Something Strange Happening Here

Yes, yes, I know you’ve heard me complain before when characters in my latest story take over and go their own ways. But this time I’m desperate and need your help!

I was staring into empty space and thinking, as one will, about George Pocock and his invention of the Charvolant – a four-wheeled, six-passenger buggy pulled by a kite that made 20mph and outran a fast mail coach in England in 1826 – and voila! there’s the nub of a story for a fab Wild West novel.

But who do I give it to? Which of the protagonists in my other Western novels can carry the weight of such a grand idea?

The unreformed gunfighter Spotted Billy Sumpter?* The boy Ronas, an accidental gunfighter?* Hamish Stark, evading a noose by hiding behind a stolen sheriff’s badge?* The amnesiac cashiered buffalo soldier Easy Holloway?* Even Leander Phipps, a cowboy lost in a very strange world?* Or someone completely new?

I inclined toward Hamish Stark because his perpetual confused desperation and bright hope to give up gunfighting to own a bi-cycle repair shop appeals to me. I began to scratch the first words.

Old Stink and Pike, one a mountainman and the other a plainsman, popped up on the page in those first words. Oh, well, thought I, they can introduce the story as they do the Ronas novels. Let Hamish Stark swoop in to take over at the right dramatic moment.

But Stark never rode over the horizon. Instead, it was Old Stink who stood up to the task, yearning to get out of the flatlands and back to his mountains where gravity is less a bother, and Pike with his opinionated mule. All three startled to see a huge box kite flying a woman across the prairie.

Hamish Stark let me down and Old Stink fled back to his mountains. Pike, only ever meant to be a minor character in other stories, was the last man standing in the scrubgrass plain and he took over. I didn’t plan that. Didn’t expect it. Surprised to find him there anxious to rough-ride across my and George Pocock’s beautiful ideas. I barely know Pike, don’t know what he’s going to do next or where he will take this story. But I’m stuck with him.

Hamish Stark, you hear me – I’ll get even with you for this. The price for treachery is the rope and I’ll see that those three posses coming after you get a lot closer a lot sooner in your next novel.

Meantime, I’ve got to deal with Pike who bizarrely considers all the Great Plains his personal property, who is haunted by what he had to do in “the late war,” and whose moral compass will not deviate from the true no matter if death jumps up before him. Yet he is not a good man.

What’s the help! I need from you? Tell me how to write a good bad man or a bad good man called Pike. Maybe then I can wrestle this story away from him and make it my own.