Only For A Piece. Only For A Time.

A Letter From The Author of That Light Sublime

Dear Reader,

I fell in love with writing when I was very young, and I have never loved the art more than when writing a letter. Letters are a gift unlike any other, I think. They work as a kind of alchemy that begins with the love inside the heart and, somehow ends up on the page in ink. I love letters because I know they take time. Take effort. And when we get one, we always read it carefully.

Consider them. Keep them in little boxes on shelves or in the drawers of desks to be kept safe. Where they can be stored between the unfolding years, waiting, until we want to remember.

No one writes a letter lightly. Or perhaps they do.

I know I never have and can’t imagine doing so.

And so, as with any good letter, one can never go wrong by beginning with gratitude.

There are so many people to thank, too many. I cannot and will not do them the disservice by having my joy provisioned among them via a Substack post. Those who I love know I love them. And there are far too many happy, supportive memories they have given me over the years I have worked on THAT LIGHT SUBLIME.

But as a collective thank you among the You Know Who’s of my life - Thank you. Each of you have, in some way, magnified the gift of life I have been given. And in return I’ve tried to give readers and those who love me a gift that shares all the love and appreciation inside me.

That Light Sublime Trilogy

Surprisingly, hell, startlingly, that’s the first time I’ve ever put all three of the covers together and really taken in all that their collective 200,000 words mean to me. And it brings to mind just how much the covers represent a great deal of the terror inside the work, yet so very little of the unquenchable longing that resides within the characters, their story, and the setting - The American West.

The Western is one of the great American contributions to the canon of world literature, none of them more impactful for me than Larry McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE. There have been others certainly - L’Amour, Portis, and Proulx, Lansdale and McCarthy, Rountree, each have set their fingertips eternally in the genre’s still wet clay. Much has been asserted about the genre’s irrelevance in our modern age, and to all those who proclaimed its final form to be set, no longer malleable, I would lovingly say that this trilogy is my happiest way of proving them wrong.

That Light Sublime is about unearthing a more true Romance. One of its several purposes was to give a voice and heroes and villains to populations who have been underrepresented in the genre. Not because I believe in charity for them, but because I believe in justice. And often times those cousins in Love’s family tree are woefully mistaken for one another. Not because they look alike, though they certainly can, but because Americans struggle to remember the differences between them.

Charity is giving someone something they never could have afforded.

Justice is giving someone something they never should have been denied.

I believe that. I believe that the Western belongs to everyone, making this Western something of a bridge stretching across the vast literary gulf between what the Western has been and what it can be.

For all of us.

This Western has elements of vampires and Lovecraftian gods and gunslingers and drunkards and rakes and emancipated peoples and a secret kingdom living in a fictional mountain in Colorado. It’s a story about family and hardship and desire and all the teeming life swirling inside the heart’s wellspring waiting to be lived. And in this way it is a Romance story.

A true story about love and sacrifice and duty and valor; all of the grand notions that disaffected readers will find crafted just for them, without a single wink of irony.

I believe in this story. Believe in its power. In the truth I found while writing it.

And for now, with these character journeys now complete, I am burdened to lay down the setting where I have learned so much about the world around me and myself. But I am unashamedly a Western writer from Texas and so, I hope you love and support these stories. With your support, I will be able to answer the question - “Are you done writing in this universe?” - with:

”Only for a piece. Only for a time.”

With my deepest gratitude,