Today, I’ve decided to write about the two Westerns I’ve authored.  What’s that?  You didn’t know I wrote Westerns?  Yes—gasp!—Toni V. Sweeney once, in her deep, dark past, wrote Westerns.  Two—count them—two of them.  Though I had to get them classified as Western Romances to get them published, I really don’t think they fit that criteria.  Both stories are full of grief and violence, but—though not necessarily the type qualifying as the typical HEA--both do have relatively happy endings, and by that I mean a Toni V. Sweeney Happy Ending…where several people are left alive and still standing…bittersweet, in other words.  They were written with a single purpose in mind:  the celebration of Nebraska’s sesquicentennial of statehood. That year, you couldn’t turn on a TV or radio or pick up a newspaper without seeing celebration…celebration…CELEBRATION!  Caught up in the fervor,  I did my literary best to contribute and came up with Walk the Shadow Trail and Vengeance from Eden. (The fact that at the time I was dating a man who liked Westerns didn’t hurt, either.  He offered his expert opinion on some of the dialogue.)

Walks the Shadow Trail’s publication came at a time when I needed a little bolstering.  I was preparing for hip surgery, to replace the prosthesis which I’d possessed since age 28 and had now worn out.  The day before my surgery, I received a letter from a publisher accepting my novel.  The only problem was, I’d sent the manuscript in a year before and had forgotten about it, so for a few moments, I didn’t know what story he meant!  Vengeance from Eden also had its own drama.  My computer crashed beyond resurrection just as I was in the middle of running the hardcopy (this was before electronic submissions) and I had to run out and buy another computer to access the rest of the story on a floppy disk.

Both stories are set in Nebraska in the late part of the Nineteenth Century.  Both concern men facing serious choices in their lives; how they handle them affects not only their  own existences but that of the people who follow them.

In Walk the Shadow Trail, impoverished German Baron Karl Wilhelm von Brandt comes to America to avoid the debt his wastrel father left behind after killing himself.  With the assistance of a Pawnee halfbreed who becomes his best friend, Will becomes a successful rancher in the Nebraska Territory but grief awaits him when he marries Summer Woman, the daughter of a Pawnee chief.

Vengeance from Eden featured another character who had life-changing choices to make.  Lucas Brennan is a man who’s been alone most of his life, isolated on the ranch he inherited from his parents who died when he was twelve.  The father of a half-Pawnee son, he travels back to Savannah to accept an inheritance from his uncle.  There, he meets Marietta Sylvestre, a Southern belle almost half his age, and takes her as a bride back to Nebraska.  For a year, Luke is happier than a man can be and then—in a few hours—everything falls apart as hatred and prejudice intrude into his life.

These two novels earned me a listing as a Nebraska writer on the Creighton University website, the Nebraska Center for Writers (http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/NCW/sweeney.htm)  I think they both reflect the Nebraskan mystique and Old West life-style to some extent. Each novel was on the publisher’s list of twenty top-sellers for three months. Both are available as  audio books, e-books, and finally in print from www.double-dragon-ebooks.com, and  in Kindle from from www.amazon.com .

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