Thank You

Hi, its me again.
I want to say thank you to everyone who read what I had to say. And the same to those who made a comment.
My day was good. Some of my class showed an interest in the book.
I did find another boy who read cowboy books. He didn't say anything because he wasn't sure what people would say.
I might do this again. Blogging I mean.
Thank you.
Chantel

Wild West Monday is today

Hi my name is Chantel and I have taken over granddad's blog for today.

I am 16 and I have a problem.

A lot of people say that kids like me are always on their mobile phones or playing on our computers or watching tv or dvds. Yes, we do those things and I go to chat sites just like others. We are teenagers. It is what we do.

Some of us read as well. I do. And I have read westerns.

I have read the things that people say in blogs and chat boards about young people. You can't get us to be interested in things if people put us into boxes and say something different. The message just defeats itself.

My granddad has a bookcase full of westerns and I borrow one now and again. How many people say that they write or read westerns because their dads did?

I read an Edge book once. It was violent and it was gory. There was a bit where a man got shot by a shotgun and what he had for breakfast fell out. Disgusting. But you know what I learned?what guns and knives can do to a person. I am so anti-knife and anti-gun today.

But in westerns it is what life was like.

And westerns are not just a man thing. That is so sexist. I'm sure I'm not the only girl who reads them. And there are women western writers.

Today I am taking a western to school. It deals with child abuse and what it can do to people. It is something that we can relate to. It's called The Devil's Rider.

Thank you for reading this.

Wild West Monday - Monday March 2nd 2009

Gary Dobbs in his blog on The Tainted Archive has set the date for the next Wild West Monday.
It is better to read his blog for more information.
For one, I will be out there again because I believe that it is time that bookstores stopped dictating what we read. To me a bookstore is a place that sells books - and that it should cater for all tastes - that is the purpose of a bookshop.

In my interview with Michael D. George he mentioned that books shops no longer catered to the masculine genres.
I still agree with that comment.
So I'm going to change genres for a moment.
Where are the war novels?
Sure, you can buy war books in the non-fiction section but where are the war novels? There was a time when Robert Hale Ltd published war fiction but that market dwindled away to nothing when book shops stopped selling them.
The horror writer Shaun Hutson cut his teeth with war fiction; as Samuel P. Bishop he wrote the three 'Track' western novels again in a climate when the western was fading from the shelves.
So if you don't want the same fate for the western then, please, do something about it.
Nothing happens, in this world, unless you allow it to happen.