Out of all the books I’ve written (published) half of them revolve around Cowboys. When it came time for the first book (Second Chances) I knew how I wanted it to go, the “theme”, the major plot points and whatnot were all there in the back of my mind. I even knew who and why the bad guy was the bad guy. One thing he was not—despite being in my western contemporary—was a *true* cowboy. Sure, he grew up in the same town as the hero in the book, they went to school together and everything. And while the hero was a cowboy in practice and spirit, the bad guy not so much. In the sequel, pretty much the same thing. The hero is a cowboy. The bad guy—well, I don’t want to spoil anything if you haven't read it, but suffice it to say so not a cowboy.

I think when I wrote those I had a hard time wrapping my head around someone who could live up to the cowboy code and then be bad on top of it all. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read plenty of books where that’s the case. I’ve seen every episode of just about every western TV show from the 60s and 70s (we didn’t have cable when I was in school and the UHF channels played all those reruns all the time—black and white was my friend in the 80s ).

I am working on a new book and have been debating who the culprit of it all will be (I am what you call a pantster—I plot only the basic premise of the story) and I may have to really bend my thinking to make the bad guy be a cowboy. The one who is helping out at every town function. Maybe not the first to lend a hand but there pretty quick. And yet he’s going to have this deep dark secret of hatred and vengeance that will put his fellow town’s people on jeopardy. Someone like him is a little scarier. When you have the bad guy that’s always bad, always skulking you aren’t surprised when he turns the evil on the H/H. But when you have a best friend, brother, cousin, neighbor who they’d depended on so many times in the past …

Hmm… I think I may have worked out a big chunk of my plot right there (thanks ever so much for letting me do that ).

So even though there’s a code, or maybe because there’s a code and he (or she) feels slighted by it, you can have a cowboy who lives it until he some switch flips it and he breaks it all for revenge or plain old greed.