If you aren’t a member of my Patreon, you can join for as little as a dollar a month, where I post my research, full texts, and other things. Here’s an example of one of my posts there…
The Cowboy Necromancer story is chiseled into the southwest, and I've been a bit worried about really pulling it off because there's just so much research necessary to get things right.
A lot of the times, it seems as if I have made something up, but if you know my style by now, you might have seen that I generally draw on actual historical documents that I then add a fantasy take to.
With Cowboy Necromancer, I not only wanted to go to some of the places, I wanted to utilize as much native mythology and names and settings of the region to create the world itself as a character.
There have been some books recently that have really helped me, and you can find them all on Amazon. Here are the ones I’ve used to craft the Cowboy Necromancer world:
Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides
Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey
Dreams of El Dorado by H.W. Brands
Some of these are absolutely amazing, especially Blood and Thunder and Dreams of El Dorado for a view of the southwest history as a hole, the Quanah Parker and Wild Bill books for a better understanding of the Comanche and some of the natives of the plains and their ways of life. Edward Abbey's book has helped me with landscape descriptions, plus his voice is something I'll channel for a project in the future. (He is literally a disgruntled park ranger writing a memoir while living at one of the national parks. It's snarky and funny).
But House of Rain by Craig Childs... this is the one I was looking for.
House of Rain follows the writer, an explorer, as he navigates rough terrain in the Southwest and touches on archeoastronomy. And... that's all I needed to connect the threads to a story I could feel at the back of my head regarding the appearance of the Godwalkers in Cowboy Necromancer, and the humans who have encountered them in the past...
Read these books, and check out my Patreon where I’ll continue posting books before they’re release as well as snippets of some of my research.
Or at least read the books I’ve read to craft this story! All links above go to the Amazon store, and all books are in audio as well.