Month: August 2008

Round Up Them Doggies

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Back in the late 1800’s when rodeos first started they were called Cowboy Reunions or Cowboy Competitions. They were rarely called rodeo until after the turn of the century. Plain ol’ cowboys came from all around to compete in these. They were fun and they allowed cowboys to get together, let off some steam and renew acquaintances, hence the name of the affair.

Every August here in Wichita Falls we host a similar kind of thing that we call the Texas Ranch Roundup. It’s where all the competing ranches sign up for events that feature just ordinary, everyday cowboys. There are no professionals allowed.

Some of the participating ranches are the Waggoner Ranch founded in 1851, the Pitchfork Land and Cattle Company established in 1883, the JA Ranch (1876,) the Tongue River Ranch (1898,) the Moorhouse Ranch (1900,) and the Spade Ranch. The area has a rich and storied ranch history that is imbedded in our way of life and we’re very proud of our heritage.

But, back to the Texas Ranch Roundup. Each event awards points for the top hands and they go toward a combined total at the end of the rodeo. The ranch with the most points at the end is declared the winner. No money is involved; simply braggin’ rights. But those cowboys are very serious about winning. They’ll risk life and limb just to be able to be called The Best.

The events are things cowboys normally would do around the ranch. There is no bull riding event because cowboys don’t generally ride bulls when they’re at work. Here are a list of the events of the Roundup:

Bronc Riding

Roping

Steer Wrestling

Wild Cow Milking

Calf Doctoring

Branding

Team Penning

Chuckwagon Cook Off

Arts and Crafts

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In GIVE ME A COWBOY, the new anthology I have coming out in February with Jodi Thomas, Phyliss Miranda, and DeWanna Pace, all our stories take place during rodeo week on the Fourth of July Independence Day celebration in 1890. All four stories are set in Kasota Springs, Texas and because they’re sort of interconnected they were challenging as all get-out to write. The heroine of mine is the mother of Phyliss’s heroine so you can imagine the difficulty of coordinating our stories.

My story, Texas Tempest, is a humorous adventure between a tough gritty gunslinger and a lovely widow who’s seriously husband-hunting. Tempest LeDoux simply has the worst luck in keeping a man. In rides McKenna Smith and they’re immediately thrown together because of the rodeo.

Of course, McKenna has no desire to become another notch on Tempest’s bedpost. He’s content with the freedom of single life.

But Tempest doesn’t play by anyone’s rules. Life has given her a raw deal and she’s fighting tooth and nail to get a husband that won’t up and die on her. She’s already buried five good men and that’s five too many. Now she’s looking for someone tough enough to become husband number six and stick around long enough to help her mend a broken heart!

When the tall lonesome gunslinger named McKenna Smith rides into town, Tempest knows he’s the one for her-if only she can rope him!

With their annual Fourth of July Rodeo about to start, she’s terrified he’ll get it in his stubborn head to sign up for the bronc riding since he has quite a reputation for taming the beasts. She’s terrified he’ll get killed before she has a chance to convince him to give up his dangerous ways. Fortunately, love and fate have a mind of their own. All it takes is a little Texas Tempest to get things going the right way toward a happy ending.

GIVE ME A COWBOY will arrive in bookstores in February. I know that’s months away, but I hope everyone will mark the release date on your calendar. It’s already available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble’s websites for pre-order.

So ladies, round up those doggies!  Have you been to a rodeo?  Do you have a favorite rodeo event? Do you like reading western romance books that have rodeo themes? Or maybe you have other events in your area that showcase your history and would like to tell us about it. I’m all ears. I’m giving away a copy of “Give Me a Texan” to one lucky winner.

And don’t forget to register for our Sizzlin’ Summer Stampede of Prizes that’s in full swing!! There’s a link on the left side of the screen.

Our Writers’ Rendezvous

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If you are, hopefully, reading this, I’m winging my way home from the annual national Romance Writers of America Conference in San Francisco. I wrote this prior to the event and won’t be able to answer until Tuesday. Air travel today is none too swift. I’m flying from San Francisco to Salt Lake City to Atlanta to Memphis.

But looking forward. . . the conference is always the highlight of my year for many reasons. I always call it The Rendezvous. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, mountain men and fur trappers got together in the west once a year in an event they called the Rendezvous. They would drink and dance and exchange tall tales. For men who led a solitary life, it was a time to let to socialize.

The Summer Rendezvous, held in the mountains every year from 1825 to 1840 was the reward for all that the mountain men had been through. One of these men was Joseph LaFayette Meek who was born in Virginia. He was one of fifteen children of a prosperous planter, but when his mother died, his father brought home an overly stern and domineering stepmother. He ran off to the west, where three of his brothers were already working the beaver streams. He would spend over a decade in the mountain, traveling relentlessly, from the Snake River to what is now southern Utah.

The life he and his fellow mountain men led was extraordinarily dangerous. They feel victim to grizzlies, froze to death, were killed by Blackfeet and other tribes. According to “The West, An Illustrated History,” written by Geoffrey Ward, Meek reported, “I have taken the soles of my moccasins, crisped them in the fire, and eaten them. In our extremity, the large black crickets which are found in the country were considered fair game. We used to take a kettle of hot water, catch the crickets and throw them in, and when they stopped kicking, eat them.” So it was no wonder that a Rendezvous was held in the mountains every spring. Word was somehow spread and as many as one thousand souls would attend. “It was always chosen in some valley where there was grass for the animals and game for the camp. . .

The waving grass of the plain, variegated with wild flowers; the clear summer heavens flecked with white clouds that threw soft shadows; . . .gay laughter and the murmuring of Indian voices, all made up a most spirited and enchanting picture. “The men drank together,” another participant relayed “They sang, they laughed, they whooped; they tried to out-brag and out-lie each other. . .” Well, I think of our national conference as our writers’ Rendezvous. I haven’t consumed crickets lately, but we have similar motivations: to get together with like kinds. We sing, we laugh, we might even whoop. Do we try to out-brag and out-lie to each other?

Well. . . we certainly are story tellers. Like the mountaineers, our chosen vocation is a lonely one. We spend much time lost in our own private world. Most people don’t understand us. They don’t understand that we really do have a job. They don’t know why we jerk awake in the middle of the night and grab a pencil, or go fifty miles out of our way while pondering a plot twist, or why we forgot a wedding we committed to (Yeah, I’m guilty. I’m only happy it wasn’t mine).

But we ARE a different breed, and occasionally we need to celebrate our difference and foibles and eccentricities with other writers. We must share our successes and failures.

And thus our national conference is a great occasion. I’ll see friends who started writing with me twenty-five years ago. I’ll see newer friends, and I’ll make even newer ones. Like those mountain men of years ago, we will party and dance and drink and tell tall tales. And I’ll be reminded again of the real life heroes who celebrated their Rendezvous so many years ago.

Donna Alward on Alberta…Welcome to Stampede Country!

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I lived in Calgary for twelve years.  In fact, Calgary, Alberta was my address until May 28th…when we moved all the way across the country, about a five-hour drive from where I grew up.  But I’ve spent the bulk of my marriage in Calgary…we moved when we were married less than a year, had a small car, mostly hand-me down possessions, and no kids.

 

The first year we arrived too late for the Stampede, but just ahead of the beginning of hockey season. (Go Flames Go!)   It was a heat wave, and we couldn’t believe how HOT it was.  One of my first memories was going to a WalMart by where we lived, and seeing an oriental man, in a cowboy hat and boots, talking on a cell phone! 

 

The second week of July, there are no hotel rooms to be had in Calgary.  It’s Stampede Week, complete with Princesses, a parade, and free pancake breakfasts all over the city.  We did make it to Stampede the next year, and I was pregnant with our first child…just pregnant, like about 8 weeks along and sick.  It was hot and all these people were drinking cold beer in the stands and I was stuck with water.  I had beef on a bun…red meat was a must while I was expecting, apparently…and laughed at the mutton bustin’ kids, admired the dexterity of barrel racing, and oohed and aahed over the broncs and bull riding.  I still love the smell of mini-donuts and hate the crush of people on the C-Train.  But I liked the Rodeo so much that I knew I had to have one in my second Romance, Marriage at Circle M.  Complete with a sexy ex-bronc rider.

 

We fell in love with the mountains, being able to see them from the city (there’s a great view from the Calgary Tower if you get a haze-free day), driving to them, skiing in them, hiking…I always thought when we moved away what I’d miss most was the mountains.  But I was wrong.

 

It’s the prairie.

 

It’s the wide open expanse.  Because truth be told, those cowboys and girls that make it to Stampede don’t live in Calgary.  They live in Longview, and Caroline, and Madden, and Wetaskawin, and all sorts of small towns that hardly appear on the map.  They live on the land and farm it, raise their stock and travel around during rodeo season.  Those towns mean something.  And I fell in love with one of them – Sundre – a few years ago.

 

Sundre is a typical western town – a hotel, a grocery, a department store (I love browsing around the V&S!), a library, a few restaurants…the amenities you need, but still a bit of a drive to Red Deer and about an hour and 20 minutes to Calgary.  When you take the highway in from Olds, you crest a hill and if you hit it at the right time, the sun is setting over the mountains and it’s spectacular.  It’s ranch country. And maybe a little oil and gas country.  And it’s beautiful.

 

When I wrote Hired By The Cowboy, it was a natural choice for the setting, and so Windover Ranch was born, and featured again in Marriage at Circle M.  I was a little homesick after that so I wrote The Soldier’s Homecoming and set it in my east-coast hometown of Fredericton, New Brunswick.  But I wasn’t done with the characters or the setting from my first 2 books yet, and so that became Falling For Mr. Dark and Dangerous.

 

I went slightly south of Sundre to the community of Bergen for this story, where the main feature is the General Store.  I’d e-mailed for some info, and one weekend when we were camping in Elkton Valley, we popped in and I introduced myself.  It was so much fun…I got to see the store, drive the roads…and knew exactly where Maggie and Nate would park in the parking lot!

 

Falling for Mr. Dark and Dangerous is out this month with Harlequin Romance, and in some ways it takes me back to my other “home” where I can see for miles and feel the blustery warmth of a Chinook on my face.

 

Is there a place that calls to you?  Have you moved, and what part of that home stayed with you the most?

 

I’ll select one person from the comments after the weekend to win a copy of FALLING FOR MR. DARK AND DANGEROUS…guess what I’m doing this weekend?  I get to witness a real-life love story.  My mum, who is 75, is getting MARRIED.  Seems genetics might have played a part in my romantic heart!!!

 

Donna

www.donnaalward.com

 

ORDER ONE OF DONNA’S BOOKS FROM AMAZON

Love Western Romances.com

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Hi, it’s Anne Carrole and Karyna DaRosa, founders of the website www.lovewesternromances.com, who are honored to be here with some of our favorite authors.  When we met for the first time at a NJ Romance Writers meeting in 2006, we discovered we both loved to read as well as write western romances and we both were frustrated at not being able to find as many new western historical romances as we wanted to read.  In fact, we were hearing that publishers were not so high on western historical romances anymore—imagine!

 So, we combined our talents—Karyna as editor and webmistress, Anne as editor and publicist—and created www.lovewesternromances.com to help readers find new western historical authors and help authors find new readers—and prove there are a lot of us out here who love western romances!

 In May we celebrated our first anniversary.  In that time, we’ve featured reviews of over sixty western historical romances, have spotlighted over sixteen authors(and still counting), and our site visitors, numbering in the tens of thousands of hits per month and growing, selected the Best Western Romance of 2007. (The Best Western Romance of 2008 contest will run in December and several of the authors here will have books in the running.)  Of the many authors we’ve featured in our spotlight, several have been from Petticoats and Pistols including Stacey Kayne (our very first spotlight author—thank you Stacey!), Cheryl St. John, Elizabeth Lane and as well as other notable authors such as Linda Lael Miller, Leigh Greenwood, Bobbi Smith and Jodi Thomas. And Pam Crooks will be in our September Spotlight—yay Pam!

 We also run an ongoing survey on our site and ask our visitors to tell us why they LOVE WESTERN ROMANCES.  Is it those rugged, sexy heroes or the independent heroines, or maybe it’s the historical time period, or those adventurous, heart-stopping plots, or just the whole uniqueness of the American West experience?  Of course, we like all those things, but overwhelmingly our visitors have chosen—no surprise—those rugged, sexy heroes as the reason they LOVE WESTERN ROMANCES.

Our attraction for these cowboys undoubtedly goes beyond their handsome faces and lean bodies. H.H. Halsell seemed to sum up the mystique in his reminisces of the cowboy life in Texas in the late 1800s, when he wrote in Cowboys and Cattleland: A cowman was a friend of the weak and readily ministered to the suffering.  He was chivalrous and brave, courteous to women and tender to children.  It may seem strange and paradoxical to say it, but I always found the really brave and daring men to be men tenderhearted and kind.  However, when danger and even when in shooting scrapes, cowboys do not always act alike or look alike…Some turn pale, some have their faces set like steel; the eyes of a few, like O.D. Halsell, seem to flash fire.

 We thought we’d share with you some of our favorite cowboy heroes from western romances.

 Anne:  My favorite heroes tend to be those strong silent types, you know the ones where you never can tell what they are thinking. Hard men who have a vulnerability that only the heroine touches.  Ones that come to mind include Caleb Black from Elizabeth’s Lowell’s Only His, Luke Shardlow from Linda Lael Miller’s One Wish, Juniper Jones from Stacey Kayne’s just released The Gunslinger’s Untamed Bride, TJ Grier from Pam Crooks recent Kidnapped by a Cowboy and Tobin McMurray from Jodi Thomas’ Texas Princess.  I also fell in love with Jane Candia Coleman’s rendition of Virgil Earp in Tumbleweed, her fictional account of Allie Earp’s life.

 

No surprise that I tend to write my own heroes in this vain like Clay Tanner in Re-Ride at the Rodeo coming out later this year from

 

 

 

 

Wild Rose Press as part of their Wayback, Texas Series. This is a contemporary western but Clay isn’t far removed from the heroes of the Old West as he rides broncs and breaks heart.  For him, everything is a competition until he meets a little spitfire named Dusty Morgan who shuts him down in less time than it takes to get bucked off a bronc. He’s aiming for a re-ride, hence the title, but qualifying may call for more than he’s prepared to give.

 

Karyna:  Like Anne, my favorite heroes are the strong, silent types. I’m definitely into alpha males. ;-D  Caleb Black is also one of my favorites!!  I think Linda Howard does alphas really well. Two of my other favorites are from her books: Lucas Cochran in Angel Creek and Jake Sarrat from A Lady of the West. Although not a western, another one of my favorite Howard alphas is Gray Rouillard, from After the Night.

Of course, I, too, write alpha males. Cole Mitchell from Dry Moon, is the quintessential alpha male. Strong, silent, and oozing sexiness.  😉  Cole is fast with guns, establishing his reputation as a lethal killer. Working for a scheming cattle baron, Cole meets Cassie Taylor, owner of Taylor Irrigation, the festering thorn in his employer’s side. He thinks it odd that a woman prefers men’s trousers to wearing dresses, but watching Cassie ride away, he vows to possess her, and none too gently either.

 

 

 

 

 

In Tempted Fate, Lucas Reinhardt has always felt like an outsider looking in.The child of a Chippewa mother, his upbringing was one of rejection and humiliation at the hands of the pale-skins. Emma Sarris knows pain as an adopted child. Though loved and nurtured by her adoptive family, unanswered questions plague her. Who are her real parents? Why did they abandon her? An intricate silver brooch, worth far more than its weight in precious metal, is the only link to her past. When Emma’s brother loses her heirloom in a poker game to Luke, Emma will stop at nothing to get it back. She will leave her fiancé, her parents, and the safety of her home, in a desperate effort to convince the handsome, mysterious stranger to return what is hers. But what will she have to give up in return?

We like to trot around so you can find us at www.lovewesternromances.com, www.annecarrole.com, www.karyna_online.com and MySpace.  Anne also has a blog, www.annecarrole.blogspot.com  where she writes about the old west, particularly little known women of the west, as well as today’s cowboys, especially rodeo cowboys.

 So now we’re dying to know what attracts you to western romances, what type of hero you like and who some of your favorite heroes are from your favorite western romances. And do you think cowboys today still embody H.H. Halsell’s ideal from his time riding the cattle trails of yesteryear?

 

 

Dry Moon