Interviews W/ Published Western Authors
Celia Hayes
A Rope and Wire Interview
I would like to thank Celia Hayes for taking time from her busy schedule to respond to the following questions.
Over the years, Celia has proven herself to be a very talented writer who has authored numerous articles, essays and commentaries as well as several excellent novels. (Actually, one memoir, one novel out and three in the works)
I’d like to start by asking if you might give our readers a brief history of your background as a writer?
I had always kicked around the notion of being a writer I had scribbled the usual sorts of juvenilia and kept a journal for about a decade and had gotten the customary degree in English, but instead of trying to get the usual sorts of jobs that one can get with a degree in English, I enlisted in the Air Force. Oddly, enough, that turned out to be a useful experience, because I was constantly being tasked to write something. My military specialty was as a radio-television broadcaster, so here I had news stories, or radio spots, briefing papers, letters of instruction, performance ratings a wide variety of material to write. I retired from the Air Force in 1997, and kicked around in some corporate/administrative jobs, while I pitched magazine articles… not with any particular luck. In 2002, I was offered an opportunity to write for a military-oriented weblog, Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief (now just The Daily Brief). That was terrifically useful, both because it offered an outlet for writing about anything I wanted to write on, and because it gave me readers and fans. (insert Sally Field girly-squeal here “You like me! You really like me!) My first book, “Our Grandpa Was an Alien” came out of a body of memoir-essays I wrote for The Brief, all about my eccentric family and growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s. The readers really loved them, and kept asking “so when is your book coming out, then?” My second book, “To Truckee’s Trail” also came out of a series of essays for The Brief but those were historical.
Was writing something you just, sort of drifted into, or were you focused on becoming a professional writer from early on?
I think I had always seen writing as something I did as a hobby. To my mind, in real life I was an NCO or an office-manager, who did a little scribbling on the side. But then it changed over, to a writer who did a little office admin/marketing work on the side.
At what point did you decide writing was what you really wanted to do?
The day that I got let go from a large corporate enterprise with hardly any notice at all. I have a military pension and they did give me a severance check, so the loss of salary wasn’t that much of an immediate problem. I floated out of there, thinking oh, that’s not so bad, I can stay home and work on the third chapter of “Truckee” tomorrow!
Are you currently writing on a full time basis?
I wish! I still have to do a little part-time admin work, just to keep ahead of the bills, and there’s more to being a writer than just writing! You have to market the books, and connect with the people who want to read them. I think I spend about 3/4ths of my creative time writing, and the other quarter figuring out how to get my books in front of readers!
One of your books, “To Truckee’s Trail”, is the fictional re-telling of a real event. What are some of the facts behind this story? What intrigued you enough to want to use it as a topic?
The basic facts are pretty much as I laid them out in the book: a party of about 50 people in eleven wagons, who were the first to scout out the California Trail from the point of the Humboldt Sink and traverse the Sierra Nevadas by way of the Truckee Pass and what is now known as Donner Pass. The story intrigued me because they came two years before the Donner Party, were pretty much the same kind of emigrants, with the same kind of equipment, also got caught by winter and stranded in the snow… and yet their experience did not become the horrendous, horrible disaster that the Donner-Reed Party experienced. What did they do that was different, what qualities did their various members bring into the pool how come they did not fall apart? And also why hasn’t anyone heard of them?
Research for any novel can consume a great deal of time. How big of a role did research play in “To Truckee’s Trail”?
I had long kicked around the notion of writing something about an emigrant party to California, so a lot of the basic information was already there, about the general pre-Gold Rush emigrant experience. There is a ton of information out there, so it’s fairly easy to read enough of it to get a sense of the time and place, weather and detail and all. There wasn’t that much to find specifically about the Stephens-Townsend Party I located just about every scrap, pretty early on all but a little pamphlet about the Hitchcock family, which I wish I had found! A descendent of Isaac Hitchcock found a copy of “Truckee” in a used bookstore and emailed me through my website. He was thrilled no end about how I had written about his people. I do wish I had been able to follow my original plan which was to follow the trail itself over a summer and to hang out extensively with re-enactor groups oh, well!
Can you point to any one person in particular who has had a major influence on your career as a writer?
Two people, out of a fairly large crowd! First, one of my blog-fans, Oren W. He liked my blog entries so much that he sent me a box of CD media and asked for me to copy my files to it, so he could read my stuff at home, where he didn’t have internet. I thought wow! People like my stuff that much? And Craig Lockwood he is a writer out in California who happened to see an early treatment of “Truckee” that I did for another blog-fan who wanted to show it around as a movie. He loved the whole concept, and loved my writing, and hand-held me through the proposal and the final draft.
Who are some of your favorite authors, and what is it that sets them apart?
Oh, gosh you’re asking that of an English major, with a house whose walls are lined with books! OK, first off two English lady writers: Rosemary Sutcliffe for “Rider on a White Horse” and Mary Stewart for “The Moonspinners” and “My Brother Michael”. They both wrote so beautifully and evocatively of places Northern England during the Civil War (theirs, not ours) and of Greece in modern times. You could read their books, close your eyes and be there. Robert Lewis Taylor for “The Travels of Jamie McPheeters” and “Two Roads to Guadalupe” for rollicking adventure on the frontier. Without realizing it at the time, I took his method of using two narrators and creating contemporary letters and diaries to tell a story. And George Macdonald Fraser for the Flashman series. Those stories are hilarious but very carefully researched! He had a peerless sense of time and place! Such a pity that he didn’t live to complete the story of how his anti-hero managed to serve on both sides of our Civil War.
Tell us a little about some of your past projects and do you currently have a project in the works?
My current project, the Adelsverein Trilogy started as a single book: I wanted to do something of the same sort as “Truckee” an unknown adventure of the 19th century frontier. I hit upon the story of the founding of the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Great story, no one outside of Texas has heard of it. Basically, a coalition of well-meaning German noblemen took up an entrepreneur grant in 1844 and over the next two or three years dumped 7,000 German immigrants onto the Texas frontier. I also wanted to include some of the elements that various literary agents had criticized “Truckee” for no suspense about survival, not dramatic enough, no sex, no violence. So I outlined a book about the founding of the colonies, and then discovered that even more dramatic things had happened during the Civil War and the aftermath, to those German settlers and their descendents. So, one book expanded to a trilogy one of my blog-fans termed it “Barsetshire with cypress trees and a lot of side arms”. It has operatic levels of everything true love, perilous adventure, bloody war, sudden death, stolen children, Comanche raids, dire revenge, lynch-mobs, Texas Rangers… and cows. Lots of cows. The Adelsverein Trilogy will be available in December, 2008. I am editing and revising all three so they may be available all at once. My publishers’ advice!
If you had only one bit of advice to pass along to someone just starting a career in writing, what would it be?
Do it, and think of it as a job. You are not a prima donna; temperament is for creative people who are too much in love with themselves. My motto is a variant on the mission statement for military broadcasting; to entertain and inform anything in your prose that gets in the way of entertaining and informing can and should be pared away. If five or six people tell you that something does not work well, that’s a clue. Edit and don’t go all prima donna about it.
