Ta-da! I finished the second draft of One More Time, the third book in the One Small Victory series published by Next Chapter Publishing. The only thing left to do is a read-through for copy editing, then it will be ready to go to the publisher, hopefully in a few days.
If your not familiar with that series and the main character, Jenny, here’s how it all started.
One day while reading the newspaper I happened across a small, four-inch item about a woman who’d infiltrated a drug ring and helped bring down a major distributor in a small town in Michigan. She was a single mother with several children, had no background in law enforcement, and had just lost her oldest son in a car accident. The news story did not give many details about the woman or how she managed to get on the drug task force. It only said that she did so at great personal risk.
Thinking about the kind of courage it takes to bully one’s way onto a task force, then actually go out and meet with drug dealers and earn their trust just blew me away. Not much about parenting can prepare someone for that. Then there was the fact that she did all that while enduring the most significant loss a woman can experience.
Pretty ballsy, I thought, and I just knew I had to write about this incredible woman. So I did.
Then came One Perfect Love after a number of readers asked if Jenny and Steve, the officer she worked closely with, were ever going to get together. There was a strong attraction in that first book, but there were also professional lines they couldn’t cross. Plus, the story was about that incredible thing Jenny did.
The latest book in the series, One More Time, started in May 2023 and I’d hoped to have it finished much sooner, but then, well life and bad joints and surgeries and… You get the picture.
So, while I go do some of that tedious proofing, I’ll let Slim Randles entertain you. This essay resonated with me on two counts. I did learn how to gun it down my driveway when I lived in the country. There were lots of holes. And I really appreciate the bit of inspiration at the end of the story.
Now here’s Slim. Enjoy!
Life is kinda like a corrugated, washboard ranch road, I believe. You give anything enough time and experience and you’ll find that warts and scars and grooves will get worn in it. The down times and the up times can lead to a corrugation in our dirt roads and our lives.
Any good cowboy knows how to handle a washboard road, though. Taken slowly, a pickup truck hits each little dip and rattles its carburetor until it puts a kink in the distributor clamp. It takes forever to get someplace, of course, but it does give a guy time to compose a symphony or a letter to Congress.
There is only one way to handle a washboard road: gun it!
Oh yeah, Mama. You step down on the pedal and kick that monster up to about 52 miles an hour and everything smooths out. Fly, baby, fly.
We hit only the high spots on the road and live a bit daringly, challenging the existence of any possible oilpan-killing rock ahead. The country slips by more excitingly and a driver tends to grin a lot.
And in life, we can wallow forever in the slow and low stuff and take ages to get somewhere, or we can floor it, give a yell, and skip along on the high spots.
Somehow, that sounds like more fun.
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Feet sore from all that walking? Hey, just sit on a rock and sprinkle some “Foot’s Achin’” powder on them. The secret’s in the sitting.
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Check out all of Slim’s award-winning books at his Goodreads Page and in better bookstores and bunkhouses throughout the free world.
All of the posts here are from his syndicated column, Home Country that is read in hundreds of newspapers across the country. I am always happy to have him share his wit and wisdom here.
Slim Randles is a veteran newspaperman, hunting guide, cowboy and dog musher. He was a feature writer and columnist for The Anchorage Daily News for 10 years and guided hunters in the Alaska Range and the Talkeetna Mountains. A resident of New Mexico now for more than 30 years, Randles is the prize-winning author of a dozen books, and is host of two podcasts and a television program.
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That’s all for today folks. We’re heading into the weekend, and I hope it’s a good one for you. Be safe! Be happy!