James D. Best

“A mine is a hole in the ground, owned by a liar.” Mark Twain I recently saw a college friend for the first time in decades. He see...

I write westerns partly because I want to preserve our frontier heritage. (I also write them for fun and profit.) Recently, I encou...

Crossing the Animas is available for the Kindle. The print format will along shortly. Center Point plans to publish the large print library...

Rod Pennington writes that "Sunday's Oscars ceremony takes place during one of the gloomiest times for the film industry in rec...

Mitchell Corn Palace We recently moved from Arizona to Omaha and are still getting to know the neighborhood. Friends—and sometime relat...

NYU teaches a class in storytelling the Tisch School of the Arts. On the first day of class, Professor Liotti invited Trey Parker and Matt S...

In a previous post I lamented our poor travel luck of late. The good news is that once we left the USA, all of our travel difficultie...

Yesterday my wife and I left Paris for Omaha. That’s not a sentence most people would enjoy writing, but we’ve been gone a month a...

                    "And by the way, you know, when you're telling these little stories? Here's a good idea - have a P...

I read every book review. Can't help myself. I'm perverse. I even like to read bad reviews. Dumb, I know, but it's a five min...

I believe Mark Twain is the greatest western writer of all time. Not only did Tom and Huck live on the frontier, but Roughing It des...

I read that railroad construction is all the rage in Western novels. I suppose Hell on Wheels spiked the popularity of trains, but I ...

Me striking a Steve Dancy pose. Recently I changed my Facebook profile picture to me as a youngster dressed up in my new chaps. The...

Still From John Ford's Stagecoach In the Old West, stage travel took patience and stamina. Wells Fargo published a set of rules f...

Looking the Part I'm not a hat person. Although I own dozens of hats, I seldom wear one. I don't even like helmets. I grew up ...

Hemingway never published advice for aspiring writers, but he spoke or wrote enough about writing that Larry W. Phillips was able to ...