction to spiritually-minded women, though it bothered him to say so. He’d abandoned the rigid orthodoxy of the Episcopal Church in 1873—the year the Colt Peacemaker was made—leaving a log-bound Wichita church in the less capable hands of those who wanted it—a tired-eyed merchant, his ignorant wife, an angry town constable and a pack of pigeon-minded misfits and miscreants who couldn’t tell the holy story from their own, not that the church saw things that way. They figured he was simply finished. And he was, though he had some feelings about that. The thing with the women crept up on him, like suppressed desires often do. Read more…
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The Presbyterian church
The old door shook. It wasn’t his intent to harm anything. Fact is, the once-reverend W. W. Ronin wouldn’t think of making light of the buildings that had given him succor over the years—initially in Greensboro, Pennsylvania where he was in training, and later in Wichita, Kansas as the second rector of the St. John’s Episcopal Church, when it was still made out of logs and situated between the confluence of two sometimes over-flowing rivers. There was still something sacred about religious places, even if he didn’t embrace the faith they sometimes contained. The church wasn’t just about “the people,” as he used to say while preaching, one hand on the lectionary, the other searching for a Bible in the event his people asked an unexpected question or two over the meal that many times followed services. Church was the building, too, though he didn’t understand that at the time. He lifted his knee up to his chest and pushed again, the bottom of his foot—the ball, actually, not the heel as it dissipated too much force to use his boot that way—and the old wooden doors, crafted from pine planks harvested in the Sierra mountains, just up the Kings Canyon toll road he figured not that it mattered, splintered into pieces like the old man’s leg caught under the wheel of an errant coach from Benton’s Livery on Carson Street last week. The door swung back and forth, its lock shattered, shards of it rolling lifelessly across the entry way of the building, erected in 1861, before Nevada was even a state. Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain’s) brother, Orion and his wife Molly attended there, though Clemens was now dead, having died a year ago, about the same time he began to wonder if there was anything real at all to the Protestant convictions he once proffered as an Episcopal priest on the American frontier. He dumped the shorter of his two Colt handguns over the back of his holster, until it was level, and then slowly extended it forward into the midnight darkness of Nevada’s oldest sanctuary, as long as you didn’t count the Mormon meeting place in Genoa, or the Catholic church which was actually finished before the Presbyterians were, though the Calvinists had started earlier but ran out of money. Read more…
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Gregg Townsley thumbing fast in Watkins,CO
I’d love to think that my performance in this video of a World Fast Draw championship in Watkins, Colorado, was fast. Fact is, world-class shooters–of which I am not–regularly draw and fire in under 3/10s of a second. I only occasionally get there. But the video shows some of the understanding I have, and the research I do, when writing the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns. I own the weapon or have fired it. I’ve been to the mountain, lake or pass I’m writing about. I’ve thrown the kick, or punched the punch, or shared that kind of dialogue in a real church setting. I’m not boasting, I’m just saying. If you’re going to spend your hard-earned dollars on fiction of any sort–historical fiction included, which is what I like to write–do it on a book you can enjoy and with an author you can trust. Thank you for considering some of mine. Read more…
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About the Author
Gregg Edwards Townsley is a reflective, free-thinking ex-pastor, martial artist, writer and Western Fast Draw enthusiast living in St. Helens, Oregon. No stranger to the places his Western characters inhabit–Reno, Carson City, Virginia City and Lake Tahoe–he raised his children in northern Nevada, from 1984 through 1993, while serving as pastor and head of staff of the First Presbyterian Church in Carson City. Prior to living in Nevada, he made his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Penns Grove, New Jersey, “a veritable fountain,” he says, of people and places he likes to visit in his Tommy Valentine, PI series of short stories. Townsley is a member of the Western Writers of America. His wife, Nancy, is also a writer and the managing editor of the Hillsboro Tribune and Forest Grove News Times. Read more…
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W. W. Ronin video
I’ve got to tell you, my friend Bill Fogle is a peach of a guy. I was his youth pastor many, many moons ago at a small church in Pennsylvania whose future had been bisected by a busy four-lane north and south highway. The highway is probably bigger by now, given that it feeds the Valley Forge National Historic Park. I’m sure the Port Kennedy Presbyterian Church is not. Geography has a way of limiting growth. As the community goes, generally so do the organizations and institutions in it. But Bill Fogle has hung in there, or his affection for me anyway. I hadn’t seen the boy in more than 40 years–I don’t want to count them, I’m sure it would be too painful. But there he was, a friend of a friend on Facebook–all bubbly and handsome, an accomplished writer, artist and videographer. I wrote him and he remembered me. The rest is, well, a delightful long-distance relationship that, I hope, will result in even more poignant memories than his sitting at my young ministerial feet assuming that I had something to say. I should note too that the above video is his work. Produced when there were just three books in the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns–there are five now, four you can buy and many more on the way–Bill volunteered to make it. It is a testimony of our friendship, I guess, and a window into the soul of a very beautiful man. It’s a good introduction, too, to what I’m trying to do with historical fiction in the W. W. Ronin series of Westerns, set in and about Nevada at the close of the 19th century. There are six of them now, available with my other books and short stories, HERE. Bill, please hear once more my deep and abiding appreciation. I love being your friend. And while we’re at it, here’s a LINK to Bill Fogle’s website. It’s beautiful, too. Read more…
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Writing place-based fiction
Author Katie Schultz has some interesting thoughts about writing “place-based fiction” in an energetic blog called “The Writing Life.” I stumbled on them, and her, while wondering if there were other people who enjoyed setting their fictional stories in actual places. Clearly, of course, there are. Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Steinbeck should have come immediately to mind, Faulkner too as these writers were a staple in my middle and high school years. (I confess a fondness for pulpier novels nowadays, particularly Florida fiction writers Carl Hiaasen, Randy White and (gulp) Tim Dorsey, but that’s another post.) It’s just that I get so excited at times writing about people’s actual stories and places in the context of my make-believe ones that it never occurs to me that doing so is “burnt-over ground,” so to speak. Schultz, who is a mentor to writers far and wide, describes her process simply. She buys maps, borrows library books, then pins what she’s learned about a particular place on butcher paper before actually visiting. At least that’s my take of the February 2011 piece I found while Google-searching the words “place-based fiction.” Her approach initially sounded sort of old-school, given what’s available on-line. I’d have no more idea where to buy a map than a home-made candy bar nowadays, though I do have a personal librarian who is an absolute peach in getting me what I need for W. W. Ronin’s next adventure. The more I thought about it however, the more I realized I was doing nearly the same thing when writing W. W. Ronin Westerns. My historical fiction books–the Ronin series of Westerns–are set in northern Nevada. And each of them is the benefit of hundreds of dollars of books, many of them out of print, personal visits and interviews, too. The first three books put me on a four-wheeler in the mountains above Carson City in order to get a good look at what used to be the old Bigler Toll Road, from Carson City to Lake Tahoe. A couple of days later, I tipped a man $20 to take a twenty-minute peek at the supposedly haunted remains of an old social club in Virginia City. More so, I’m the only person I know who has ever been in the basement of Bowers Mansion. All in a day’s work, so to speak. I’m working on the sixth and seventh in the series now. The fifth is with my editor, who is crazy enough to actually read my books in the raw. She sleeps with me, too. I’m that lucky. Read more…