Cowboy Kisses

RED RIVER RIFLES IS A FINALIST FOR THE WILL ROGERS MEDALLION AWARD!

“A man only learns by two things, one is reading, and the other is association with smarter people.” – 

Will Rogers

I am thrilled and very honored to learn that my book RED RIVER RIFLES has been selected as a finalist for a 2020 Will Rogers Medallion Award in the Western Romance category. The Will Rogers Medallion Award honors, “those books that represent an Outstanding Achievement in the Publishing of Western Media. Your book exemplified the combination of excellent content, high production values, and honoring of the Cowboy Heritage that the Award was created to acknowledge.”

If you are too young to be familiar with Will Rogers (November 4, 1879 – August 15, 1935),  he was a respected writer as well as a cowboy entertainer and philosopher who did much to embody and demonstrate western traditions.  The award was created to help expand the “Heritage of Literature which honors the traditions and values of the American Cowboy.”

He was also an American stage and film actor, vaudeville performer, cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator from Oklahoma. He made frequent use of puns and terms which closely linked him to the cowboy tradition. From about 1925 to 1928, Rogers traveled the length and breadth of the United States in a lecture tour. He began his lectures by pointing out that, "A humorist entertains, and a lecturer annoys."

In the mid-1930s Rogers was hugely popular, the leading political wit in the United States, and the highest paid of Hollywood film stars. He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska during bad weather.

His Hollywood Star

Will Rogers's tomb from the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma

Perhaps Rogers most famous saying was, "I never met a man I didn't like.” He has many famous quotes that can be found at. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Will_Rogers and https://www.willrogers.com/. Three of the ones I liked the best are:

·         “Lord, the money we do spend on Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one-third the money twenty years ago.”

·         “What the country needs is dirtier fingernails and cleaner minds.”

·         “We are here just for a spell and then pass on. So get a few laughs and do the best you can. Live your life so that whenever you lose it, you are ahead.”

Like the characters in my novels set on the American frontier, Rogers believed in hard work in order to succeed and realize individual success. He symbolized the self-made man and woman. He believed in America and the American Dream.

So does Samuel Wyllie, the hero of RED RIVER RIFLES. In 1818, the bravest of the brave settled a narrow strip of land along the Red River in Texas. A place where death and life held equal strongholds. For Samuel, his family’s land south at Pecan Point was a nearly sacred place, as beautiful as heaven must be. He has big plans for the future and will do what it takes to carve a new life out of the wilderness.

A gritty western, a love story, RED RIVER RIFLES, Book One in the Wilderness Dawning Series, is a clean, yet romantic historical set against the stunning backdrop of the Province of Texas. It has a 4.6 star rating out of 5 with 75 Amazon reviews and is available in ebook and print at https://amzn.to/2VprVdG.

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