The Time of the Backroads: A Ryland Creek Novel
A Long Time Coming . . .
Yes, this story truly 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" and introduces a new character, retired Game Warden Fulton Wainwright.
But I’m not the first Upstate New Yorker to pen such a tale of time travel. While I tend to think of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, published in 1895, as the first time-travel novel, in truth, a resident of Elmira, NY (about 15 miles west of Painted Post), Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court six years earlier.
Thus, Backroads offered a golden opportunity to mesh local history, legend, and (of course) hounds and chasing raccoon, all into one.
With Something of a Twist . . .
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 before the story was finished, I couldn’t stop laughing.)
How does this tale's hunter-hound relationship end? Well, you’ll have to read the book.
Yes, this story truly 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" and introduces a new character, retired Game Warden Fulton Wainwright.
But I’m not the first Upstate New Yorker to pen such a tale of time travel. While I tend to think of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, published in 1895, as the first time-travel novel, in truth, a resident of Elmira, NY (about 15 miles west of Painted Post), Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain) wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court six years earlier.
Thus, Backroads offered a golden opportunity to mesh local history, legend, and (of course) hounds and chasing raccoon, all into one.
With Something of a Twist . . .
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 before the story was finished, I couldn’t stop laughing.)
How does this tale's hunter-hound relationship end? Well, you’ll have to read the book.
Fiddleheads in the springtime swamps of Painted Post
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