About

I was a new journalism graduate waiting for that first newspaper job when I saw the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs was seeking short stories for its 1979 anthology of Western fiction. What hopeful young writer could resist? Not me, certainly. So I attacked my old typewriter for a week and produced “Song for a Summer Night” and delivered it a day or two before deadline. At 24, I was cocky on the outside, nervous as a virgin on the inside, and just relieved that I’d finished a story by the deadline. So when the anthology – Writers Forum 6 – appeared and my story was singled out in the forward in glowing, rhapsodic terms, my ego immediately grew to the size of Jupiter and I suddenly wondered whether I was denying the world a great, great literary talent by going into daily journalism? Once I realized the anthology paid nothing except glowing, rhapsodic words, I took the next newspaper job offered to me.

And there I labored for the next forty years, climbing the reporting ladder from chasing police calls in the night to covering the political gunfights in the Colorado Legislature, then on to Washington, D.C., for six years as a congressional and White House reporter, and then back to Southern Colorado for more than two decades of political and government reporting. The walls of my home office are decorated with the awards from the Associated Press and others for my investigative reporting, breaking news, and political coverage. Some of the words on those plaques are even glowing.

And yet. Through it all, I kept working on my fiction. Massively over-written police procedurals, oddball short stories. My patient wife, Barbara, a Princeton grad, read them all, told me my work was wonderful and then suggested, gently, that perhaps editing was needed. A lot of it. I became convinced she was right when rejection letters arrived from professional agents. My literary ego was no longer the size of Jupiter.

The novels showcased here at Peter Roper Books are not those. These books are their adult children. Stories I couldn’t resist telling, stories set in the tumultuous 1960s that are filled with the rock ‘n roll musicians I’ve known over the years, along with the young men who were afraid of dying in Vietnam, and the grown men who found their own ideas about patriotism challenged by a war that seemed both senseless yet lethal.

Other stories, other books are coming. It seems that once I learned how to better focus my story-telling, the stories have lined up to demand my attention, like paratroopers standing at the open door of my writing desk, waiting to jump into your imagination.