Keith McCafferty

Check out this episode of “Remote. No Pressure. Fly Fishing  Podcast,” which I did with host Jeff Troutman:

//directory.libsyn.com/episode/index/show/remotenopressure/id/12487223

1. Have you always wanted to be a writer?

         

I think those of us who want to be writers started as avid readers.  I was fascinated by snakes growing up in the Appalachian hills, and it occurred to me at a very early age that adults didn’t know much about them, that they were prejudiced because of their ignorance.  My grandmother was steeped in superstitions.  She would place towels under the doors in her house so my snakes couldn’t slither  in and would say things like, “For pity’s sakes, child, I see’d that milk snake suck the breath from a baby.”  I realized that the only way I could learn was to teach myself how to read, which I did with my mother’s help at about four years old.  That was beginning of the journey.  Later, I was enthralled by a volume of The Complete Sherlock Homes, which was so heavy it put a dent in my chest, and later still by Jim Corbett’s tales of man-eating tigers in India.  I knew then that I not only wanted to lead a life of adventure, but to write about it, and by my teens I knew exactly what kind of a writer I wanted to be, and exactly whose job I wanted.  My hero was Al McClane, the fishing editor of Field & Stream magazine, who was deliciously rumored to be a cold war spy.  He had a beautiful daughter about my age, and my goal in life was to impress him, to marry his daughter and ultimately to take his place as the fishing editor.  I did none of these things but I came close in the professional sense; I wrote more than a thousand articles for the magazine and was even a finalist for two National Magazine Awards for my work.  The road from magazine writing to being a novelist was long, but I was on my way.

 

2. What do you enjoy most about writing in a contemporary Western setting, as opposed to a “classic” one?

 

The one-word answer is the characters. One of the first things that struck me upon moving to Montana, some thirty-odd years ago now, was its diversity and the openness and collective humor of the people.  In the East, it seemed, people tended more to stay within their socio-econominc/philosophicale/religious/political and age classes.  But in the changing West, people from all walks of life walked together, talked together, hunted and fished together, shot pool over the long winters together. As the big old-family landholding broke apart and were sold in twenty acre allotments for second homes, as the economy changed from timber, mining and agriculture to tourism and fishing, with some counties such as my fictional Hyalite County running on money generated by trout slime, people of all different stripes were thrown together.  You might have a state senator living in a riverside log mansion living next door to barista renting a rundown cabin, next to a medical marijuana grower, next to a fishing guide, next to a movie star.  And they all know each other and are in a sense equal inhabitants of the land.

This West contrasts with the Old West of Zane Grey and Louis Lamoure, two great writers writing a West that maybe never was.  It also contrasts with current literature of the Rockies, which champions iconic loner lawmen in enormous empty counties — the admirable fiction of Craig Johnson and C.J. Box.  Now their novels are relevant in the sense that their setting do still exist, especially in Wyoming,  but the clock is ticking down on the wide open West and it is in a process of flux.  My protagonist, Sean Stranahan, is a transplanted Easterner because I wanted him to observe this dynamic, and to see the country with fresh eyes that aren’t always comparing his vision with a disappearing ideal.

 

3. Crazy Mountain Kiss is the fourth book in the Stranahan series. How would you say that Sean has changed and grown the most since the first book?

 

When this series started, Sean Stranahan was a lost man recovering from divorce and searching for place to call home. He moved west because his father had always wanted to take him west to fish and had died before they could make that trip, and he didn’t much care what happened to him just as long as something happened. Which did, with a knock at the door, as soon as he put his shingle up — Blue Ribbon Watercolors, and, in discreet script he hoped nobody would notice, Private Investigations). As the sheriff, Martha Ettinger, put it, he was one of those people who would step into shit even if there was only one horse in the pasture. He was also notably sane, the center of a cast of eccentrics.

Maybe too sane. He changed or, rather, Montana changed him, for the better I hope, and he found that in blue ribbon rivers and his relationships he had found not only a home, but a reason to live. Like Martha, he is a lonely heart not without lovers, and they circle each other, one’s shadow always upon the other no matter whose arms they are in– what could have been, what should have been, if the stars had only known better. They danced in the dark in The Gray Ghost Murders, danced apart in Dead Man’s Fancy. In Crazy Mountain Kiss . . . but no, I won’t give it away.

One has to be careful when pairing characters up in plot driven novels. It’s not so much that married people are boring, but that the other half is hanging around and has to be dealt with. If he or she is not a part of the story, they slow it down. It’s the same reason you don’t want your main character to have a dog, because you’re always dealing with the dog. I broke that rule, because there isn’t a man in Montana, a single man anyway, who doesn’t have a dog. If you don’t have a dog, who’s there to talk to? And now I’m paying the price, constantly inserting little reminders into parenthesis — (WHERE’S THE DAMNED DOG???).

I have a few readers who complain that Sean doesn’t fish as much as he used to. But then these are not fly fishing novels so much as novels that have a little fly fishing in them — NPR’s Cherie Newman says I’ve invented a genre, fly fishing noir — and sometimes Sean just has more important things to do than wave a rod. But don’t worry. He will always return to the river, for it is his reflection in the face of water that reminds him of who he was, who he is, and in its distortion, who he will be. Hopefully, some day, with Martha.

 

4. There’s a thread in Crazy Mountain Kiss that involves a different kind of “Mile High Club.” What gave you the idea for that?

 

Several years ago I helped host a dinner party in Key West (my part was to cook antelope steaks I’d brought from Montana) and was having a drink with the tarpon fishing guide Simon Becker, who told the story of the infamous Key West mile high club, called “Fly Key West,” a service which offered “quickie” flights for couples who paid up to $350 to be flown around the island while they cavorted in a Piper Cub. The service included souvenir sheets and the option of having their couplings recorded on a voyeur cam (“By Request Only”), the business coming to an abrupt end in 2001 when a couple in their sixties, posing as lovers, high-jacked the plane to fly them to Cuba. A struggle ensued with the pilot, who crashed the plane in the Florida Straits; the plane sank, the pilot alone survived to tell the story.

Only in Key West, I thought at the time, but then thought, “Why not Montana?” Certainly there had to be sex clubs in Montana, though as a happily married man I had to look them up. I looked them up — there were plenty. Trade the plane for a forest cabin, up the elevation and viola — “The Mile and Half High Club.” It gave me the opportunity to write some quirky but sympathetic characters and is true to the nature of the area, which has never been at a loss for avenues of sexual escape. The police in Bozeman, my home town, recorded the names of some 600 local and transient prostitutes during just one calendar year in the 1880s, this in a town that started that decade with roughly a thousand people. Most were men, obviously, and evidently starved ones at that!

 

5. You’ve undoubtedly influenced other writes with your work, particularly Western writers. What advice would you give to aspiring authors?

 

To do the work.  East, West, South, it doesn’t matter where you’re from.  This is easy to say, but ninety percent of success is showing up, as Woody Allen and lot of other people have said before.  Just write the novels.  Muddle your way through that 250 pages in the middle where most of the competition jumps ship, and then rewrite it until it’s as good as you’re going to get it.  If I have learned anything traveling around the country and meeting other authors, it’s that those who have success, by which I mean they are working authors who make a living putting words together, it’s that they have achieved their status somewhere between books ten and twenty.  So it’s never too early to start.  Don’t set out to write the great American novel, and then rewrite it half your life; write a lot of books until they start sticking to the wall.

I do think younger writers have lost sight of this a little bit. I have been a panelist and presenter at many writing seminars and conferences, and it seems that the emphasis is more on the publishing end of the business than the writing aspect of it.  But to get house published, as opposed to self-publishing, the work has to stand first.  Tara Singh, a very wise editor I worked with at Viking/Penguin, said that writers are always telling her how many Twitter followers they have, as if that should be what convinces her to accept their book.  It isn’t.

And it’s okay to start small.  You can learn more as newspaper reporter in three months than you might as a masters candidate in an MFA program.  Write in different mediums — newspaper, magazine, poetry, blog, whatever.  They feed off each other to make you a better writer. I know I’m a better novelist for being a magazine writer (I know how to meet deadlines, for example), and being a novelist has made me a more fluid and better magazine writer.

Last, give yourself room to surprise yourself.  I was a quote “literary writer” in the magazine world, someone who wrote thoughtfully and elegantly about his family.  I thought that was my strength.  But essays are driven by the declarative sentence, whereas novels are driven by character and dialogue almost entirely.  Humor, character and dialogue came naturally to me; they were my real strengths and I’d never have guessed it.    It only  took me thirty years to find that out.

 

6. What comes next for you?

 

In the immediate future, I’m traveling to Cuba to fish.  One of the great perks of keeping my hand in the magazine world is travel.  I could do more if I had the time.  Writing novels is a be-careful-what-you-wish-for profession.  Crazy Mountain Kiss, my fourth novel in the Sean Stranahan series comes out in early June and I am contracted for two more, which basically means I work too much and fish too little.  I do still enjoy the characters. I wrote my first novel, “The Royal Wulff Murders,” partly to amuse myself, and aimed to surround myself with characters I’d like to hang out with.  I’m thankful that I will have more time to do just that.  I’ve also been working on a novel about children growing up in Appalachia, though that one’s sleeping the subconscious for the time being.

This is strange business.  When I was a crime/nightside reporter, I had my finger on the pulse of the city, knew everyone, could tell you all the back stories.  A story for a newspaper took two hours.  Then I became a magazine writer, taking a big step away from interactions with my fellow human beings.  And a story took two days or two weeks.  Still, not long enough to become obsessed.  Then I became a novelist, that most isolating of all the writing professions, where you sit with a cat on your lap (or I do), summoning lies from the ether, and having a full year to go mad about something that in a sense isn’t even real.  I’m not altogether sure that’s healthy, but I wouldn’t change my fortune for a round-tip ticket to the best trout stream in New Zealand.

 

–Thanks to Kristin Centorcelli and Publisher’s Weekly for allowing me some space in their excellent publication.  I’m honored.  Keith McCafferty

Note: Below is an excerpt of the blog I recently wrote for Printasia, the online bookstore. Be sure to follow the link to read it in its entirety.

This afternoon, while sitting on a folding chair on a footbridge along the Drinking Horse Mountain Trail, I wrote “The End” to my fourth novel in the Sean Stranahan detective series.  I’ve not yet settled on a title, though the setting is Montana’s Crazy Mountains and it’s hard to pass up using the word.  Lost in the Crazies, Deep In The Crazies, A Killing In The Crazies, any — the most apt would be the first, for I certainly was lost for a long time writing it. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating, that writing a novel is like setting sail for a distant land. You can see as far as the horizon, and that will get you a few chapters in, and at a certain point you’ll smell land or a shorebird will perch on your mast, and you’ll be able to see the end and work toward it with a sense of excitement — say over the novel’s last four chapters. It’s those 250 or so pages in between when you’re lost at sea, sharks circling, and no stars to take a bearing, that separate those who wish to write novels from those who actually do.  READ THE REST HERE

 

I thought some might be interested in seeing video of my event with Nevada Barr at the Poisoned Pen.  She is quite a performer and I, well, I’m the one wearing the reindeer socks! It was thoroughly enjoyable, and I’d like to thank Nevada for her generous invitation to share the stage, as well as Poisoned Pen owner Barbara Peters for putting me up at her lovely home in Scottsdale. Independent bookstore owners such as Barbara are the true knights in shining armor for struggling and best-selling authors alike.  

See the video here:
 
http://new.livestream.com/poisonedpen/nevadabarr-keithmccafferty

In another piece of news, signed first editions of my books, complete with postcard/bookmark, are now available at VJ Books (503-750-5310). 

 

They tell you the second book is the hardest. You have all your life to write the first.  Nobody expects anything to come of it, there’s no pressure but what you apply to yourself. And the third, well, you’ve done it twice, you can do it again.  But the second book, especially if your first novel came with a two book contract and a deadline, well that’s a different story.

 

Dominick Abel, my literary agent, explained my predicament at our first meeting by putting his forefinger to his temple and cocking his thumb.
“Tick, tick, tick,” he said, and added, “I don’t envy you.”

 

At the time I was trying to write The Gray Ghost Murders, my second novel in the Sean Stanching fly fishing detective series, set in Montana’s Madison Valley.  The first, The Royal Wulff Murders, set a high bar, having received a red star review from Publisher’s Weekly and having been chosen by both the Mystery Guild and the Book of the Month Club.  And Dominick was right, the publisher of Penguin Press was expecting something new from me and I was feeling the pressure. So far, my sheriff, Martha Ettinger, had managed to unearth the bodies of two older men, hence the title, from the slopes of a mountain called the Sphinx; now my problem was getting Stranahan involved and figuring out how and why my gray ghosts had gotten buried there in the first place.

 

As a writer I’m what you call a muddler througher as opposed to an outliner.  I start with a scene, I write the first line, the second is born of the first, and so the story develops.  It’s like setting sail, you can see to the horizon, then you’re lost at sea.  Finally you smell land, and you exhale the breath you didn’t know you’d been holding the past few months when your inclination had been to jump overboard into the teeth of the sharks. As a way of writing a plot driven novel, this is not a method I recommend, but it seems to be the only way I can work.

 

Still, I was muddling along admirably, despite the invisible gun to my head, when the birds appeared.  To make a long story quite short (you’ll have to read the Author’s Note at the end of The Gray Ghost Murders for the full tale), I took over the rearing of four baby Brewer’s blackbirds that had been transplanted, together with the spruce tree their parents had selected for a nest, some 140 miles on a flatbed trailer.  Finding the transplanted nestlings I called the local wild bird rescue person, who told me to dispense with formalities and just call her Captain Marvel.  I asked Captain Marvel if she would take on the rearing of the little darlings — after all, I thought naively, this is what such people do.  Captain Marvel said, “Honey, that’s how we all start.”

 

From that point forward, The Gray Ghost Murders emerged in fifteen minute bursts, for baby birds must be fed every quarter hour.  It was sink or swim, not to belabor the ocean analogy, and the birds taught me to swim. Some three months later my blackbirds, fully feathered and boldly iridescent, migrated south.  In another week, I completed the book.  Yes, I thought, the plot worked. All that was left to do was hike up to Sphinx Mountain, which I hadn’t climbed in 25 years, to make sure the country in the novel matched the country of the gods.  The week before, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks had tranquilized several grizzly bears in the area, taken their blood, administered other tests and released them, putting them in a bad mood when they saw humans forever after. I had visions of one sinking his teeth into my own (slightly?) graying hair and wondered if the newspaper story of my death would help sales of the novel.

 

A mauling may not have, for if it’s true that the second novel is the hardest to write, it’s equally true it’s the hardest sell. Eventually, Oprah’s Book Club resurrected interest by selecting it as “One of Five New Mysteries We Can’t Put Down,” and today many readers have told me it’s their favorite in the series.  I would meet my personal Waterloo trying to write the third novel, but then that’s another story for another day.

A few years ago, a fellow novelist gave me a piece of advice I didn’t give a lot of credence to at the time, having only started “The Royal Wulff Murders” and not really knowing what lay in store when the initial flush of excitement wore off. “I learned that if I wanted to write books the first thing I had to do was stop smoking dope.”

As a child of the sixties I have to take the fifth when asked about partaking banned substances, but at the current stage of my life the advice seemed irrelevant.  Of course he didn’t mean it literally — well, he did, but what he was getting at it was this:  You need a clear head. A novelist puts a lot of balls into the air over the arc of a story, characters pop in and out, story lines start, stop, and start again, relationships change, tensions build, and everything has to be assigned a frequency of appearance as well as a specific gravity.  Another way of putting it is that a cloud forms over your head, and your job is not only to form the raindrops but to release them from the cloud in a precise sequence and correct their trajectory so they hit the ground with the right force at the right time.

When you start a book the raindrops come really easy.  It’s fun, or as fun as writing ever gets. Then, thirty or forty pages in, it becomes work and stays work until you see the spot of light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. Then and only then does it become fun again.  If you succeed or fail it’s usually because you didn’t have the perseverance it takes to wade slog through the unfun parts. Or you smoked too much dope.  There are a lot of fifty page starts to novels collecting dust in a lot of desk drawers or taking up space on ancient floppy disks (remember those?), hard drivers, and flash drives.

So my advice to aspiring novelists is keep a clear head, keep the raindrops coming, don’t expect the middle part to be easy, and finish the damned book. It will be the hardest work you’ll ever do without getting blood on your hands — which might go to field dressing and boning a bull moose by yourself in the wilderness.  But that’s another story.  

Learn how to tie the Grey Ghost, the fly for which my second novel The Grey Ghost Murders is named. A historical and beautiful pattern… Click on the images below that link to videos.