A Conversation with Authors Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

We are delighted to welcome authors Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall to Omnimystery News today.

Clark and Kathleen's fourth and final book in their "Cowboy and Vampire" series is The Last Sunset (Pumpjack Press; June 2016 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with them talking about it.

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Omnimystery News: Tell us a little more about the lead characters of the Cowboy and Vampire books. What is it about them that appeal to you as writers?

Photo provided courtesy of
Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall: The books feature two main characters: Tucker and Lizzie. Tucker is a hard-luck cowboy from tiny LonePine, Wyoming, just trying to scrape together enough cash to keep himself in whiskey and his overly-sensitive dog Rex in kibble. Lizzie is a reporter from New York, with a short fuse, a growing reputation as a rising star in the world of feature journalism and an ancient, undead secret in her blood. The series follows their relationship as they try to navigate an unlikely romance while fending off threats — both physical and existential — from the vampire and human world.

The draw for us as writers was the many angles to really dig into an "opposites attract" romantic storyline. He's from a very small town — population 438. She's from the ultimate big city. He's used to wide open spaces, manual labor, cheap whiskey and John Wayne movies. She's used to the hustle and flow of urban life, creative and cerebral labor, expensive Pinot and theater.

Of course, that sounds like the set up, maybe with different clothes, for any "cultures clash," "fish out of water" romance, but we super-charged it with paranormal and occult elements that clawed past the expected to an even deeper level: the unconscious. By crashing together two tried and true archetypes, cowboys and vampires, we were able to explore the tension pre-loaded into these cultural heavyweights. Cowboys are stoic and laconic and hard working, forever standing up for the little guy and what's right. Vampires are the epitome of decadence and decay, cunning and prone to hyperbole and forever eating the little guy and perverting what's right. It's a rich, juicy vein to sink our literary teeth into.

And of course, the opposites attract story line appealed from the outset because of our own romantic relationship — a cowboy and a very urban writer. Tucker and Lizzie became almost proxies to explore the powerful currents, pitfalls and shadowy corners of our own relationship.

OMN: How have Tucker and Lizzie developed over the course of the series?

CH/KM: Our two main characters change and evolve to, we hope, reflect the evolving nature of their relationship, culminating in the ominously titled The Last Sunset. Still, they — and their love for each other — didn't change very much outside of learning what they were willing to sacrifice, and trying to overcome loss and grief together and alone.

One character that did change quite a bit in the four books is the blood-thirsty and delightfully amoral Elita. Introduced early in book one (she actually has the first line in the prologue), she quickly became a fan favorite due to her wit and hedonistic proclivities — think Dorothy Parker meets undead Betty Page. She tried to murder Tucker, twice, almost ate his dog Rex, and left Lizzie to waste away in the streets of New York. But by the end of the series in book four, she's become a champion for equal undead rights (there's a whole Royals versus Reptiles civil war throughout), become Lizzie's best (only?) friend and experienced a level of empathy — out of love and grief — disproportionate to her long, undead existence. Of course, her compassion is expressed in true undead manner: sex and violence.

OMN: Into which genre would you place this series?

CH/KM: Our books have been called everything from paranormal romance to occult thrillers, but we consider them Western Gothic. It's a fairly narrow field, given that we might be the only authors working in it, ever, but it's appropriate. Our books transplant the moody, death-obsessed themes of classic gothic fiction (think Castle of Otranto or, of course, Dracula) to the wide open, inspiring vistas of the modern west (Riders of the Purple Sage, or All the Pretty Horses). Add in the quirky humor natural to small towns and, whatever the label, we think it makes for an unforgettable experience reading experience.

OMN: Give us a summary of The Last Sunset in a tweet.

CH/KM: Cowboys, vampires, rodeos, sex, violence, whiskey, survivalists, pancakes, death cults and one long-suffering cow dog named Rex. #lastsunset

OMN: Describe your writing process for us.

CH/KM: We have been writing — together and separately, creatively and professionally — for decades now. With paychecks, sanity and romance often hanging in the balance, getting it mostly right the first time is important. We don't leave much to chance any more when it comes to first drafts, otherwise we risk letting enthusiasm and speed carry the whole thing off the rails. It's a painful and time-consuming process when the plot weaves into some blind alley or black hole that requires a restructuring or, worse, a full rewrite.

It's all about fidelity to good process. First we develop in-depth character sketches for new characters, including mannerisms and physical description and life details. Then we build a pretty strong plot with a solid idea of how the book begins, where the characters go, and how it ends. Next up comes a chapter by chapter line up. It's loose enough to allow creativity, but focused enough to keep us moving through it at a pretty brisk pace.

If we stick to the process, we end up with a first draft that is so good, so polished, so logically consistent, so grounded in classic storytelling techniques, that it only requires a few hundred full edits and reviews to whip it into shape.

As we do the marketing for The Last Sunset, we're starting a new series that's firmly in the mystery genre, and thanks to the deep character sketches, we know more about the two protagonists (and yes, we're writing about a couple again), than we do some of our closest friends. Which suggests we should make more friends.

OMN: Where do you most often find yourself writing?

CH/KM: We always say we can write anywhere, and probably could. Every time we travel to the coast, or the high desert, or the mountains, or anywhere else of beauty the Pacific Northwest has to offer — and there are lots! — we always take out computers. But the truth is, we don't use them. Sure, we tap a few notes on our phones that always look so cryptic and tantalizing later ("b sure 2 check cut skull sticker shock") or capture a few lines of poetry in notebooks ("lazy tornadoes of newspaper leaves"), but that's not when the magic happens.

The magic is in the routine, the grinding, brain-draining long hours spent parked in the living room of our unassuming little townhouse, on an exceptionally comfy brown couch and an equally comfortable overstuffed red chair. Good writing takes a lot of time and, like dying in a car crash, the odds are that it's going to happen closer to home.

OMN: How important is the setting to the series?

CH/KM: Our books are all set in fictional LonePine, Wyoming, population 438. It's based on a wonderful amalgam of some of our favorite small towns:

First and foremost is Whitehall, Montana, where Clark grew up. It was actually about 20 miles from the ranch, and seemed like a fairly bustling place at the time. It wasn't. Favorite memory: eating corndogs and the A&W and visiting the feed store (memorialized in The Last Sunset).

Next is Big Piney, Wyoming, an even smaller town where Clark's dad worked for many years. Favorite memory: the Radio Shack mall, memorialized in Blood and Whiskey, and also donuts.

Another small town we're fond of us Plush, Oregon. It might be the smallest of all, but we had a wonderful time there mining for sunstones, Oregon's state gemstone. The sunstones play a pivotal part in Blood and Whiskey, and also show up in The Last Sunset.

Last but not least are the countless small towns we've visited on awesome road trips through the west: Fossil, Frenchglen, Shaniko, Cougar and Madras. That last town is deathly important to The Cowboy and the Vampire Collection, because it was at a truckstop there where we tried to overcome a two-year separation and bring our hearts and minds together for a lifelong creative partnership. We sat at a booth chain smoking (which is very bad for you, and we've since stopped) and drinking truckstop coffee while sketching out the plot for the first book on a paper placemat, in crayon. We used a lot of black and red.

OMN: How did you come up with the titles of the books in this series?

CH/KM: This is going to sound weird, but coming up with the title is often the most agonizing part of the process for us. You want a title to do so much: catch eyes, hook interest, hint at the plot without giving anything away, resonate emotionally, stand out in the crowd, speak to the humor, horror, romance and action packed into each book, roll off the tongue and stand for all eternity. A simple truth we've learned along the way is that the more you expect from the fewer words, the more exhausting and tortuous the process of settling on them.

Book one, The Cowboy and the Vampire: A Very Unusual Romance, came to us relatively easily. The cowboy and vampire part is pretty self-explanatory — truth in advertising and setting off the tension and humor in the books — and the rest was serendipity. While researching vampires at the Library of Congress years ago (remember, our first book came out way before Twilight and True Romance), we saw an old book with "A Very Unusual Romance" in the title. It was one of those vintage beauties that smells a little mildewy, with a thick green cover and gold leaf on the title. We were smitten.

The universe has been less kind ever since.

Trying to keep a short, powerful title that evokes something of the gothic and western part of our series has been tortuous. For each of the next three books, we came up with the plot and started writing, and kept a separate list of potential titles in the plot tracker/style guide document (we use that to keep the plot ordered, and to keep track of names, places, character descriptions, etc., and a running list of stylistic conventions). It gets used a lot and the rule is, every time one of us opens the file, we have to plop in a new title idea.

For the second book, Blood and Whiskey, we picked something that symbolized the crashing together of cultures as Tucker and Lizzie settled in to their new romance and the vampire and cowboy worlds came together. And we liked the juxtaposition of the beverages of choice between the two characters and worlds, and the hint of dark nights of hedonism for both.

The third book, Rough Trails and Shallow Graves, we finally decided on this pair of concepts to capture the trouble their relationship was facing, sync up with the tragedy at the heart of the book, and give a weird, subliminal sense of hope because, at least for the undead, a shallow grave is only a temporary inconvenience, and one that can be an undead life-saver.

For the fourth book, we tapped into the associations loaded into "sunset" for both cowboys (for ever riding off into them) and vampires (who come to life at them). And it hints at the culminating showdown between them and their love. It fits perfectly, but it took us 57 tries on our list of titles to get there. Some of them were pretty good (Tumbleweeds and Tombstones, A Fist Full of Darkness) but some of them were pretty bad (Requiem for Rustlers and Revenants, Sagebrush Fugue).

OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?

CH/KM: When Clark really picked up the reading bug, he was living on a ranch in Montana and read every book Louis L'Amour wrote, most of them three times, which obviously cemented his love for westerns. He tells the story, probably much to his parents' dismay, of how for a class assignment on who you most admire, he chose Louis L'Amour. As other kids proudly wrote about their moms or their dads, or Ronald Reagan, he profiled L'Amour. His English teacher: "Uhm, he's a fine author."

As for Kathleen, she read voraciously as a girl. As a young child, it was Nancy Drew, Archie comics and multiple stripped down children's versions of the plot lines of Shakespeare plays and the Greek myths. Her reading habits turned decidedly darker after she grew unexpectedly large breasts, and she switched at that point to the Russian masters, spending her adolescence warping her brain by thinking too much about the nature of the human soul, until the rest of her body caught up to her boobs. She's still in recovery from her adolescent reading patterns.

OMN: What do you watch on television for entertainment?

CH/KM: We're crazy about Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, a wonderful mystery series set in 1920s Australia. We're also big fans of Longmire, a police procedural set in the modern west (based on the Craig Johnson books) and Jessica Jones. Clearly, we're into mystery series with unusual quirks.

OMN: What's next for you?

CH/KM: After almost two decades of living in the undead world (remember, book one first came out in 1999, way before True Blood and Twilight), we're leaving LonePine and the vampires behind after The Last Sunset. We are working on a new series (title TBD: see the question above) that we're very excited about. It's a departure from the Western Gothic genre, moving us squarely into the realm of mystery. It will feature a couple in a strained relationship (sound familiar?) trying to navigate the pitfalls and payoffs of a romantic relationship while the world seems intent on leaving corpses in their path. It's going to be a lot of macabre fun.

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Clark Hays was raised on a ranch in Montana and spent his formative years branding cows, riding horses and writing. His poetry, creative fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many journals, magazines and newspapers. Most recently, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for a short story appearing in Opium magazine.

Kathleen McFall was born and raised in the heart of Washington, D.C. She has worked as a journalist and has published hundreds of articles about natural resources, environmental issues, biomedical research, energy and health care. Previously, she was awarded a fellowship for fiction writing from Oregon Literary Arts.

The authors live in Portland, Oregon.

For more information about the author, please visit their website at CowboyAndVampire.com and their author page on Goodreads, or find their on Facebook and Twitter.

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The Last Sunset by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall

The Cowboy and the Vampire Series

Publisher: Pumpjack Press

Take one long, last look at LonePine, Wyoming, population 438. It's been two years since the vampires quit the quirky little town and things are mostly back to normal — broken dreams and never enough whiskey. But that's about to go to hell.

Hold on tight for a midnight showdown when a psychotic religious order takes the entire town hostage — including Tucker's long-lost brother — to lure Lizzie from her frozen exile in Russia. The mad monks know Lizzie's murder will strand the ruling vampire elite in a disembodied afterlife so the cult can impose their twisted beliefs on the living and undead alike. It's a rip-roarin' stampede as a cowboy and a vampire try to round up the shattered pieces of their unusual romance.

With the fate of the world on the line yet again, can Tucker and Lizzie put aside their broken hearts to face one last sunset together?

Slap leather or reach for the sky.

— The Last Sunset by Clark Hays and Kathleen McFall. Click here to take a Look Inside the book.