A few years back, my wife encouraged me to enter a short story contest. I was grinding away as a tree climber and a bike shop employee in Hood River, Oregon, staring down some difficult choices; become a business owner in a trade I was good at but loathed on many levels, or continue cruising along in the mediocrity of someone else’s business. I was beaten and bruised from wrestling trees to the ground, sitting at our coffee table staring into space, when she laid the advertisement in front of me. There was a pen and ink caricature of Hemingway on it. I read the parameters, wrote a quick story over the next few weeks and sent it off, thinking not much of it. A few months later, I learned I’d placed third. Eventually I won that contest. Nice to win, yes, but that wasn’t the surprising juice, the buzz, the jolt of it all. No. That was taking an idea and fleshing it out to the point that its veracity was unquestionable. True? Not entirely…but reeking of truth. Who would have known that inside this square-headed wrecking machine of heart, lung, muscle and bone there was a latent writer waiting to get out? She did.
And so, it’s several years later. A book of short stories is published, a well reviewed novel, and there’s another novel in rough draft. I consider the question: where would I be if Jen did not have faith in me, did not lay that torn piece of magazine in front of me lo so many years ago? I can say, truly, that none of this would have come to be.
So it is with great reverence, love and gratitude that I say thank you to her for the constant faith in me, especially when faith in myself flags.
Two Hours Before Winter is the novel; dark, stormy, frozen…an effective noir morality tale anchored in Northwest indigenous folklore. Not for the squeamish, but certainly for you if you’re still with me…all for less than a trip to your local coffee shop.
Pick it up, read it and for god’s sake, please review it.
Yours in spirit,
Kevin MacGregor Scott
