Interview With Author W. Michael Farmer
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a retired Ph.D. physicist. I live in Smithfield, Virginia, and have written sixteen novels, two non-fiction books, two technical books, and have two novels and a non-fiction book in press. I’ve won twelve Will Rogers Medallion Awards, Five New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards, and a Spur Finalist Award.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Proud Outcast, Days of War, Days of Peace, Chato’s Chiricahua Apache Legacy, Volume Two is my latest novel. It was inspired by Chato’s doppleganger relationship with Geronimo and how the two went from close friends to bitter enemies.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I learn the history and let the subject tell the story.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann; Lonesome Dove buy Larry McMurtry; Indeh by Eve Ball, Nora Henn, and Lynda Sánchez; From Cochise to Geronimo by Edwin Sweeney; Geronimo by Angie Debo; Tularosa by C.L. Sonnichsen; Pancho Villa by Friedrich Katz; novels by Tony and Anne Hillerman; novels by Craig Johnson; and In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
What are you working on now?
The Chronicles of Apache Kid, Volume One- Army Apache Scout; Volume Two Vanished Outlaw; The Tularosa Basin Range War; an a novel Hunt for the Vanished about what happened to the Apaches in Mexico around 1930-1940.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
The best method I’ve found to promote my novels is to provide weekly historical vignettes on my Killer of Witches Facebook page. The vignettes provide the readers of my historical fiction a foundation to understand what happened in the novels and why it happened.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
Write everyday, even if it’s only a paragraph or two. Keep your chapters short.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Read out loud what you’ve written and rewrite until it sounds smooth and correct.
What are you reading now?
Blue Wild Indigo by James Jennings; Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance; and, Abraham Lincoln, the Prairie Years, by Carl Sandburg..
What’s next for you as a writer?
A nonfiction book, The Betrayals of Pancho Villa.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
The Revised English Bible; Joseph and His Brothers; Lonesome Dove; and, In Search of Lost Time.
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