Asclepias oenotheroides

In my new book Asclepias, character Cliff House takes Tony to the location of a new species of milkweed recently discovered in Arizona.  The new milkweed is called Asclepias oenotheroides, also Yerba de Zizotes.  This story is actually true, except rather than the fictional Cliff House discovering the new species, it was the real Christopher Kline.  Asclepias oenotheroides had been found once in Arizona, prior to my finding it.  However, it had been misidentified, with the correction being made after my finding the plant.  The misidentified population consisted of a single plant northeast of Portal.  The population I found consisted of around 40 plants, and the exact location of the population is detailed in my novel.

In Asclepias, Cliff comments to Tony how the county blades the roadside of Portal Road down to bare soil.  Cliff expresses concern how long the new milkweed will be able to survive this abuse.  Cochise County does, in fact, blade this roadside down to bare soil.  And, probably because of that, three years after I had found it, it was gone.  I found Asclepias oenotheroides in August of 2006.  In September of 2009, there was not a single plant of Asclepias oenotheroides.  In September of 2011, there still was not a single plant.

By the way, the county did finally fence the roadside of Portal Road.  Black cows walking around on Portal Road at night had in fact caused accidents when I first started visiting the area.  Fortunately, not any more!

Asclepias oenotheroides

Portal Road, looking toward Portal.

Asclepias is Available!

Asclepias is available through my CreateSpace site ( https://www.createspace.com/3675423 ).

Wanted to share a little bit about the cover.  The flower on the cover belongs to Antelope Horns (Asclepias asperula), a species of milkweed.  Normally they bloom in what is called an umbel, which is like a big ball of flowers.  Using Publisher, I was able to cut out one of the flowers from the umbel.  The flower is important because the reason why the main character (Tony Spencer) is near the Arizona/Mexico border is to do milkweed research.  Of course, little does he know he will end up in the middle of a crime spree which is killing illegal immigrants.

The barbed wire was cut out of a photo that I had taken near my home in Ohio.  It was amazing how hard it was to find free clipart of barbed wire that was of any decent resolution, so ad to create my own!  The barbed wire represents the border fence.  Now-a-days, most of 'The Fence' is made of what looks like a corrugated steel about fifteen feet tall.  Along the border are also what look a little like fire lookout towers equipped with sensing devices that can detect people.

Finally, I wanted the background to look like the border country of Arizona.  The photo was taken in Pinal County, Arizona, between Florence and Catalina.  The mountain range farthest to the back is the Catalina Mountains near Tucson.

Hope you enjoy Asclepias!

Asclepias coming November 1!

  Just ordered what will hopefully be the final proof of Asclepias.  Asclepias takes place largely in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona.  I totally fell in love with the Chiricahuas the final couple years I lived in Arizona.  A unique set of mountains in so many ways.  Wildlife, wildflowers, history, all of it is incredible there.  By the way, the flower on the front cover belongs to Asclepias asperula, also known as Antelope Horns.  Asclepias should be available through Create Space (https://www.createspace.com/3675423) and Amazon on or before November 1.
  While I am not going to give away the story, I am going to give away a solid hint of what the book will be about, and I will do so with a picture I took of the front door of my friends, Linda and Paul's, house who live along Cave Creek in the Chiricahuas.  I visited them in September when I went to Arizona for butterfly hunting and book signings.  So that the picture makes a little more sense, let me share that they have a primary residence on the property along with a small outbuilding about the size of a large storage shed that they use as a guest house.  I will translate below the pic.

There is no food in the house.  If you all are hungry, there is food in the cabin at the end of the road.  The door to the cabin is open.  Please, do not enter the house.  There are traps and we have an electronic security system.  Good luck in the mountains.

Birthplace of Hostile Lookout

  This is the birthplace of Hostile Lookout, Apartment A at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum.  As mentioned in a previous post, I lived here for nearly 18 months when I first started working for BTA and my family was in Pine, Arizona waiting for our house to sell.    If the clouds, planets, and Arizona Diamondbacks were properly aligned you could almost pick up one television station, and the only radio available was talk radio and sports radio.  Not being inclined to listen to faceless voices getting grotesquely overpaid to spew hatefulness regarding subjects they knew nothing about, I listened to A LOT of Arizona Diamondbacks and Phoenix Suns games.
  The building, built who knows when, probably somewhere around the time of Prohibition, was actually a triplex.  A co-worker, Pete, lived in Apartment B, and Kenny B, a volunteer lived in The Dorm.  At the time, I was leading music occassionally for our church in Pine, so when I wasn't writing, I was playing guitar.  Kenny B played bongos, so I would go over to the dorm and practice the next Sunday's playlist with Kenny accompanying on the bongos.
  Kenny was an interesting guy.  I think he still lived in the '60s.  He was prone to bad language and torn clothing, but had a very big heart.  He also had some sort of disease in which his muscles were slowly wasting away. 
  We had a rock squirrel, or something, that lived in the attic of the triplex, and one day Kenny declared war against the squirrel.  The problem was that the squirrel would race around the attic at night, when we were all trying to sleep, and even though the squirrel only weighed a few pounds, it sounded like an elephant running around up there.  Kenny was convinced that the squirrel was getting in and out through a hole under the porch steps of my front door.  So one day Kenny filled the hole with gravel.  Of course, the squirrel dug through the gravel.  The next day Kenny placed as large of rocks as he could fit under my porch into the hole, and then filled the rest of the space with gravel.  Amazingly the squirrel still managed to find space between the boulders to get in and out.  Kenny then built a small brick wall under the steps, and back filled with boulders and gravel.  Well, the brick wall did it. Although, we don't know if the squirrel got trapped in or out of the attic, but we did know the herd of elephants stopped waking us up at night.
  We had all kinds of creatures that lived around the triplex.  Rattlesnakes, gila monsters, red racers, scorpions, and terantulas were all relatively frequent visitors to the triplex.  Pete once had a terantula walk into his apartment when he left the door open one evening, and one night I found two rattlesnakes mating in the space between the propane tank and the prickly pear cactus.
  When I stayed in Apartment A a couple weeks ago, some wonderful improvements had been made.  It was now carpeted and had a cover over the ceiling light, rather than the bare wires and light bulb I had enjoyed living with.  The apartment had received a fresh coat of paint and the outside water heater had received a new out-building to enclose it.
  I get Asclepias back from the editor this afternoon.  It should be available next month!

Life experience is a great idea generator!

  As you know, Tony has a run-in with a cougar one night in Hostile Lookout.  What got things started, sort of, was the animal pressing his nose against Tony's tent and letting out a hiss. 
  I got the idea for this from an experience I had while camping at Herb Martyr campground in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeast Arizona.  Herb Martyr was the last campground on the road, the deepest into the mountains.  It had a fairly steep access road, and consequently, not many folks stayed there.  In fact, of the several times I stayed there, I think I was the only one in the campground at least half those times.  The campground had maybe eight spaces tucked into the oak woodland and Cave Creek ran along one edge of the site.
  Much to my wife's and mother's dislikes, I tended (and still do) to go out into the woods alone.  I had just finished setting up the tent, had crawled in, kicked off my boots, and was just kind of sitting there.  I noticed a sound outside the tent; something rooting around in the leaves.  The sound got closer to the back of the tent.  I continued to sit and listen.  Suddenly, something pressed its nose hard against the back of the tent, hard enough to push the tent wall in a bit.  It wasn't a big nose, like a bear or a cougar, but a nose all the same.  It made no sounds though.  In a second or so the nose retreated and I heard scuffling in the leaves again.  Not wanting to startle whatever it was, I waited a few minutes before exiting the tent to investigate.  I put my boots back on and climbed out of the tent and saw nothing around my campsite or any of the others.  Well, I knew the nose wasn't imaginary.  I then heard scuffling around down by the creek, which was perhaps ten feet down an embankment below my tent.  I peeked over the edge to see a skunk waddling around in the brush along the edge of the creek.  Made me glad I had not immediately shot out of the tent after it!

About the character Jean Paxton

If you have read Hostile Lookout, then you are familiar with Jean Paxton, Tony Spencer's best friend.  They have been close friends for a few years, closer since the death of Tony's wife Sue.  In the book, Jean lives in Mountainair and works at the Forest Service Research Greenhouse in Flagstaff.

Jean was inspired by a friend of mine, Jan Huntsberger.  Jan also lived in Mountainair and worked at the Forest Service Greenhouse.  Jan and I met while working at Pots-n-Plants Nursery in Flagstaff.  I still remember a water fight we had inside the store!  Jan and I were not necessarily best friends, like Jean and Tony, but we got along well.  FYI, we never stole a couch out of a doctor's trash bin!

When I worked for the U.S.G.S. the second year, Jan would let me park my Jeep (mine was red as opposed to Tony's orange one) at her house, to save me the expense of having to buy a parking permit to park at Northern Arizona University.  At the end of our week long shift, my co-worker would drop me and my stuff off at Jan's, and then he would continue on to Flag' to unload equipment and pick up his own car.  It also saved me about ten miles on my round trip drive to Pine (roughly 120 miles).

Jan never shot anybody for me, nor would she cook dinner for me!  But a good friend all the same.  On occassion, we would sit on the picnic table in her front yard and discuss various things over a beer.  She has since moved on to Idaho.

What is this?

Thought I would start a blog in support of my mystery novels.  For those who may be unfamiliar, the main character of my novels is Tony Spencer, a United States Geological Survey field biologist.  My first novel, Hostile Lookout has been out since March, 2011.  The second book in the series, Asclepias, is currently being edited, and should be available in October, 2011.

Where did the name Tony Spencer come from?  Well, I don't rightly know.  I just opened my brain and out it came.  Some of the other characters' names actually do have more realistic origins, but that will be shared at a later time.

Tony Spencer is not a cop, private investigator, or retired cop.  He is just an ordinary guy that tends to get himself into tight predicaments.  And while frequently he is saving the day in some fashion, every now and then he is requiring saving.  He faces many of the same dilemmas that each of us face routinely.

The first book, Hostile Lookout, was started in January, 2003.  I had just taken a job as Education Director at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum in Superior, Arizona.  Prior to that I had been teaching science, math, and Spanish at Pine-Strawberry School in Pine, Arizona.  In Pine, we lived in an older double-wide trailer. The nicest house we had ever lived in, but unfortunately, not a hot commodity in a town of million-dollar summer homes.  So when the call came from BTA, there was no way our house was going to sell in a few weeks.  It actually did not sell for 18 months.

Therefore, I moved to Superior alone, leaving my family behind in Pine to try to sell the house.  I lived in a small adobe shack (we called it an apartment) on the grounds of BTA.  There was not a whole lot to do in the evenings.  There was no television service, or at least nothing reliable, and radio was limited to just a few country stations (yuck!) and talk radio out of Phoenix.  So, in the evening boredom I began to write.

I called upon my memories of when I was a U.S.G.S. field biologist.  I worked for the U.S.G.S. two summers, one summer based out of Alpine, the other when we lived in Pine.  My boss and the home office was in Flagstaff.  Some of the issues that Tony faces in the book are directly based on experiences I had those two summers, others are sort of related with a lot of fantasy and imagination mixed in.

The other characters in Hostile Lookout are all fictional characters, not real people, although I will admit, that certain character traits may resemble personalities of people I have known in the past.  But the resemblance is minimal.  An overwhelming majority of each character is their own unique personality and attributes.

While the characters in Hostile Lookout are strictly fictional, the places are very real.  Allow me to mention a couple of examples.  There is a small village in the book called Clints Well.  Clints Well is a very real place, comprised of a gas station, post office, restaurant, and forest service visitor center trailer.  Once upon a time, there was a dog that would lay next to the door or the gas pumps at the gas station, a golden retriever.  I do not know if the dog is still around; he was pretty old when I was visiting Clints Well ten years ago.  My wife was involved in a very serious car accident in 1988 just a few miles southwest of Clints Well.

Another location mentioned in the book is Fossil Creek.  Fossil Creek is located west of Strawberry, Arizona and eventually feeds into the Verde River.  Once upon a time there was a hydroelectric power station along Fossil Creek.  Something about the power station caused beautiful travertine pools to form along the creek, sort of like hot tubs (without the heat) along the edge of the creek.  Most of these pools were three to four feet deep, while the main channel of the creek was considerably deeper.  I was actually baptised in one of these pools, and the water was so clear, even in the main channel, that you could see fish swimming several feet beneath the surface.  The only down side to Fossil Creek is the trash, in that a lot of folks who visit the creek are not good about cleaning up after themselves.  The creek is beautiful, but getting to the creek from the gravel road is a bit unsightly.  You owe it to yourself to visit Fossil Creek if you have never done so.

Finally, for this edition, I had mentioned that some of the character names actually do have stories behind them.  I will mention one here.  One of Tony's love interests in Hostile Lookout is a Forest Service employee named Melissa Arenas.  Melissa Arenas was actually the name of a former student of mine from my teaching days.  I always thought she had such a pretty name.  I did not really know Melissa very well, and only had her in class a couple months.  I have no idea if her personality is anything like the Melissa in the book.  If it is, it is purely coincidental.

I will be posting interesting little factoids about the Tony Spencer Mystery Series to this blog every week or two.  I do hope you will enjoy the blog, and also the books.