Western Trail Blazer -new releases

Troy D. Smith

We're trying to start 2014 off right over at Western Trail Blazer. In our first month of WTB's new era, we've released three new anthologies, two of them the first installments of what we hope to be regular series. We've also released seven ebook shorts -two of them were in the final days of 2013 and we mentioned them last month, but we thought they should be included in this first official monthly list of new releases as well. The two new stories by Frank Roderus, in particular, have been tearing up the chart.

TWILIGHT OF THE GUN consists mostly of stories already available from WTB as singles (though not all of them)... this is our way of re-introducing WTB, and showcasing several of our regular authors.

LADIES LOVE OUTLAWS is the first of many western romance anthologies.

WESTERN TALES! is more than a single anthology; it is going to be a regular series, each with five western short stories. I view it as a digital echo of great magazines of the past like Louis L'Amour Western Magazine, which is where I got my start. We've tried to capture some of that old, exciting pulp feel in our covers.

They're all available right now- grab one today!

 

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WOLF CREEK interviews all week!

Book 6 of the Western Fictioneers series WOLF CREEK is making its official debut July 2. It's called HELL ON THE PRAIRIE, and features seven short stories highlighting several of your favorite Wolf Creek citizens -including the one I write for, the roguish town marshal Sam Gardner.

You can read about it all week long -Jacquie Rogers is interviewing all seven authors, a day at a time over at her blog Romancing the West ... with me first on the chopping block, er, agenda.

Go check it out!

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar - in the Old West

Many years ago I read that John Ford had wanted to do a western version of King Lear. He never got around to it, but someone else did: in 2002 TNT aired King of Texas, with Patrick Stewart as the patriarchal John Lear (with a screenplay by Stephen Harrigan.)

The bard had been brought to the big screen in chaps before- in 1956 Glenn Ford, Ernest Borgnine, Valerie French and Rod Steiger appeared in the film Jubal, adapted from the Paul Wellman novel Jubal Troop -a western re-telling of Othello.

Both those adaptations worked pretty well, and that's not surprising. I've said often that what I like most about the western genre is the opportunity for a storyteller to strip away the veneers and get at the most primal passions of the characters -and Shakespeare was a master at that. the combination, then, as not as incongruous as it might seem to most folks. In fact, it is a natural.

I decided to try the same thing, a few years before the Patrick Stewart novel came out, in a short story called "Judah King," which is a western retelling of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Judah is a charming, ambitious psychopath, who has pulled the wool over the eyes of a western town's citizens -he has become the local lawman, and has set a trajectory for higher office... but his oldest friend Mark Brules is starting to think Judah has gone too far, and become too dangerous. But what can he do...?

You can check out the story as a 99-cent ebook single, or in the short story collection Red Trail (which has more than a dozen other stories, as well.)

 
Judah King

Red Trail