Sinks Canyon Mystery

About the Book

This simple little adventure tale was originally written as a “juvenile novel” in 1964 while I was a teacher in Lander, Wyoming. It didn’t impress publishers, so I put it aside and later moved to Colorado and stored the manuscript in the attic and lost track of it. Decades passed, but I persistently thought of rewriting my book, not to sell, necessarily, but for my own gratification, and I pondered how it could be better. I found the manuscript in early 2007, read it one more time and immediately set to work. The result was a complete revision, a total re-write other than the title, the locale and the basic plot. Because I was no longer hampered by trying to satisfy an editor or agent, I developed a style which frequently matches the way I really think and talk. (Some people who know me are thinking, Yeah, right: disorganized, repetitive, foolish, irreverent, cliché-ridden, etc., etc.) Anyway, I was satisfied with the result. If you can read through the whole thing without losing interest or throwing up, then I feel that I have achieved my goal of becoming a bona fide novelist.

About the Author

My writing career began in a one-room country schoolhouse in South Dakota where I scribbled short Western stories in little spiral notebooks and charged my classmates a penny or two to read them. My ambition to be an author was delayed by college, Air Force, marriage with children and other distractions. Eventually, while teaching English in Lander, Wyoming, I succeded in writing Duel Decision, using a pseudonym: Milo Grant. It was not published. Years later (2008) I did publish a juvenile novel (Sinks Canyon Mystery) under my own name. In that story, one of the characters spent his spare time writing a rather racy Western novel. It was only natural that I named that character “Milo Grant” and the book he was writing was, of course, Duel Decision! Thus we have a unique situation in which a fi ctional character wrote a book which became real--this one. RLN (Milo Grant)