Pintsized Pioneers at Play: Homemade Frontier Fun and Danger received a nice review in the April issue of Western Writers of America’s The Roundup magazine. Thanks to reviewer Scott McCrea for the kind words and to editor Johnny Boggs for including it in the magazine.
The book has been named a 2026 WWA Spur Finalist, and Harriet and I will receive our certificates at the St. Louis convention this June. The Pintsized books have served us well, and we are now researching Pintsized Pioneers in Love on courtship on the frontier. We expect to release it in the summer of 2027, so we would be interested in hearing from anyone who has family stories of Old West romance.
Our emphasis this year has been on juvenile and young adult novels. When the rights on three juvenile books reverted to me last year, we began bringing out new editions this year in what we have named the Old West Critters Collection from our Bariso Press.
The second volume in the series—Blanca Is My Name: Or How I Saved the Buffalo on the Texas Plains—was released this month, following the re-issue of They Call Me Old Blue: Or How I Helped Charles Goodnight Invent the Chuck Wagon in February.
Then in June, we will release Just Call Me Uncle Sam: Or How a Camel Born at Sea Found Himself in Texas, the last of the original books. I liked the original covers for Old Blue and Blanca, but wasn’t as fond of the cover for Uncle Sam, so we developed a new one with the help of ChatGPT and DALL-E.
Then in September we will release the first original in the new series with a book on the famous Wyoming bucking horse Steamboat. Next year we will publish the fifth book in the Old West Critters Collection on a semi-famous San Angelo racehorse named “Charlie Wilson.”
In the interim Harriet and I are working a book titled Beloved Companion, a collection of Civil War correspondence between two of Harriet’s great-great grandparents, James and Frances Catherine Wood. He served in the 199th Pennsylvania Volunteers from September 1864 through the summer of 1865. While he was at war, she ran the farm and raised three young daughters in his absence. We have the originals of their letters and a typescript of a daily diary he kept during his enlistment. It’s a fascinating look at a God-fearing soldier who served from the siege of Petersburg through the surrender at Appomattox and a wife trying to manage her loneliness and her young family during a very cold winter in northeast Pennsylvania. We hope to have it out by the end of the year.
So, we have plenty of projects to the works. We’ll post more details as they develop.
