Love Bytes is happy to have author Julia Talbot here today to talk with us all about her upcoming book, To Hell You Ride.
Thanks for dropping by the blog, Julia!
Hey y’all!
I’m Julia Talbot, and Love Bytes is letting me hang out and talk about my rerelease from Dreamspinner Press, To Hell You Ride.
An Old West historical, To Hell You Ride is set in Telluride, Colorado, which started out as a mining town. It’s a ski town now, but it was a mining town for a long time. Big Roy, who’s one of my main characters works in a gold mine called the Tomboy.
I did a lot on research on gold mines when I was writing this book. I visited the Bachelor-Syracuse mine in Ouray and took a mine car train down into the depths of a darkness I’d never experienced before. Gold mining was a dangerous, physically exhausting profession. If you were strong like Big Roy, you swung a pick axe all day. If you were small or young, you set charges or held the pins that the axe men hit with their hammers. Broken bones, cave-ins, and poison gasses were common and life expectancy was short.
One of the most amazing thing I found during my research, though, was how many miners could actually read, which was a tough skill to learn back then, and how many struck up romantic relationships with other men. I read a series of love letters between two miners that brought tears to my eyes, especially since the last letter was written after one of the miners had passed away, and was written as a tribute. That really influenced the character of Big Roy for me (well, that and the song Big John) because I wanted him to be a reader and a romantic and a lover of theater. For a poor man, he’s rich in literature.
That makes him so much more interesting to actor Clancy.
Anyway, I hope you’ll take a chance on Roy and Clancy!
XXOO
Julia
BUY LINKS
Blurb:
Big Roy is a hard-rock miner with a not-so-secret love for the theater, so when he hears a new troupe of actors are coming to the Telluride Opera House to put on a Shakespeare play, he saddles his mule and makes the trek into town to see it. The play doesn’t disappoint, but the beautiful lead actor, Edward Clancy, certainly does. Clancy is rude and arrogant, and Roy figures he’d never have a chance with such a man. He’s wrong, because Clancy needs some entertainment himself, being stuck in a hellish mining town for the long, snowy winter. Come spring, though, Clancy knows he’s going to want to move on, and he thinks Roy will be easy to forget. Then tragedy hits, and Clancy has to rethink his entire life. Can these two strike gold?
Second Edition
First Edition Published by SCREWDRIVER An imprint of Torquere Press, January 2007.
Julia Talbot lives in the great Southwest, where there is hot and cold running rodeo, cowboys, and everything from meat and potatoes to the best Tex-Mex. A full time author, Julia has been published by Dreamspinner Press and Changeling Press. She believes that everyone deserves a happy ending, so she writes about love without limits, where boys love boys, girls love girls, and boys and girls get together to get wild, especially when her crazy paranormal characters are involved.
Find her on the web at www.juliatalbot.com