Zanski: Blog

I have just submitted the fifth and final book of the Arenoso Trails Series, Hard Trail. The reaon it's the last book is because the time of the story has become too modern for my tastes in terms of writing a western. Once the internal combustion engine looms on the horizon, the western setting becomes anachronistic, IMHO. So I will bow out before that calamity takes hold.

True Confession time: I've left a major editing error in Game Trail Chapter 11, leaving a section I had rewritten. My apologies. Cleaning it up is my very next task.

Due to overwhelming demand (I've had as many as three requests this month alone), I offer the following link to a series of maps that are a product of my own hand and Microsoft Paint. You'll quickly discover that I am neither cartographer, topographer, nor artist. They are what they are:

https://arenosotrailseriesmaps.blogspot.com/2023/03/hard-trail-map-arenoso-trails-series.html

I made them as large as I was able, but you'll likely need the Windows Magnifier or similar app to see any detail on the Dry Valleys region maps. I'm not sure if the feature will work in every browser, but Chrome has a click-to-enlarge provision for the Blogger graphics. And I clipped through Border Wells at the bottom of some of the maps -- oops. If you have trouble juxtaposing my Arenoso State Map onto a U.S. map, that's only because it's not possible.

Despite the fact that Game Trail has been active for over a day, I had to spot my use of "more closer" in Chapter 1 all on my own. How mortifying. The inept grammer was leftover from a poorly-proofed text revision. Eventually, I'll post a repair.

Lazeeze has fixed the loss of bold font in the file transfer, and my experimental Date in bold font opening to the (date in standard font) closing appears much more obvious, at least to my eyes.

The intent of that Bold Head and (standard foot) approach was to quickly and easily orient the reader to the time transition from one section to the next.

I used the same approach to open and close the first person narration of the Wayne DeWitt character. Insering that "first peson" narrator within the overall "third person-observeer" narrator of the series was another experiment.

I've since written another two-book series, the Coldwater County Series, contemporary murder mysteries in the Pacific Northwest, using the first-person narrator. I'll post it after I finish posting the fifth and final book of the Arenoso Trails Series, Hard Trail.

I just submitted Game Trail to the posting queue.

Frankly, prepping it was a lot more work than I anticipated. First, it was longer than I remembered (Duh!), then I tripped over a major time misalignment, and finally revamped what I decided was an untenable plot development (What was I thinking?). And a few other things.

A few comments:
Apologies to Texas, especially the Rangers. (Don't want to get on Chuck's bad side.)
Polish expletives I've left untranslated; Google Translate provides some bland interpretations. Interestingly, the word "cholera" was a curse in several north and eastern European languages. Never realized that's what Dad was saying when I was a kid.

In going through the formatting of Game Trail prior to posting, I've run up against a plot detail that, when I read it this time I thought, 'That would never work.' It's a detail that recurs, now and then, through the remainder of the book, as well as in the final book, Hard Trail, so this may take a few days.

It's been a couple years since I've re-read Game Trail, so I'm not exactly sure how much will need revising, but I am sort of amazed I thought the idea would work in the first place. Go figure.