I can't go to bed tonight without also mentioning my friends A B "Bud" Guthrie and Frank Bonham. Bud was always going to give a talk at one of my writing classes but always ran into a road block. Finally, he said "Ken, tell 'em for me that I spent all day on one sentence and felt like I'd done a good day's work."
That, guys, was a writer!
He also said that for every character whom he was writing about, he wrote from that character's point of view. That practice backfired on him when he created "Brother Weatherby," a Methodist preacher, as a comic foil in The Way West. "Weatherby" became a somewhat more sympathetic character than Bud had created him to be.
For the last year or so of his life, I drove Frank to his doctor appointments � a chore that his wife didn't like to be bothered with. I ran the ballistics numbers for the killer's long rifle shot in Frank's last novel, The Eye of the Hunter. That's the kind of attention to fine detail that makes a good writer good.
Frank was a very creative and artistic novelty wood-worker. I still have (I hope!) one of his "Skull Valley sardines," a wooden butter knife. (He lived in Skull Valley, near Bill Ruger's ranch.)
