June 12, 2025 • 34 mins
Author and editor Beau L'Amour discusses his father Louis L'Amour's work, how he carries his legacy, and some behind the scenes facts of the process.
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Visit Beau's website and check out his work:
http://beaulamour.com/
Keep up with Louis L'Amour's preservation:
https://www.louislamour.com/
Follow Beau on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/BeauDLAmour/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 02 (00:00):
Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima.
Welcome to Writing and Editing,the author-focused podcast that
takes a whole-person approachto everything related to both
writing and editing.
Louis L'Amour's name isrecognized even by those who
wouldn't call themselvesreaders, and his many
contributions to the literarycommunity are still well-loved
and much read.
Continuing that legacy is hisson, Beau L'Amour, and I'm
(00:24):
delighted to have him with us onthe show today.
Well, first, thank you so muchfor being here.
Speaker 00 (00:29):
thank you.
Thank you so much for havingme.
Speaker 02 (00:32):
So what made you first realize that this was
something that you wanted to do?
Or did you maybe have adifferent idea of how to
preserve your father's legacy?
Speaker 00 (00:41):
Neither one of those things really happened.
I had been working a little bitin the publishing business,
doing a little bit of work withthe art department and in the
very early days of audiopublishing.
And my dad passed away and Irecognized that there were an
awful lot of things that neededto be restructured in order to
(01:02):
keep us going on into thefuture.
Our business had been all aboutthe new book.
It always had been the newbook.
And I realized that the entirebacklist needed to be treated
kind of as one unit and that weneeded a publishing program that
looked at all of it kind ofrather than sort of a
(01:23):
scattershot approach.
So it kind of grew out of that.
Speaker 02 (01:27):
Oh, interesting.
I just assumed that maybe therewas always this inkling of an
idea and then you just sort oflaunched it from there.
So that's much different thanwhat I had in mind.
If you want to tell people verybriefly what it is about the
book, Having
Speaker 00 (01:44):
taken over my dad's literary estate and managing
that, we've had to do manydifferent things over the years.
It's really a good idea if youhave a kind of legacy product
that occasionally you pull arabbit or maybe even a
rhinoceros out of the hat andshow it to the publisher so that
they don't start to take youfor granted.
(02:06):
The publisher often has to doexactly the same thing with the
booksellers.
Bye.
So over the years, we've donemany things.
We did a magazine of newWestern short stories for a
while.
We had this very innovativeaudio publishing program where
(02:27):
we did almost all of our workfor many, many years, not so
much any longer, but for manyyears as a radio drama.
So full cast and sound effectsand score and everything else.
And towards the beginning ofthis century, there was a moment
where the publisher had anawful lot of books in their
(02:51):
warehouse that had the wrongprice on them.
They were wanting to up price.
And this was before a lot ofthese shorter print runs and
just-in-time delivery that hasnow become a part of the
business.
And one of the things that wearranged for them to do was to
give over a million books to theU.S.
Armed Forces.
Speaker 01 (03:13):
as
Speaker 00 (03:13):
a gift, but hopefully to start readers off.
You have one kid in a tankreading a book, and maybe in the
next 10 years, you've sold 100books.
So I'm always trying to kind ofspin the next thing and get it
ready to go.
And Louis L'Amour's LostTreasures grew out of a problem
(03:36):
with a particular booksellerabout 10 years ago, who was
complaining that they had us ontheir shelves, but there wasn't
anything new.
We had been publishing books ofunpublished short stories for a
while, but that had eventuallygiven out.
We got to the end of prettymuch everything that my dad had
written and they wantedsomething new.
(03:58):
And the publisher was talkingto them about maybe new covers,
just something to make it lookfresh in some manner to create a
better sense of morale amongstthe store managers.
I've got no idea what exactproblem they were facing.
And I didn't like that verymuch.
And I just thought new bookcovers, I mean, we're always
(04:21):
involved in doing things likethat, but it takes an incredible
effort to try and get all thecovers sort of looking the same
and reflecting
Speaker 02 (04:29):
similar
Speaker 00 (04:30):
values and things like that, because we've got 130
plus books.
Speaker 02 (04:34):
Right.
And then all that backstockthat you'd be left with too, if
you would decide.
Speaker 00 (04:37):
Exactly.
Unknown (04:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 00 (04:38):
Exactly.
And they're not going to let usgive it away to the military
again.
So anyway, what happened was,is we had had a website.
I had taken a whole bunch of mydad's material and we had
created a subscription website.
And you could pay a little bitof money if you were a dyed in
(04:59):
the wool, Louis L'Amour fan, andyou could go in there and you
could find all kinds of earlydrafts of books that had been
produced.
drafts of stories that hadnever been produced,
correspondence, all kinds ofstuff.
We had this kind of wonderfulsetup where you could go in
there and kind of explore theinside of Louis L'Amour's
(05:21):
creative mind.
And it had never beenparticularly popular, especially
in those days, pre-social mediadays, person went on the web,
they did not want to pay foranything.
The attitude we ran into allthe time was, yeah, yeah, I do
it, but it's, you know, you wantwhatever it was, $2.99 a month
or something like this.
(05:41):
And I took that material.
I repackaged it into two newbooks, Louis L'Amour's Lost
Treasures Volume 1 and Volume 2.
Those would be the unfinishedand unpublished short stories or
novels, both.
And I would take the materialthat was my dad's material that
(06:03):
was there, and I would write apiece about it.
After you read it, you'd getto...
section and I would sort ofdescribe why he had written it
and what he was hoping to do.
And then through possibly notesor journal entries or
correspondence, I would say, youknow, this is very likely what
was going to happen with thatparticular story.
(06:25):
So this is how that story wouldbe finished, would play out
this for the unfinished ones.
Some of these stories, therewould be multiple drafts.
So in the book, if the draftsare interestingly different,
I'll give you different draftsso you can see how my dad was
playing around with getting thestory started.
Sometimes there would be abunch of drafts and I would meld
(06:47):
them all into kind of the bestof single version.
And sometimes there'd be anoutline for the book, various
things like that.
Some of these beginnings ofstories are quite long.
There's one piece in therethat's, I think it's 240 pages.
So it's probably almost all ofact one of a relatively big
(07:08):
novel.
So they go from a couple ofpages all the way out to
multiple chapters.
And so we had, those were intwo books.
And then I put together, Iwrote with my dad, I finished an
unfinished novel of his calledNo Traveler Returns, which would
have been his first novel hadhe ever published it and kind of
(07:31):
got it set up so that youunderstood how it fit into his
career.
So there's a piece in thereabout what he was trying to do
with that novel and when it was.
It was written in the late 30s.
And then in about 30 plus ofthe old novels that have been in
print for quite a while, I dida postscript.
And it did the same thing as Idid in Louis L'Amour's Lost
(07:53):
Treasures Volume 1 and 2.
I would try and tell the storybehind the story, what he was
doing, early drafts.
Was there a short story thatinspired this?
What was he going to try and dowith it?
Sometimes I'd write a piece onhim doing Did you ever have
(08:13):
multiple choices for what youwould include as
Speaker 02 (08:25):
postscript material where you had to pick and choose
a little bit?
Speaker 00 (08:29):
Not so much because that's kind of the interesting
thing when you have differentaspects of something, you know,
I could produce one aspect andthen I could talk about another
aspect.
Occasionally there would beseveral of those things.
It wasn't too much of a choice.
I mean, I try not to let thesethings go over 40 pages and I
really don't like them to goless than six.
So, you know, I just kind ofdepend.
Speaker 02 (08:52):
Yeah.
It all makes sense too, to havethat parameter in place just to
figure out where's the readergoing to be comfortable feeling
like they have enough bonusmaterial that it counts as bonus
material versus when it shouldbe almost this whole separate
piece on
Speaker 00 (09:06):
its own?
It's all different.
It's a little hard to say.
I mean, each story has adifferent thing that I'm able to
say about it.
It's very rarely the least bitrepetitive.
Like I said, sometimes it wouldbe research, sometimes it would
be the fight to get aparticular manuscript published,
the walking drum, a kind ofCrusades era adventure story
(09:27):
that my dad was only ablepublished late in his career was
actually written in 1960.
And all the publishers werejust saying, no, Louis, we just
want Westerns.
So there are different trialsand tribulations.
That's so
Speaker 02 (09:42):
fascinating too, because, you know, you think
about it as just, okay, I'mgoing to find the best piece
that matches this book.
I'm going to find this andthis, but know that there are so
many other variables at playand that you do have all this
other personal information whereyou're able to make the most
informed decision too.
Speaker 00 (09:58):
And it's a, you know, a way that hopefully the
casual reader will like reading.
There's definitely a lot ofeducation about the publishing
industry.
I mean, it's about a guydealing with the publishing
industry from 1953 or even alittle bit before to 1988 and
the various adventures that hehad there, what was possible,
(10:21):
what wasn't possible.
And sometimes where variousinspirations came from, there's
actually kind of a four-stepprogram in there that deals with
my dad's relationship withKatherine Hepburn.
They were somewhat distantfriends.
And she was originally...
John Wayne wanted her to playin the movie Hondo, which my dad
(10:43):
wrote the story that it wastaken from.
And she didn't like Waynebecause of his political
position, so she told him to getlost.
And then she and my dad becamefriends.
They explored doing a couple ofdifferent stories.
None of that came to fruition.
But eventually, she became dearfriends with John Wayne.
Speaker 02 (11:29):
talk a lot now about how interconnected the creative
community as a whole.
You'll be talking to someoneand you find out they know this
musician that you listen to, orthey're going to go somewhere
and meet this other artist thatyou're a fan of.
And I think this just provesthat that's really always been
the case.
Creatives just sort of meldtogether somehow.
It doesn't really matter howyou express that creativity.
(11:49):
Yeah.
It's still this like-mindedgroup.
Speaker 00 (11:53):
And it was even close, you know, in Hollywood in
those days, the bonds were evencloser.
I used to say that in the dayswhen studios had walls and
agents didn't controleverybody's career, the
community was very, very tight
Speaker 02 (12:07):
knit.
And I would say it extends pastjust author life during that
time period.
But now, because I think it'sso easy for readers to just see
(12:30):
that book on the shelf or pickit up as an ebook, and they
don't really think abouteverything else going on behind
the scenes or that maybe thisauthor did want to write in a
different genre and was told,no, you're not allowed.
And they might have thosequestions like, why doesn't this
person branch out?
Or why don't they try somethingnew?
Or I wish there was anotherstory with this character in it
and not realizing how manyroadblocks are in their way to
(12:52):
really find There are
Speaker 00 (12:58):
a surprising number of things that hold writers
back.
And, you know, on theinspiration side, you look at a
guy like my dad, he wrote 92novels and 250 some odd short
stories.
And you think, oh my gosh, youknow, this man was such a
productive master thateverything he did kind of turned
to gold.
And it didn't.
(13:18):
It's Louis L'Amour's LostTreasures Volumes 1 and 2 are
full of all the things he did.
that didn't work, they are atthe same time, some of the most
interesting material he everworked on, because this was the
stuff that was too ambitious forhim to finish.
So as an insight into him andhis interests, it's really quite
(13:38):
amazing.
And I was lucky in writing thismaterial about my father's
material and about thepublishing industry and things
like that.
I was lucky that I went to workoccasionally, once in a while
in publishing in the 1980s.
And so I knew a lot of thepeople also through my dad that
(14:00):
had really started the paperbackbusiness in the 50s.
They were just kind of slightlygoing out as I started.
I had an office when I wasworking in audio publishing at
Bantam Books.
I had an office down the hallfrom Ian Ballantyne who, I mean,
he would tell you that hepersonally brought the paperback
book format to the UnitedStates from England.
(14:21):
I'm not sure that's entirelytrue.
But he would tell you all kindsof stories about that.
And Ian had been around,obviously, forever and bent my
ear endlessly.
Then even before I was working,you know, I was kind of playing
under the desks of Oscar Disteland some of these other guys at
Bantam who had gone into thatbusiness from magazines.
(14:46):
A lot of those guys had been inthe OSS during World War II.
So there was this kind ofcamaraderie.
There were a bunch of of themthat had been with the OSS in
Cairo during World War II.
And so they were kind ofbuddies from the war and clear
through till today.
So I certainly haven't seen thebusiness evolve as an adult
like my mother has, but I've hada pretty good run.
Speaker 02 (15:08):
Yeah, I would say so.
So also just not even lookingat the industry, but even just
looking at your dad's work, howhas your view of that maybe
evolved?
And not just as going from achild to an adult, but perhaps
looking at his finished workThere
Speaker 00 (15:26):
isn't an awful lot of difference.
odd abilities that he had.
My dad was a master at knowingwhat not to write.
Speaker 01 (15:48):
And
Speaker 00 (15:49):
I don't mean subject matter.
I mean, like literally thedifference between what to
include in a sentence and whatnot to include in a sentence.
So many times I'll have fanswho will write to me and they'll
tell me how beautifully andwondrously he described an area
of the country where maybe theylive or they visited or
something of the sort.
And there's not much of adescription in the book.
Speaker 01 (16:12):
My
Speaker 00 (16:13):
dad was incredible at just giving like just enough
details to fire the imaginationof the reader and give them a
co-authorship of their imaginaryexperience.
page, 225 page format thatexisted in those days.
(16:46):
They were very, very good atdoing this.
And it's a wonderful thingbecause so many times you'll see
in what is supposedly highergrade literature, an author
telling you everything.
Speaker 02 (17:01):
Yes.
And that leaves no room for thereader.
Speaker 00 (17:03):
Leaves no room for the reader.
I mean, I struggle with this.
My dad never struggled with it.
He just, he kind of knew justhow to, you know, I drop her out
the information.
And it's a wonderful, wonderfulquality.
Speaker 02 (17:16):
Oh, that is definitely an admirable skill
because it's exactly like yousaid.
And I think we do, most peoplehave that tendency because we're
almost thinking cinematicallyand we're trying to get that
across in words, but we don'tneed to do that in words.
And again, it almost becomeslike a passive experience for
the reader because theirimagination is no longer
activated and engaged becausethere's nothing for them to
(17:39):
really imagine when they'respoon fed every single detail.
A
Speaker 00 (17:43):
writer who was writing up until, maybe he's
still around, I'm not sure, butwriting up until a few years
ago, who was wonderful at thatwas Alan First, who wrote a
whole bunch of kind of pre-WorldWar II thrillers.
And he could put you, you know,a rain damp street in 1938
Paris in like seven words.
Speaker 01 (18:01):
Yes.
Speaker 00 (18:02):
He was just, he was incredible, incredible at it.
Speaker 02 (18:06):
Yeah, that really is such a gift.
And I think it's one of thosegifts we don't talk about
enough, but- Especially when youthink about the people that did
go from short stories first.
So they're used to that brevitywith their words and knowing
how to very judiciously pickeach single one.
So it has that impact and thatvery limited page space you
have.
And then just carry over thatskill into their longer work.
Speaker 00 (18:30):
You will see with my dad and other writers who were
masters at certainly popularshort stories, Stephen King
would be one of them, wheresometimes you read their work
and you kind of go, you know,there were a lot of these short
stories that actually were abetter short story than some of
the novels were later.
(18:51):
There's just an elegance to theway they do that.
It's hard to make thedifference.
Of course, Stephen King wentfrom short stories to gigantic
four-inch novels.
So maybe it stands out a littlebit more, but there are some
very good writers who wrote somevery good short stories who
unfortunately no longer do.
Speaker 02 (19:13):
Yeah.
So before you were putting allof Lost Treasures together, were
you already aware of how muchmaterial there would be to work
with, or was this a surprise toyou?
Speaker 00 (19:23):
My dad had a large kind of combination office,
library, four or five hundredsquare feet with 12 foot tall
bookshelves that were on doorsthat opened up.
So there were more bookshelvesbehind them.
And still the room was hip highin books and papers and things.
There was a little trail thatwent over to an area where he
(19:47):
could roll his chair around athis typewriter.
And then there was a trail thatonce had led to a couch on the
other side of the room.
But once the couch disappeared,the trail sort of peaked.
out and there wasn't anythingleft.
And when my dad passed away, itfell upon me to clean up all of
(20:07):
that.
And one of the last things thatwe cleaned up were all of these
manuscripts.
Some of them were broken intosections.
Some of them, we didn't knowwhat belonged to what, you know,
we had a whole room stackedfull of manuscript pages that we
had to reassemble into booksthat we knew and we could file
(20:30):
away or things that weremysterious that we were just
learning existed and that'swhere a lot of that stuff came
from.
Speaker 02 (20:37):
How long did it take you to sort through everything
and not just sort through it butput those related pieces
together.
I'm
Speaker 00 (20:45):
still doing it.
30 plus years later.
And I still, I will go out tomy archive room and a display
that's going up at the ReaganLibrary.
And they wanted a couple ofpieces of something.
And I went out to try and findthem.
And I was looking through thesevarious sections of notes and
(21:05):
realizing that I really shouldfile some of these with the
manuscript that they pertain to,that I use them for the lost
treasures of that manuscript.
And really I should probablyput them both in the same file.
So there's still a refinementgoing on.
Speaker 02 (21:21):
Yeah.
So how are they currentlyorganized?
Speaker 00 (21:24):
The manuscripts are all in fireproof file cabinets
in their own files.
And so are the finished shortstories.
And the problem is the notesthat made up some of these
things.
I have several boxes full ofnotes and they're all kind of in
there at random.
We scanned them when we did thewebsite way back in the early
(21:47):
days, and we only sorted themout at that point.
And so I used that material tocreate the Lost Treasures books.
I didn't go back to theoriginal documents.
And so the original documentsneed some filing.
Yeah.
Speaker 02 (22:01):
So I was reading on your website and it was saying
that everything is left in itsown unfinished form or most
pieces are.
So can you explain why you didthat and why you decided not to
add anything to them or that youjust use the raw material?
Speaker 00 (22:15):
Yeah.
So you're talking about theunfinished work that's in Louis
L'Amour's Lost Treasures 1 and2.
And there have been some thingsthat I've finished.
So I finished No TravelReturns, which was this
unfinished novel that my dadhad.
And I also am just finishing asecond unfinished novel right
now.
I don't know when, you know howlong the publishing business
(22:37):
takes to get around to actuallydistributing a book.
So I'm saying this, but awarning to your audience, don't
go looking for this booktomorrow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I thought at leastpresenting Louis L'Amour's Lost
Treasures, I thought thefascinating thing was to allow
people to find the work like Ifound it and to just experience
(23:00):
the mystery of, I did organizeit.
I did put the notes with thestories and I did comment on the
stories and things like that.
And I presented it in an orderthat was fun to read, not
necessarily the order in whichit was written or anything like
Speaker 01 (23:15):
that.
Speaker 00 (23:16):
But I thought that it would be an interesting thing
for a reader to be able to kindof go through the archaeology
of Louis L'Amour and uncoverthese different things at
different times and recognizethat when you get into volume
two, dad was working on anonfiction book on a man who
(23:37):
traveled all over the Arab worlda thousand years ago, Ibn
Battuta.
And he tried to sell thatnonfiction book to several
publishers.
Nobody was interested.
And then he sat down and wrotekind of a fictionalized version
of it, The Walking Room.
So it's not a fictionalizedversion of a character who is
(24:00):
traveling the path of IbnBattuta or anything like that.
But it's definitely inspiredfrom what he learned at that
time.
And I thought, you know, ifyou're flipping through this and
you start reading this outlinefor a nonfiction book, and when
you get to my section of it, yousay, and this became The
Walking Drum, that's maybe kindof exciting to sort of explore
(24:23):
these things in kind of a randommatter and have the experience
of discovery.
Speaker 02 (24:29):
So for the book that you did finish, what made you
decide to finish that piece?
And then how did you alsoseamlessly blend both author
voices?
Speaker 00 (24:39):
So the easier one to talk about in that way is No
Travel Returns.
It's easy also because it's outthere and somebody could go buy
it right now.
Speaker 02 (24:46):
Right.
Speaker 00 (24:48):
It was a stack of chapters.
Dad started his career writingwhat we call his yondering
stories is because we publishedthem in a collection called
Yondering Back Around 19.
They're kind of ErnestHemingway-esque sort of personal
adventures that were quiterealistic, taken from his time
(25:10):
traveling around the world inthe 1920s.
And it actually created kind ofa nice career for him.
He was published in some verygood magazines, and he developed
quite a good reputation basedon those particular stories, but
they didn't make him any money.
And And so he went on to writefor the pulp magazines, kind of
(25:33):
pulp adventure and crime storiesand things like that.
But in the process, while hewas doing that, he started work
on a novel that was part of thatseries, that sort of world
building event.
And it was this No TravelReturns.
It shares a number ofcharacters with yondering short
stories and things like that.
But it was really a pile ofchapters.
(25:54):
Every other chapter in thisbook is a different crewman on
this particular tanker ship.
that the story follows.
Speaker 02 (26:02):
I love all those different perspectives when
they're added in.
Speaker 00 (26:05):
Yeah.
So there's a continuingperspective that keeps appearing
in between each one, but thenthe alternating chapters are
different stories, a differentbackground for a different guy,
different approach to what'sgoing on, the problems that are
happening on the ship, thingslike that.
And they just sort of piled up.
They weren't really associatedwith one another.
But as I read it, and it seemedlike, I mean, I think the story
(26:28):
I just finished is a Cold Warof thriller.
So you'd think that that wouldbe the easier one to do.
But as I was looking throughthis, I suddenly realized this
is one of those all people areconnected stories.
There was a motif in the workthat touched on that.
It didn't play it hard, but ittouched on it.
(26:50):
If you can think back to, therewas a whole spate of movies for
a while, Vine movies, Lantanaand Magnolia.
There was Crash was anotherfilm that came out.
out back in the 90s that wasthis kind of mysterious
intertwining of lives.
I had a friend who made onecalled Mojave Phone Booth.
And I was inspired by that.
(27:10):
I went, this story is allpeople are connected.
That's the theme behind this.
And on top of it, it's a shipthat is taking a cargo to the
Philippines and China,afterwards to China.
And I just thought, well, whoa,I get it.
You know, I know what to dowith this.
Speaker 01 (27:30):
So
Speaker 00 (27:31):
it needed pieces.
It needed a beginning.
It needed a better ending.
It needed some of thecoincidence kind of pulled out
of it.
It needed the chapters moreintertwined with one another.
If I have a point of departurefrom my father's writing and a
point that I have to hit, I findit very easy to duplicate his
(27:54):
style.
It's more difficult if you justkind of have to keep going and
going and going and going.
Oh, true.
Speaker 02 (28:00):
Interesting.
Yeah.
I was going to ask about thattoo, because that was something
I wondered, you know, how do youdo that or how easy it comes to
you?
Speaker 00 (28:07):
My dad wrote in five different styles.
I mean, I don't know thatsomebody else would think so,
but I've kind of broken it downthat way.
And the first four from thebeginning, from this one that
I'm talking about through hispulp style, through his early
paperback original style, kindof his mature paperback original
style, and then kind of thelater style, I can do the first
(28:28):
four.
The later one where the got alittle more complicated and
things like this, I have sometrouble with that would be that,
you know, maybe the last 10books that he wrote, but the
early stuff I find pretty easy.
I would say I could not go backinto no traveler returns and
point out where his work stoppedand mine started.
Speaker 02 (28:50):
Oh, that's impressive.
Speaker 00 (28:52):
So it's, you know, I try to do generally when I'm
editing something now, thiswould no travel returns was
literally the two of us asco-writers.
But when I'm editing somethingand I take out a section and I
do the same sort of thing, Imake a jump like that.
I always try to have as littleimpact as possible.
(29:14):
So if I'm going to fixsomething, I try to do it with a
cut first.
And if it takes some bridgingmaterial, then I try and do the
bridging material as minimallyas I can.
And a lot of times it dependson what I'm bridging.
If I'm bridging just a sectionwhere I cut it because it needed
to be a little shorter orsomething like that.
That's easy.
If I'm making a cut becauseI've got an inconsistency in a
(29:38):
character voice or somethinglike that, then it's a little
more
Speaker 02 (29:41):
complicated.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Speaker 00 (29:44):
And every once in a while, there's one where it
becomes a little difficult.
We had a story by the waters ofSan Diego, short story, where
it was very much this younglady's adventure and kind of
getting herself traumatic stuckin a situation down on the coast
of South America.
And there was kind of a guythat came in at the end that
(30:07):
sort of solved everything.
And I thought, you know, we'vedone that one.
We've done that one over andover.
And we've stuck with this galfor so long.
I'd like to see her handlethat.
And I know I get letters allthe time.
People tell me they loved it,but they're like going, that
woman was really kind of feral.
(30:28):
It's like, you know, It's like,she was really tough at the end
of that thing.
I'm like, yeah, I know I mayhave overdone it a little bit.
But that's what it took to haveher sort of solve her own
problem without this outsideinfluence.
And I try not to let thathappen.
(30:49):
I don't ever want somebody topick out, oh, you did this, you
did this or something.
At the same time, and I'm sureyou've experienced this in your
business, people really don'tunderstand the impact that
editors and publishers have on amanuscript.
And I mean, I will have fanstalk to me about how dare you
(31:10):
change this comma.
And, you know, it's kind oflike, I'm joking, of course,
when I say this, but, and Imean, I have to kind of politely
write back to them and say, youknow, if you thought Louis was
in charge of commas, you're outof your mind.
You know, it's, it is not thatpurely the writer's voice,
purely the perfect thing.
(31:32):
We've never had much editinguntil I came along in all my
work in the publishing business.
I've never met an editor that Iknew does the kind of work that
say you do.
Speaker 02 (31:46):
Oh, really?
Speaker 00 (31:47):
Yeah.
So mostly we're going to getlike line and copy editing.
So development editing.
I mean, I saw that once I hadone issue where I realized I was
dealing with a developmenteditor on Lost Treasures because
we got in kind of a tiff abouta particular thing.
I was in the middle of thisLouis and Catherine Hepburn
(32:09):
story.
And I had said that CatherineHepburn was too old for a
particular role.
Speaker 01 (32:16):
And
Speaker 00 (32:17):
the editor got very upset about that.
Just like, you know, CatherineHepburn couldn't possibly have
been too old.
You know, it's like she was atthe time you're writing about,
she was only 28.
I was like sitting there going,Like I met Catherine Hepburn a
couple of times and she waspretty old by the end of her
life.
And I'm like, going back to 28,I'm like going, was my dad even
(32:39):
writing when she was 28?
And then I realized she wastalking about Audrey Hepburn.
Speaker 02 (32:45):
Oh, yes.
That is a very
Speaker 00 (32:49):
big difference.
The weird thing was, is she hadthe age exact, but somehow
she'd gotten the two women mixedup.
Speaker 02 (32:57):
Interesting.
Speaker 00 (32:58):
And I mean, she really knew which he was talking
about age-wise.
But she didn't know one actressfrom the other, which was
weird.
But I was sort of like, we'renot talking about the same lady.
Speaker 02 (33:12):
This is a great story to leave it on because I
think it's hysterical.
But yes, so just for our finalquestion, where can people find
out more about you and moreabout these books that you've
written?
Well, not really written, butcompiled.
Speaker 00 (33:29):
Compiled and various things.
Yeah.
So louislamore.com.
is a great entry point toeverything because on
louislamore.com on the topbanner, there will be a
additional websites thing, whichwill take you to a website for
Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasuresand a bunch of other interesting
things that we've done that wehaven't talked about, but I
think somebody would beinterested in.
Speaker 02 (33:49):
Well, thank you again.
This has been so amazing.
Oh,
Speaker 00 (33:52):
thank you so much.
It's been a wonderful,wonderful time talking to you.
Speaker 02 (33:55):
Same.
And thank you for listening andbe sure to check out the show
notes for additionalinformation.
And then please join me nextweek when author Janelle will
discuss why opposing charactergoals work so well when you're
writing romance.
Thanks again.
Hello, I'm Jennia D'Lima.
Welcome to Writing and Editing,the author-focused podcast that
takes a whole-person approachto everything related to both
writing and editing.
Louis L'Amour's name isrecognized even by those who
wouldn't call themselvesreaders, and his many
contributions to the literarycommunity are still well-loved
and much read.
Continuing that legacy is hisson, Beau L'Amour, and I'm
(00:24):
delighted to have him with us onthe show today.
Well, first, thank you so muchfor being here.
Speaker 00 (00:29):
thank you.
Thank you so much for havingme.
Speaker 02 (00:32):
So what made you first realize that this was
something that you wanted to do?
Or did you maybe have adifferent idea of how to
preserve your father's legacy?
Speaker 00 (00:41):
Neither one of those things really happened.
I had been working a little bitin the publishing business,
doing a little bit of work withthe art department and in the
very early days of audiopublishing.
And my dad passed away and Irecognized that there were an
awful lot of things that neededto be restructured in order to
(01:02):
keep us going on into thefuture.
Our business had been all aboutthe new book.
It always had been the newbook.
And I realized that the entirebacklist needed to be treated
kind of as one unit and that weneeded a publishing program that
looked at all of it kind ofrather than sort of a
(01:23):
scattershot approach.
So it kind of grew out of that.
Speaker 02 (01:27):
Oh, interesting.
I just assumed that maybe therewas always this inkling of an
idea and then you just sort oflaunched it from there.
So that's much different thanwhat I had in mind.
If you want to tell people verybriefly what it is about the
book, Having
Speaker 00 (01:44):
taken over my dad's literary estate and managing
that, we've had to do manydifferent things over the years.
It's really a good idea if youhave a kind of legacy product
that occasionally you pull arabbit or maybe even a
rhinoceros out of the hat andshow it to the publisher so that
they don't start to take youfor granted.
(02:06):
The publisher often has to doexactly the same thing with the
booksellers.
Bye.
So over the years, we've donemany things.
We did a magazine of newWestern short stories for a
while.
We had this very innovativeaudio publishing program where
(02:27):
we did almost all of our workfor many, many years, not so
much any longer, but for manyyears as a radio drama.
So full cast and sound effectsand score and everything else.
And towards the beginning ofthis century, there was a moment
where the publisher had anawful lot of books in their
(02:51):
warehouse that had the wrongprice on them.
They were wanting to up price.
And this was before a lot ofthese shorter print runs and
just-in-time delivery that hasnow become a part of the
business.
And one of the things that wearranged for them to do was to
give over a million books to theU.S.
Armed Forces.
Speaker 01 (03:13):
as
Speaker 00 (03:13):
a gift, but hopefully to start readers off.
You have one kid in a tankreading a book, and maybe in the
next 10 years, you've sold 100books.
So I'm always trying to kind ofspin the next thing and get it
ready to go.
And Louis L'Amour's LostTreasures grew out of a problem
(03:36):
with a particular booksellerabout 10 years ago, who was
complaining that they had us ontheir shelves, but there wasn't
anything new.
We had been publishing books ofunpublished short stories for a
while, but that had eventuallygiven out.
We got to the end of prettymuch everything that my dad had
written and they wantedsomething new.
(03:58):
And the publisher was talkingto them about maybe new covers,
just something to make it lookfresh in some manner to create a
better sense of morale amongstthe store managers.
I've got no idea what exactproblem they were facing.
And I didn't like that verymuch.
And I just thought new bookcovers, I mean, we're always
(04:21):
involved in doing things likethat, but it takes an incredible
effort to try and get all thecovers sort of looking the same
and reflecting
Speaker 02 (04:29):
similar
Speaker 00 (04:30):
values and things like that, because we've got 130
plus books.
Speaker 02 (04:34):
Right.
And then all that backstockthat you'd be left with too, if
you would decide.
Speaker 00 (04:37):
Exactly.
Unknown (04:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 00 (04:38):
Exactly.
And they're not going to let usgive it away to the military
again.
So anyway, what happened was,is we had had a website.
I had taken a whole bunch of mydad's material and we had
created a subscription website.
And you could pay a little bitof money if you were a dyed in
(04:59):
the wool, Louis L'Amour fan, andyou could go in there and you
could find all kinds of earlydrafts of books that had been
produced.
drafts of stories that hadnever been produced,
correspondence, all kinds ofstuff.
We had this kind of wonderfulsetup where you could go in
there and kind of explore theinside of Louis L'Amour's
(05:21):
creative mind.
And it had never beenparticularly popular, especially
in those days, pre-social mediadays, person went on the web,
they did not want to pay foranything.
The attitude we ran into allthe time was, yeah, yeah, I do
it, but it's, you know, you wantwhatever it was, $2.99 a month
or something like this.
(05:41):
And I took that material.
I repackaged it into two newbooks, Louis L'Amour's Lost
Treasures Volume 1 and Volume 2.
Those would be the unfinishedand unpublished short stories or
novels, both.
And I would take the materialthat was my dad's material that
(06:03):
was there, and I would write apiece about it.
After you read it, you'd getto...
section and I would sort ofdescribe why he had written it
and what he was hoping to do.
And then through possibly notesor journal entries or
correspondence, I would say, youknow, this is very likely what
was going to happen with thatparticular story.
(06:25):
So this is how that story wouldbe finished, would play out
this for the unfinished ones.
Some of these stories, therewould be multiple drafts.
So in the book, if the draftsare interestingly different,
I'll give you different draftsso you can see how my dad was
playing around with getting thestory started.
Sometimes there would be abunch of drafts and I would meld
(06:47):
them all into kind of the bestof single version.
And sometimes there'd be anoutline for the book, various
things like that.
Some of these beginnings ofstories are quite long.
There's one piece in therethat's, I think it's 240 pages.
So it's probably almost all ofact one of a relatively big
(07:08):
novel.
So they go from a couple ofpages all the way out to
multiple chapters.
And so we had, those were intwo books.
And then I put together, Iwrote with my dad, I finished an
unfinished novel of his calledNo Traveler Returns, which would
have been his first novel hadhe ever published it and kind of
(07:31):
got it set up so that youunderstood how it fit into his
career.
So there's a piece in thereabout what he was trying to do
with that novel and when it was.
It was written in the late 30s.
And then in about 30 plus ofthe old novels that have been in
print for quite a while, I dida postscript.
And it did the same thing as Idid in Louis L'Amour's Lost
(07:53):
Treasures Volume 1 and 2.
I would try and tell the storybehind the story, what he was
doing, early drafts.
Was there a short story thatinspired this?
What was he going to try and dowith it?
Sometimes I'd write a piece onhim doing Did you ever have
(08:13):
multiple choices for what youwould include as
Speaker 02 (08:25):
postscript material where you had to pick and choose
a little bit?
Speaker 00 (08:29):
Not so much because that's kind of the interesting
thing when you have differentaspects of something, you know,
I could produce one aspect andthen I could talk about another
aspect.
Occasionally there would beseveral of those things.
It wasn't too much of a choice.
I mean, I try not to let thesethings go over 40 pages and I
really don't like them to goless than six.
So, you know, I just kind ofdepend.
Speaker 02 (08:52):
Yeah.
It all makes sense too, to havethat parameter in place just to
figure out where's the readergoing to be comfortable feeling
like they have enough bonusmaterial that it counts as bonus
material versus when it shouldbe almost this whole separate
piece on
Speaker 00 (09:06):
its own?
It's all different.
It's a little hard to say.
I mean, each story has adifferent thing that I'm able to
say about it.
It's very rarely the least bitrepetitive.
Like I said, sometimes it wouldbe research, sometimes it would
be the fight to get aparticular manuscript published,
the walking drum, a kind ofCrusades era adventure story
(09:27):
that my dad was only ablepublished late in his career was
actually written in 1960.
And all the publishers werejust saying, no, Louis, we just
want Westerns.
So there are different trialsand tribulations.
That's so
Speaker 02 (09:42):
fascinating too, because, you know, you think
about it as just, okay, I'mgoing to find the best piece
that matches this book.
I'm going to find this andthis, but know that there are so
many other variables at playand that you do have all this
other personal information whereyou're able to make the most
informed decision too.
Speaker 00 (09:58):
And it's a, you know, a way that hopefully the
casual reader will like reading.
There's definitely a lot ofeducation about the publishing
industry.
I mean, it's about a guydealing with the publishing
industry from 1953 or even alittle bit before to 1988 and
the various adventures that hehad there, what was possible,
(10:21):
what wasn't possible.
And sometimes where variousinspirations came from, there's
actually kind of a four-stepprogram in there that deals with
my dad's relationship withKatherine Hepburn.
They were somewhat distantfriends.
And she was originally...
John Wayne wanted her to playin the movie Hondo, which my dad
(10:43):
wrote the story that it wastaken from.
And she didn't like Waynebecause of his political
position, so she told him to getlost.
And then she and my dad becamefriends.
They explored doing a couple ofdifferent stories.
None of that came to fruition.
But eventually, she became dearfriends with John Wayne.
Speaker 02 (11:29):
talk a lot now about how interconnected the creative
community as a whole.
You'll be talking to someoneand you find out they know this
musician that you listen to, orthey're going to go somewhere
and meet this other artist thatyou're a fan of.
And I think this just provesthat that's really always been
the case.
Creatives just sort of meldtogether somehow.
It doesn't really matter howyou express that creativity.
(11:49):
Yeah.
It's still this like-mindedgroup.
Speaker 00 (11:53):
And it was even close, you know, in Hollywood in
those days, the bonds were evencloser.
I used to say that in the dayswhen studios had walls and
agents didn't controleverybody's career, the
community was very, very tight
Speaker 02 (12:07):
knit.
And I would say it extends pastjust author life during that
time period.
But now, because I think it'sso easy for readers to just see
(12:30):
that book on the shelf or pickit up as an ebook, and they
don't really think abouteverything else going on behind
the scenes or that maybe thisauthor did want to write in a
different genre and was told,no, you're not allowed.
And they might have thosequestions like, why doesn't this
person branch out?
Or why don't they try somethingnew?
Or I wish there was anotherstory with this character in it
and not realizing how manyroadblocks are in their way to
(12:52):
really find There are
Speaker 00 (12:58):
a surprising number of things that hold writers
back.
And, you know, on theinspiration side, you look at a
guy like my dad, he wrote 92novels and 250 some odd short
stories.
And you think, oh my gosh, youknow, this man was such a
productive master thateverything he did kind of turned
to gold.
And it didn't.
(13:18):
It's Louis L'Amour's LostTreasures Volumes 1 and 2 are
full of all the things he did.
that didn't work, they are atthe same time, some of the most
interesting material he everworked on, because this was the
stuff that was too ambitious forhim to finish.
So as an insight into him andhis interests, it's really quite
(13:38):
amazing.
And I was lucky in writing thismaterial about my father's
material and about thepublishing industry and things
like that.
I was lucky that I went to workoccasionally, once in a while
in publishing in the 1980s.
And so I knew a lot of thepeople also through my dad that
(14:00):
had really started the paperbackbusiness in the 50s.
They were just kind of slightlygoing out as I started.
I had an office when I wasworking in audio publishing at
Bantam Books.
I had an office down the hallfrom Ian Ballantyne who, I mean,
he would tell you that hepersonally brought the paperback
book format to the UnitedStates from England.
(14:21):
I'm not sure that's entirelytrue.
But he would tell you all kindsof stories about that.
And Ian had been around,obviously, forever and bent my
ear endlessly.
Then even before I was working,you know, I was kind of playing
under the desks of Oscar Disteland some of these other guys at
Bantam who had gone into thatbusiness from magazines.
(14:46):
A lot of those guys had been inthe OSS during World War II.
So there was this kind ofcamaraderie.
There were a bunch of of themthat had been with the OSS in
Cairo during World War II.
And so they were kind ofbuddies from the war and clear
through till today.
So I certainly haven't seen thebusiness evolve as an adult
like my mother has, but I've hada pretty good run.
Speaker 02 (15:08):
Yeah, I would say so.
So also just not even lookingat the industry, but even just
looking at your dad's work, howhas your view of that maybe
evolved?
And not just as going from achild to an adult, but perhaps
looking at his finished workThere
Speaker 00 (15:26):
isn't an awful lot of difference.
odd abilities that he had.
My dad was a master at knowingwhat not to write.
Speaker 01 (15:48):
And
Speaker 00 (15:49):
I don't mean subject matter.
I mean, like literally thedifference between what to
include in a sentence and whatnot to include in a sentence.
So many times I'll have fanswho will write to me and they'll
tell me how beautifully andwondrously he described an area
of the country where maybe theylive or they visited or
something of the sort.
And there's not much of adescription in the book.
Speaker 01 (16:12):
My
Speaker 00 (16:13):
dad was incredible at just giving like just enough
details to fire the imaginationof the reader and give them a
co-authorship of their imaginaryexperience.
page, 225 page format thatexisted in those days.
(16:46):
They were very, very good atdoing this.
And it's a wonderful thingbecause so many times you'll see
in what is supposedly highergrade literature, an author
telling you everything.
Speaker 02 (17:01):
Yes.
And that leaves no room for thereader.
Speaker 00 (17:03):
Leaves no room for the reader.
I mean, I struggle with this.
My dad never struggled with it.
He just, he kind of knew justhow to, you know, I drop her out
the information.
And it's a wonderful, wonderfulquality.
Speaker 02 (17:16):
Oh, that is definitely an admirable skill
because it's exactly like yousaid.
And I think we do, most peoplehave that tendency because we're
almost thinking cinematicallyand we're trying to get that
across in words, but we don'tneed to do that in words.
And again, it almost becomeslike a passive experience for
the reader because theirimagination is no longer
activated and engaged becausethere's nothing for them to
(17:39):
really imagine when they'respoon fed every single detail.
A
Speaker 00 (17:43):
writer who was writing up until, maybe he's
still around, I'm not sure, butwriting up until a few years
ago, who was wonderful at thatwas Alan First, who wrote a
whole bunch of kind of pre-WorldWar II thrillers.
And he could put you, you know,a rain damp street in 1938
Paris in like seven words.
Speaker 01 (18:01):
Yes.
Speaker 00 (18:02):
He was just, he was incredible, incredible at it.
Speaker 02 (18:06):
Yeah, that really is such a gift.
And I think it's one of thosegifts we don't talk about
enough, but- Especially when youthink about the people that did
go from short stories first.
So they're used to that brevitywith their words and knowing
how to very judiciously pickeach single one.
So it has that impact and thatvery limited page space you
have.
And then just carry over thatskill into their longer work.
Speaker 00 (18:30):
You will see with my dad and other writers who were
masters at certainly popularshort stories, Stephen King
would be one of them, wheresometimes you read their work
and you kind of go, you know,there were a lot of these short
stories that actually were abetter short story than some of
the novels were later.
(18:51):
There's just an elegance to theway they do that.
It's hard to make thedifference.
Of course, Stephen King wentfrom short stories to gigantic
four-inch novels.
So maybe it stands out a littlebit more, but there are some
very good writers who wrote somevery good short stories who
unfortunately no longer do.
Speaker 02 (19:13):
Yeah.
So before you were putting allof Lost Treasures together, were
you already aware of how muchmaterial there would be to work
with, or was this a surprise toyou?
Speaker 00 (19:23):
My dad had a large kind of combination office,
library, four or five hundredsquare feet with 12 foot tall
bookshelves that were on doorsthat opened up.
So there were more bookshelvesbehind them.
And still the room was hip highin books and papers and things.
There was a little trail thatwent over to an area where he
(19:47):
could roll his chair around athis typewriter.
And then there was a trail thatonce had led to a couch on the
other side of the room.
But once the couch disappeared,the trail sort of peaked.
out and there wasn't anythingleft.
And when my dad passed away, itfell upon me to clean up all of
(20:07):
that.
And one of the last things thatwe cleaned up were all of these
manuscripts.
Some of them were broken intosections.
Some of them, we didn't knowwhat belonged to what, you know,
we had a whole room stackedfull of manuscript pages that we
had to reassemble into booksthat we knew and we could file
(20:30):
away or things that weremysterious that we were just
learning existed and that'swhere a lot of that stuff came
from.
Speaker 02 (20:37):
How long did it take you to sort through everything
and not just sort through it butput those related pieces
together.
I'm
Speaker 00 (20:45):
still doing it.
30 plus years later.
And I still, I will go out tomy archive room and a display
that's going up at the ReaganLibrary.
And they wanted a couple ofpieces of something.
And I went out to try and findthem.
And I was looking through thesevarious sections of notes and
(21:05):
realizing that I really shouldfile some of these with the
manuscript that they pertain to,that I use them for the lost
treasures of that manuscript.
And really I should probablyput them both in the same file.
So there's still a refinementgoing on.
Speaker 02 (21:21):
Yeah.
So how are they currentlyorganized?
Speaker 00 (21:24):
The manuscripts are all in fireproof file cabinets
in their own files.
And so are the finished shortstories.
And the problem is the notesthat made up some of these
things.
I have several boxes full ofnotes and they're all kind of in
there at random.
We scanned them when we did thewebsite way back in the early
(21:47):
days, and we only sorted themout at that point.
And so I used that material tocreate the Lost Treasures books.
I didn't go back to theoriginal documents.
And so the original documentsneed some filing.
Yeah.
Speaker 02 (22:01):
So I was reading on your website and it was saying
that everything is left in itsown unfinished form or most
pieces are.
So can you explain why you didthat and why you decided not to
add anything to them or that youjust use the raw material?
Speaker 00 (22:15):
Yeah.
So you're talking about theunfinished work that's in Louis
L'Amour's Lost Treasures 1 and2.
And there have been some thingsthat I've finished.
So I finished No TravelReturns, which was this
unfinished novel that my dadhad.
And I also am just finishing asecond unfinished novel right
now.
I don't know when, you know howlong the publishing business
(22:37):
takes to get around to actuallydistributing a book.
So I'm saying this, but awarning to your audience, don't
go looking for this booktomorrow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I thought at leastpresenting Louis L'Amour's Lost
Treasures, I thought thefascinating thing was to allow
people to find the work like Ifound it and to just experience
(23:00):
the mystery of, I did organizeit.
I did put the notes with thestories and I did comment on the
stories and things like that.
And I presented it in an orderthat was fun to read, not
necessarily the order in whichit was written or anything like
Speaker 01 (23:15):
that.
Speaker 00 (23:16):
But I thought that it would be an interesting thing
for a reader to be able to kindof go through the archaeology
of Louis L'Amour and uncoverthese different things at
different times and recognizethat when you get into volume
two, dad was working on anonfiction book on a man who
(23:37):
traveled all over the Arab worlda thousand years ago, Ibn
Battuta.
And he tried to sell thatnonfiction book to several
publishers.
Nobody was interested.
And then he sat down and wrotekind of a fictionalized version
of it, The Walking Room.
So it's not a fictionalizedversion of a character who is
(24:00):
traveling the path of IbnBattuta or anything like that.
But it's definitely inspiredfrom what he learned at that
time.
And I thought, you know, ifyou're flipping through this and
you start reading this outlinefor a nonfiction book, and when
you get to my section of it, yousay, and this became The
Walking Drum, that's maybe kindof exciting to sort of explore
(24:23):
these things in kind of a randommatter and have the experience
of discovery.
Speaker 02 (24:29):
So for the book that you did finish, what made you
decide to finish that piece?
And then how did you alsoseamlessly blend both author
voices?
Speaker 00 (24:39):
So the easier one to talk about in that way is No
Travel Returns.
It's easy also because it's outthere and somebody could go buy
it right now.
Speaker 02 (24:46):
Right.
Speaker 00 (24:48):
It was a stack of chapters.
Dad started his career writingwhat we call his yondering
stories is because we publishedthem in a collection called
Yondering Back Around 19.
They're kind of ErnestHemingway-esque sort of personal
adventures that were quiterealistic, taken from his time
(25:10):
traveling around the world inthe 1920s.
And it actually created kind ofa nice career for him.
He was published in some verygood magazines, and he developed
quite a good reputation basedon those particular stories, but
they didn't make him any money.
And And so he went on to writefor the pulp magazines, kind of
(25:33):
pulp adventure and crime storiesand things like that.
But in the process, while hewas doing that, he started work
on a novel that was part of thatseries, that sort of world
building event.
And it was this No TravelReturns.
It shares a number ofcharacters with yondering short
stories and things like that.
But it was really a pile ofchapters.
(25:54):
Every other chapter in thisbook is a different crewman on
this particular tanker ship.
that the story follows.
Speaker 02 (26:02):
I love all those different perspectives when
they're added in.
Speaker 00 (26:05):
Yeah.
So there's a continuingperspective that keeps appearing
in between each one, but thenthe alternating chapters are
different stories, a differentbackground for a different guy,
different approach to what'sgoing on, the problems that are
happening on the ship, thingslike that.
And they just sort of piled up.
They weren't really associatedwith one another.
But as I read it, and it seemedlike, I mean, I think the story
(26:28):
I just finished is a Cold Warof thriller.
So you'd think that that wouldbe the easier one to do.
But as I was looking throughthis, I suddenly realized this
is one of those all people areconnected stories.
There was a motif in the workthat touched on that.
It didn't play it hard, but ittouched on it.
(26:50):
If you can think back to, therewas a whole spate of movies for
a while, Vine movies, Lantanaand Magnolia.
There was Crash was anotherfilm that came out.
out back in the 90s that wasthis kind of mysterious
intertwining of lives.
I had a friend who made onecalled Mojave Phone Booth.
And I was inspired by that.
(27:10):
I went, this story is allpeople are connected.
That's the theme behind this.
And on top of it, it's a shipthat is taking a cargo to the
Philippines and China,afterwards to China.
And I just thought, well, whoa,I get it.
You know, I know what to dowith this.
Speaker 01 (27:30):
So
Speaker 00 (27:31):
it needed pieces.
It needed a beginning.
It needed a better ending.
It needed some of thecoincidence kind of pulled out
of it.
It needed the chapters moreintertwined with one another.
If I have a point of departurefrom my father's writing and a
point that I have to hit, I findit very easy to duplicate his
(27:54):
style.
It's more difficult if you justkind of have to keep going and
going and going and going.
Oh, true.
Speaker 02 (28:00):
Interesting.
Yeah.
I was going to ask about thattoo, because that was something
I wondered, you know, how do youdo that or how easy it comes to
you?
Speaker 00 (28:07):
My dad wrote in five different styles.
I mean, I don't know thatsomebody else would think so,
but I've kind of broken it downthat way.
And the first four from thebeginning, from this one that
I'm talking about through hispulp style, through his early
paperback original style, kindof his mature paperback original
style, and then kind of thelater style, I can do the first
(28:28):
four.
The later one where the got alittle more complicated and
things like this, I have sometrouble with that would be that,
you know, maybe the last 10books that he wrote, but the
early stuff I find pretty easy.
I would say I could not go backinto no traveler returns and
point out where his work stoppedand mine started.
Speaker 02 (28:50):
Oh, that's impressive.
Speaker 00 (28:52):
So it's, you know, I try to do generally when I'm
editing something now, thiswould no travel returns was
literally the two of us asco-writers.
But when I'm editing somethingand I take out a section and I
do the same sort of thing, Imake a jump like that.
I always try to have as littleimpact as possible.
(29:14):
So if I'm going to fixsomething, I try to do it with a
cut first.
And if it takes some bridgingmaterial, then I try and do the
bridging material as minimallyas I can.
And a lot of times it dependson what I'm bridging.
If I'm bridging just a sectionwhere I cut it because it needed
to be a little shorter orsomething like that.
That's easy.
If I'm making a cut becauseI've got an inconsistency in a
(29:38):
character voice or somethinglike that, then it's a little
more
Speaker 02 (29:41):
complicated.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Speaker 00 (29:44):
And every once in a while, there's one where it
becomes a little difficult.
We had a story by the waters ofSan Diego, short story, where
it was very much this younglady's adventure and kind of
getting herself traumatic stuckin a situation down on the coast
of South America.
And there was kind of a guythat came in at the end that
(30:07):
sort of solved everything.
And I thought, you know, we'vedone that one.
We've done that one over andover.
And we've stuck with this galfor so long.
I'd like to see her handlethat.
And I know I get letters allthe time.
People tell me they loved it,but they're like going, that
woman was really kind of feral.
(30:28):
It's like, you know, It's like,she was really tough at the end
of that thing.
I'm like, yeah, I know I mayhave overdone it a little bit.
But that's what it took to haveher sort of solve her own
problem without this outsideinfluence.
And I try not to let thathappen.
(30:49):
I don't ever want somebody topick out, oh, you did this, you
did this or something.
At the same time, and I'm sureyou've experienced this in your
business, people really don'tunderstand the impact that
editors and publishers have on amanuscript.
And I mean, I will have fanstalk to me about how dare you
(31:10):
change this comma.
And, you know, it's kind oflike, I'm joking, of course,
when I say this, but, and Imean, I have to kind of politely
write back to them and say, youknow, if you thought Louis was
in charge of commas, you're outof your mind.
You know, it's, it is not thatpurely the writer's voice,
purely the perfect thing.
(31:32):
We've never had much editinguntil I came along in all my
work in the publishing business.
I've never met an editor that Iknew does the kind of work that
say you do.
Speaker 02 (31:46):
Oh, really?
Speaker 00 (31:47):
Yeah.
So mostly we're going to getlike line and copy editing.
So development editing.
I mean, I saw that once I hadone issue where I realized I was
dealing with a developmenteditor on Lost Treasures because
we got in kind of a tiff abouta particular thing.
I was in the middle of thisLouis and Catherine Hepburn
(32:09):
story.
And I had said that CatherineHepburn was too old for a
particular role.
Speaker 01 (32:16):
And
Speaker 00 (32:17):
the editor got very upset about that.
Just like, you know, CatherineHepburn couldn't possibly have
been too old.
You know, it's like she was atthe time you're writing about,
she was only 28.
I was like sitting there going,Like I met Catherine Hepburn a
couple of times and she waspretty old by the end of her
life.
And I'm like, going back to 28,I'm like going, was my dad even
(32:39):
writing when she was 28?
And then I realized she wastalking about Audrey Hepburn.
Speaker 02 (32:45):
Oh, yes.
That is a very
Speaker 00 (32:49):
big difference.
The weird thing was, is she hadthe age exact, but somehow
she'd gotten the two women mixedup.
Speaker 02 (32:57):
Interesting.
Speaker 00 (32:58):
And I mean, she really knew which he was talking
about age-wise.
But she didn't know one actressfrom the other, which was
weird.
But I was sort of like, we'renot talking about the same lady.
Speaker 02 (33:12):
This is a great story to leave it on because I
think it's hysterical.
But yes, so just for our finalquestion, where can people find
out more about you and moreabout these books that you've
written?
Well, not really written, butcompiled.
Speaker 00 (33:29):
Compiled and various things.
Yeah.
So louislamore.com.
is a great entry point toeverything because on
louislamore.com on the topbanner, there will be a
additional websites thing, whichwill take you to a website for
Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasuresand a bunch of other interesting
things that we've done that wehaven't talked about, but I
think somebody would beinterested in.
Speaker 02 (33:49):
Well, thank you again.
This has been so amazing.
Oh,
Speaker 00 (33:52):
thank you so much.
It's been a wonderful,wonderful time talking to you.
Speaker 02 (33:55):
Same.
And thank you for listening andbe sure to check out the show
notes for additionalinformation.
And then please join me nextweek when author Janelle will
discuss why opposing charactergoals work so well when you're
writing romance.
Thanks again.
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