Frank's blog

Most Westerns are a snooze-fest. You know the ones. Twenty pages of a guy staring at a cactus. Three chapters dedicated to the "majesty" of a sunset. That’s fine if you want a nap. It’s trash if you want a story. Readers today don’t have time for literary filler. They want pulse-pounding, throat-gripping action. They want characters who bleed and a plot that moves like a bullet train. If you want to read: or write: a novel that people actually finish, you need a different pla

Forget the dusty paperbacks gathering cobwebs in your grandpa’s attic. The Western isn't dead. It's just evolved. Too many readers think "Western" means a boring dude in a white hat shooting a dude in a black hat. Wrong. That’s the old way. That’s the "literary" trap where nothing happens for 400 pages but descriptions of sagebrush. You want fire. You want grit. You want a story that grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the final bullet finds its home. Choosing th

Most adventure novels are trash. There. I said it. They’re filled with plastic characters, predictable explosions, and "action" that feels about as exciting as watching paint dry in a humidity chamber. You read them, you forget them before you’ve even closed the back cover, and you move on to the next piece of literary fluff. But you don’t want fluff. You want a story that haunts you. You want a book that stays in your marrow, making you check over your shoulder when the wind