Well, I did it again: led the Seven-Sentence Short Story workshop (created by science fiction and fantasy author James van Pelt) at a writing conference, this time, Wordbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta. Here’s the story I …
It’s time for this year’s Kickstarter to fund Shapers of Worlds Volume V, the fifth in the series of anthologies featuring science fiction and fantasy by authors who were guests on my Aurora Award-winning podcast, The …
It takes money to publish books, and most of that money flows out the door before the book is released and sales begin, so my publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, is turning to Crowdfundr to help …
Shapers of Worlds Volume IV, the fourth anthology featuring authors who were guests on my podcast, The Worldshapers, is now available everywhere, including directly from Shadowpaw Press. Here’s a handy universal URL with links to …
My publishing company, Shadowpaw Press, has three great titles coming out in the first two months of 2024, all of them science fiction or fantasy. The first two, The Good Soldier by Nir Yaniv and …
Here’s another seven-sentence short story! I ran the workshop again at Ganbatte, an anime convention in Saskatoon. It went well, and here’s the one I created, again with the instructions, created by noted SF short-story …
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Another taste of that other Edward Willett
This seems to be my week for coming across complete facsimiles of my 19th-century namesake’s books. Hard on the heels of the his biography of Ulysses S. Grant, I’ve found a facsimile of one of his more typical titles, a “dime novel” called “Wide-Awake George, the Boy Pioneer.”
You can read the whole thing in PDF format, but here’s how it starts:
Chapter 1: Welcoming a New Settler
“This is my first act of ownership!”
As George Denston spoke he struck his ax into a tall young white oak tree.
Near him stood his mother, with his sister Lucy, a fine girl of sixteen. A litle nearer was his brother Ben, a bright boy of fourteen. George himself was a tall and manly young fellow of eighteen.
He had become the head of the family, and felt himself equal to his responsiblities.
After the death of his father the farm in Indiana had been sold under a mortgage, and George, who had taken the direction of affairs, advised a move to South-western Arkansas, where he had traveled, and where a friend of his had offered him a section of land at a low price and on easy terms. The offer had been accepted, and the move had been made.
A little later on we get a taste of the local dialect, when a fellow shows up in a coonskin cap and “a ragged suit of butternut jeans,” a man whose “dark face had never been touched by a razor” and whose hair “looked as if it had never made the acquaintance of a comb”:
George greeted him politely, but he took no notice of the salutation.
“Wot are you cuttin’ my timmer fur, young feller?” he asked.
Before the end of the first page, our young hero and his brother have come under rifle fire, and the adventure is really off and running!
Clearly, Edward Willett was a writer after my own heart, as well as name!
Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/11/another-taste-of-that-other-edward-willett/
