I Should Have Been Named Colton McCabe

I should have been named Colton McCabe.  Wayne Ryder.  Swanky Toughpants.  Anything but Victoria Elizabeth.  Sounds like I’m a frail little princess.  Here I wrote a wilderness survival story, filled with raids from warring rivals, jealousies, sacrifices, and monumental grief, as well as humor and a love story, and I don’t get to put Colton McCabe on the cover as author.  Well, I could, but I want to use my real name.  I just wish my real name was something else.

The book, Only the Mountains, originally started as a story of a white captive woman living with Crow Indians in 1846-48.  I loved researching it, traveling the Oregon Trail, camping out alone, and sans cell phone.  It wasn’t that I was trying to be daring—we didn’t own a cell phone back then, and camping was cheaper than motel rooms.  The wide windy plains, the miles and miles of dry tumbleweeds, the steep climb into the Blue Mountains, and the drippy trees of Oregon were great times to write in my head.  Coming around the back of Mt. Hood on the historical Barlow Trail, I got stuck. Oblivious to my danger, chopped through an obstruction, went on, got lost on a forest road, and found my way out in spite of May snow.  I’m not sure my husband knows about that part.

I visited with the Crow Indians, got a Crow-English-Crow dictionary, interviewed tribal members, and prowled around the reservation.  Spent hours in the library, spent hours online went to pow-wows, visited lots of museums featuring Native American artifacts.

Probably the best research was going on annual wilderness canoe trips and the many backpacking trips with my brother. He’s an insistent hiker, and who can say no to his zeal?  Off we’d go, and it is great fodder for writing about exhaustion, determination, rain, cold, and hunger.

After sending out vast numbers of query letters, attending writers’ conferences and interviewing with agents, I was able to send the book itself off.  They said they liked it, but could I change it? “Historical fiction does not sell well,” they said.  So I fast forwarded the time of the book to 500 years from now, after the apocalypse and the pandemics, when the population is down to 5% of what it is now.  The world has plunged into a more primitive setting, and civilization in New America is clustered on the two coasts.  Seattle is the new capital.  What population there is lives in little towns and tries to eke out a living by farming.  Southern America is a desert.

However, the Native Americans, especially the Dakota Sioux and the Crows, have done well.  The Crow, influenced by Mennonites who had lived near them before the apocalypse, decided to return to their own roots and live a purified Native American lifestyle, as did the Dakota Sioux.  They believe their traditional lifestyle has made them able to resist the pandemics, but unknown to them, they have in inherent resistance. The Crows, now called the Wrocks, and the Dakotas, now called the Dackos, have grown to two huge populations, controlling most of the central north section of North America.  Feared by city people, who believe the Wrocks and Dackos to be cannibals, violence is common. Internal tribal strife has risen as well. The elders want to hold to traditions, while the younger men want weapons more powerful than their enemies.  Meanwhile, city people from both coasts are encroaching on their territory, and once again history is repeating itself.

But above all else, this is a love story.  A young city woman is captured by a raiding party of Wrocks when her airship crashes. A Wrock man in the raiding party seeks her out.  When sex traffickers raid the tribe, the Wrock man and other tribal leaders have to take off to rescue them. Friendless now, with winter approaching, the city woman has to make decisions that will change her life forever.

I suppose I have a pretty good name for writing romances. Such a prim and proper name, let me pour you some tea.  It might be spruce needle tea rather than Darjeeling, it might be served in a horn cup rather than bone china.  Although when you think about it, Victoria and both Elizabeths were long living and powerful queens. 

Toughness and bone china to boot.