Featured Book of the Month at WHM

NONE

First, some housekeeping. If you have been keeping up with the series, you deserve fair warning: this book blurb contains mild spoilers for the remaining chapters. I am publishing it now because WHM has a massive Kipling launch coming this fall.

More on that later.

The Premise

Every new contract promised to be the last before he went home.

When rancher Michael Vincent rescues a young woman from the aftermath of a wagon train massacre, he never expects to find a home.

But a split-second decision, made while trying to secure their future, leaves another family without a husband and father. Michael begins to question whether he deserves a family of his own.

Rather than return home, he doubles down on the one thing he believes he can offer: provision.

Each new contract will be the last before he returns.

A tax bill. A hard winter. A collapsing barn roof. A growing herd. Another job. Another paycheck.

Another reason to stay away.

As the miles grow longer and the letters grow shorter, Michael must decide whether providing for the woman he loves is worth losing the life he is trying to build with her.

NONE explores the lie that a man’s worth lies only in what he can provide—and the redeeming grace of discovering the full power of his presence.

Editor’s Letter

A man who sees his only worth as a provider may never understand the full power of his presence.

This novella began as an idea nearly twenty years ago.

My father introduced me to spaghetti Westerns when I was young. I was named after Jessica in The Man from Snowy River, starring Kirk Douglas. I read my first Louis L’Amour when I was eight. Cowboy grit was part of our home.

When I was fourteen, I watched the 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven. Over the next two years, I watched that movie dozens of times.

One scene stayed with me more than any other.

Chico, the youngest of the gunslingers, challenges Vin by pointing out that his gun has given him everything he possesses. Vin responds by totaling up the rented rooms, hash-house meals, and passing acquaintances his gun has earned him.

Then comes the arithmetic that has stayed with me ever since:

“Home, none. Wife, none. Kids … none. Prospects, zero.”

That hesitation gets me every time because it is the hesitation of regret.

As a young adult, I decided to write a story inspired by The Magnificent Seven. I wanted to dedicate it to the man who shouldered the responsibility of staying to raise my sisters and me.

The Man to Whom the Book is Dedicated

Some men are born with the urge to roam and wander.

My father was such a man.

Growing up in north-central Pennsylvania, near the New York line, he left home at eighteen. He traveled to Colorado and began putting down roots, only to return east just as suddenly.

It was there that God got hold of his heart.

Salvation did not erase the wanderlust. Two years later, he returned to Colorado, where a Sunday school teacher asked how he felt about dating an older woman.

That woman was my mother.

Four years his senior, she caught his attention immediately. My father still says it was love at first sight.

He did put down roots. Yet growing up, I could see the tension in him—the desire to stay warring against the desire to move on. He never made any of us feel like a burden. He carried responsibility well.

But one thing he once said to my mother has stayed with me:

“Sometimes I feel like Charles Ingalls.”

Anyone familiar with Little House on the Prairie understands the comparison. Pa Ingalls was forever loading his family into a wagon and heading somewhere new—sometimes because circumstances demanded it and sometimes because something in him longed for the horizon.

My father eventually packed us up as well, moving our family from Colorado to Oklahoma when I was fourteen. There was land to be had, opportunity to pursue, and a different life to build.

But life did not change as much as any of us imagined.

The responsibilities remained. Bills still needed to be paid. A wife and three daughters still needed food on the table, clothes on their backs, and a roof over their heads.

There were hardships. There were good years. There were ordinary years.

The older I get, the more I realize that my father’s greatest expression of love was not found in grand gestures or dramatic sacrifices. It was found in the daily decision to stay.

To go to work.

To pay the bills.

To shoulder responsibility.

To keep showing up when no one was watching.

My father learned to stay.

Because he did, I learned what faithful leadership looks like.

And yet, staying is not always the same as being present.

For all my father’s faithfulness, I remember days when I would excitedly relay some part of my day or a discovery I had made, only to realize that he had not heard a word.

The infamous thousand-yard stare occupied our table like a force of nature. My father would break off his train of thought only long enough to pat the food on his plate into a tidy pile, take a bite, and then return to whatever occupied his mind.

I remember growing quiet, shrinking my thoughts, and learning when to talk to Dad and when to stay silent.

As a mother, I understand him better now.

My own mind constantly whirls with thoughts, from the time my eyes open in the morning until I go to sleep at night. Something that bothers me is that I, too, have inherited that thousand-yard stare—my mind a million miles away from the people I call home.

There are times when my children must physically grab me to get my attention.

This is not how I want them to grow up.

I want to be present as a parent.

What the Story Became

When I first began adapting Michael’s story into a serial, I had a beginning and an endpoint. But, as so often happens to me as a writer, the plot began to contain a larger truth than I originally intended.

I am not entirely sure how this happens. Nor am I entirely sure I land it every time I publish.

In fact, I am certain I do not.

I originally wrote Michael as a drifter who has to decide to stay. Somewhere between chapters eight and nine, however, I discovered that the true heart of the novella is the power of presence.

One might argue that staying and presence are the same thing. But the parent who must be called back to focus on the child standing directly in front of them proves otherwise.

Presence requires more than physical proximity.

It requires attention. Time. Energy. Thought.

It requires the discipline of turning our minds toward the people in front of us and loving them with more than the work we accomplish on their behalf.

So, if you read NONE and wonder where it is all heading, read it with this in mind:

We only get one lifetime to spend on the people we love.

Provision matters. Staying matters.

But neither can replace the gift of being fully present.