The Round-Up: June 2025

A monthly miscellany of interesting links and tidbits

I’m running a summer paperback sale this month! For the first two weeks of July, you can order a selection of my paperback books directly from me at a discount from their regular prices. Find all the details on this page.

And some Substack news: I’m going to begin serializing a complete novella here next week! I’ve been so occupied with drafting my next novel that I just didn’t want to take the time out to edit the short fiction I’d originally planned to post here over the summer…so I decided to serialize one of my backlist titles instead. Look out for the first chapter of Bridge to Trouble, a romantic-suspense novella set in the Montana mountains in 1920, on Monday, July 7th, and new chapters each Monday after that. It will be free to read until complete, and go behind the paywall shortly afterward.

• Something pretty neat happened earlier in June: I had a piece of work translated for the first time! My short story “The Heiress and the Horse-Trade” was translated into German for the Journal des Arbeitskreises Western & Abenteur (Journal of the Western and Adventure Working Group), or AKWA, a German web page devoted to the Western genre. As you may know, there has long been an enthusiastic German readership for all things Western, so it's really exciting to have my fiction introduced to this audience. (For English-speaking readers, this story is included in my collection The Smoking Iron and Other Stories.)

• A lovely post from Harriet at The Joy of Old Books about Laura E. Richards and her novels for girls. I was familiar with Richards’ name from her children’s poetry, but I did not know that (A) she was Julia Ward Howe’s daughter, and (A) that she wrote so much fiction (including Captain January, the basis for a Shirley Temple movie that I enjoyed growing up).

• I had been half thinking I might write something about Ai one of these days, but

  Griffin Gooch has basically said in this essay much of what I would have tried to say. My personal stance on Ai is a hard-line I will not use it, but Griffin articulates extremely well a lot of the considerations that influence my attitude.

• A fun and interesting piece from Postwar Pop about how famous authors were major celebrities in mid-20th-century America. What’s even more fascinating to me is the background on just how much of a reader the average American was in the first half of the century and even past it.

• From Derrick Jeter at Y’allogy, a post on the remarkable life of Lizzie Johnson Williams, who started life as a Texas schoolteacher and ended up an amazingly successful businesswoman and rancher who accompanied her own cattle up the Chisholm Trail.

• Enjoy this collection of over two hundred-photos from an all-girl cattle roundup, location and occasion unknown, photographed by N.R. Farbman for LIFE magazine circa 1950.

• I was just recently introduced to this poem: “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas. England and summer captured in a few simple, lovely words.

• A deeply interesting piece from Ted Gioia on the 21st century’s strange attitude towards the concept of aesthetic beauty. Lots to ponder here…I shared a few brief thoughts in this note.

• I love this quote by Charles Spurgeon on rejoicing in the beauty of God’s creation. (Tangent: I recently finished reading Spurgeon’s commentary on Psalm 119, The Golden Alphabet, and it was excellent.)

• A summertime song that reliably makes me get a little choked up: “Blackberry Summer” by Dale Ann Bradley.

• And finally, in case you missed it, this month’s bit of humorous flash fiction:

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