PRESS RELEASE: The Time of the Backroads

It was a long time coming—years, in some respects—for the release of The Time of the Backroads: A Ryland Creek novel, the sixth book in the Ryland Creek saga.

Backroads—while still involving the forests of Upstate New York—is my first novel with a true “time slip.”  But I’m not the first Upstate New Yorker to pen such a tale. While I tend to think of H.G. Wells novel, The Time Machine, published in 1895, as the first time-travel novel, in truth, a resident of Elmira, NY (about 20 miles east of Painted Post), Samuel Clemens (aka, Mark Twain) wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court six years earlier, which also dealt with someone traveling back in time.

Thus, Backroads offered a golden opportunity to mesh local history, legend, and (of course) hounds and chasing raccoon, all into one. Further, while the Ryland Creek novels deal with the enduring bond between hunter and hound, what about a story where the man and his dog begin essentially hating each other? (When telling my very good friend, Carey, about this concept over a year ago, I couldn’t stop laughing.)

How does that hunter-hound relationship end? Well, you’ll have to read the book.

The Time of the Backroads is available at all major book retailers.

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