Bowen: Oh, hell yes! Wake of Vultures was born of a late night tweet in which I decided I wanted to write Lonesome Dove but with monsters and heroes who weren’t white guys. The idea stuck with me, hard, and I decided that if I was going to flip a table, I should flip ALL THE TABLES. In Nettie, I wanted to craft a hero who would face every single kind of discrimination and hardship in the Old West and still triumph. She begins as a half-black, half-Comanche girl kept as a slave by a pair of abusive drunks, and she goes on to realize that what she wants most in life is to be a cowpoke and live as a man. I learned that I had been playing it safe in other books, not putting my protagonists in too much pain. But torturing Nettie and watching her kick ass is a pure joy and has helped me level up as a writer. Now, instead of thinking, “What happens next?”, I think, “How can I take away everything she loves, and how can she still come out victorious?”

Gilman: I didn’t so much want to shake them up as step around them. By setting by story in 1800-1802, I’m working before the “Old West” that we recognize today was established. An area that hadn’t been surveyed by the east yet, much less colonized or claimed… so a lot of the tropes we automatically assume are there—weren’t, yet.

That wasn’t intentional. I’d been using the Louisiana Purchase as my story-point, since it was an interesting pivot for the continent (history major, here. So much of who we are as a nation can be traced back to this moment, both politically and emotionally, for good and for ill). But my research quickly reminded me that, for example, the Colt “Six Shooter” so beloved of the Western wasn’t mass produced until 1832, and even the flintlock revolver was 1814. So my characters would be restricted to single-shot rifles and blunderbuss pistols—with a 14″ muzzle, not exactly useful for the quick draw! Take away the Western iconic gunfighter, lawman, and cavalry (not to mention the affiliated townspeople)…what do you have?

The explorer. The dreamer. The builder. And, yes, the order-bringer, in the lawful neutral sense of the word. Fortunately, those were the people who interested me.

Files: My route to the Western led directly through Slash Canyon, so yeah, I guess I was looking to mess things up from the start—but then again, when you deliberately gay up a narrative that’s already homocentric and homosocial by nature, how far are you actually moving away from the original? I went into my first book, A Book of Tongues, with the deliberate intent of making my main character a full-bore Billy the Kid kind of guy, unrepentantly murderous, peacock-flamboyant and viper-deadly, anti-authoritarian to the point of perversity but also completely and absolutely “frilly”…a dude who, if rap had been invented yet, would be apt to declaim in public that he like[d] big dudes and [he] cannot lie, or [he] could but [he] ain’t gonna try, mainly for the pleasure of shooting any fool dumb enough to object. That was Chess Pargeter, the human engine whose doomed relationship with fallen preacher turned hexslinger Reverend Rook drives the entire trilogy.

As I got further into even that first book, however, I started thinking about trying to redress other imbalances. I made up a literal magical Native person character, the Diné shaman Grandma, just so that I could have her do the opposite of what she’d be expected to do in a “normal” Western; instead of mentoring the Rev, she observed him from afar long enough to figure out how dangerous he was, then lied to him to get him close enough to kill. My Big Bad turned out to be an amalgamated creature constructed from worship-hungry indigenous archetypes that had eaten each other after “death,” named after the Mayan moon goddess Ixchel but also containing all the most bloodthirsty aspects of a bunch of Mexica goddesses, whose transition from human sacrifice to total inhumanity predicts what could happen to any magician if they become more interested in predation and power than making sure the world around them survives the imbalance they create by simply existing. Trying to do due diligence and be respectful to all three cultures was a challenge I was proud to meet, though I’m sure I screwed up here and there, for which I apologize.

By the next book I was playing around with situational bisexuality, lesbianism, and genderfluidity, introducing a character (Yancey Colder Kloves, an innkeeper’s daughter who quick grew to become the third-most important person in the whole shebang) who hopefully made the whole thing slightly less of a massive bag of dicks, and trying my best to make even the people I’d originally brought in as little more than pulpy local colour into honest-to-god human beings, with character development and everything. Near the end, I was even trying to make a distinction between zealous Christian characters whose faith was genuine but who made bad decisions and the sort of straight-on status quo hypocrites you expect in these tales. I also fell down a burning ring of shaky world-building here and there, but was hopefully able to extricate myself without looking completely ridiculous.

One of the biggest things I learned from the whole experience was that although the Western looks like a “simple” genre, it’s really anything but. Adding historical detail and trying to keep it fresh but valid will take you down one rabbit hole, while adding realistic psychological detail but trying to keep it true to the period will take you down another; trying to make sure no character falls into the easy trap of “heroes” vs. “villains” is yet another challenge, as is trying to create action and maintain pace, to sketch spectacle without allowing things to flatten out. I don’t even begin to know how other people do it, especially if the structural changes they’re trying to incorporate involve more than crossbreeding your basic horse opera with black magic and gay romance.

Bear: I certainly set out to give a more realistic picture of the American west than we usually get in the motion pictures, which are extraordinarily white-washed and Bowdlerized. The American west was a very diverse (and very stratified) society, and so many of the people who made it up are erased from the narrative, the Myth of the West. (Which I think in general is a pretty toxic myth on a lot of levels.) I did want to show some classic Western tropes from the point of view of the people who are usually treated as set dressing, to give them a subject position.

And once I found out about the history of prostitution in Seattle and San Francisco, well, the setting for Karen Memory was pretty much set and done.

And finally, the Western story obviously comes with a certain amount of baggage, and the genre has a problematic legacy. How did you grapple with this in writing your own Western?

Bowen: I started Nettie out in isolation, which means she was, philosophically, a nearly blank slate. She was taught very little and kept outside of the mores of society and religion, which means she doesn’t have the built-in prejudices most people of her time would. The book is in tight third person, which means the narration is in Nettie’s voice, mostly, and allows me to show how she reasons through her various problems and her growing understanding of herself and her place in the world. She’s never encountered any spectrum outside of miserable heteronormativity, so she’s able to reason that there’s nothing wrong with the fact that she’s attracted to both sexes and prefers to live as a man. She’s been taught she’s ugly and that being non-white is a bad thing, but she reasons that since the white folks who raised her aren’t worth a damn, their teachings about race aren’t worth a damn either. Nettie ultimately decides that a person’s worth is based not on what they look like or who they love, but in how they treat people and animals and what they contribute to the world. She does face insult and discrimination, but she has a strong core of self-worth and rises to the occasion as she grows.

In book two, Conspiracy of Ravens, which I’m writing now, it was important to me that Nettie make the mental leap from thinking of herself as a woman to accepting himself as a man, and I was really excited to write that bridge and change his pronouns to he/him. It is odd to have him think of women as basically useless, therefore disparaging my own gender, but it’s important to me to stay true to the character and his feelings… while slyly using women in the story to up his estimation of female worth.

Files: As I’ve tried to address somewhat in the paragraphs above, the difficulty of providing representation is always going to be that readers will automatically assume you intend your characters to be representative of their own particular identity, their group, their sub-set—and this is only going to get worse when you’re working in a genre rightly infamous for its classic use of racist shorthand. What always helps, however, is if you do your level best to make sure your gay character isn’t the only one within sight, or your female character can’t be somehow assumed to symbolize all female characters, and so on. Don’t tell stories that make people feel bad about who they think they are, if you can help it; that’s the basic principle. It’s hard, I guess, but it’s not that hard.

Because I write horror, for example, I struggle with the perception that since a lot of my characters are “bad people,” I must therefore have created them in order to prove that every person who shares their traits must be equally “bad.” In the Hexslinger Series, one of the ways I tried to get around this was by making sure Chess Pargeter eventually (spoiler alert!) gets to the point in his life where he doesn’t shoot first and ask questions never, or act like he thinks being annoying warrants the death penalty. Over the course of all three books, he makes and keeps friendships, learns to value other people’s happiness, changes enough so that he’s willing to make sacrifices on their behalf which cost him dearly, grieves love’s loss yet takes the risk of loving again.

None of which necessarily makes him a “good” person per se, or substantially different from his original self, but definitely does make him better, or at least recognizably human—and that’s all I was going for, really, in terms of not only Chess, but every other character he shares these books with.