"Words. They Are The Key."

Those simple words were destined to spawn my writing career. At a very young age, my Grandmother would buttonhole me and force me to sit and take the word power tests in Readers Digest Magazine. My Grandfather introduced me to the Western Novel soon after I had put down my Curious George books.

After abandoning my dreams of running away to join the circus, I picked up my young manhood dreams from Zane Grey the Western Novelist. I remember distinctly in his novel entitled, Wyoming, the scene opening with the Cowboy standing on the desolate plains. “Sand, sand blowing, shifting like a silver silken sea of clouds.” I was mesmerized and bitten by the great American expansive west.

Laughed out of my grade school music days for playing The Streets of Laredo as my favorite song, I took my album (yes, one of those vinyl plastic things), stuffed it in my backpack and headed for the school bus home. There I was on the bus, a Cowboy Hat wearing outcast, a drifter who didn’t fit in. It was the beginning of the character I was to create and become in my fiction writing. The self-styled lone wolf, I took up skiing and quickly exhausted the eastern mountains.

I soon found myself, Stetson hat and knapsack looking out over the great American plains of Wyoming. The big horns looming large on the horizon, with the Tetons and Jackson Hole Ski Area not far down the road. My knapsack harbored my marbled black and white composition book filled with doodles and short stories. Consumed and possessed by the adventure of the mountains, I lived the life that I had read about in the Westerns. I skied as many of the American Rockies as I was able. I was always trying to find the words to paint the beauty I was fortunate enough to live every day.

Writers are word stackers, shapers, like “Sand, sand blowing, shifting like a silver silken sea of clouds.” Just ask the self-styled lone wolf, the drifter and outrider of society who just stepped off The Streets of Laredo in their mind. Albert Bianchine