Gerald W. McFarland

There was no September blog post because I spent the last ten days of the month in the hospital recovering from surgery.
Good news! WHAT THE OWL SAW has been named by the New Mexico Book Co-op as a finalist for its Best New Mexico Adventure Novel of 2015 award. The NM Book Co-op is an organization dedicated to promoting communication among authors and readers of books in every genre dealing with the Southwest. Read More 

Stay tuned. Yesterday I signed up for a Twitter account. Now I need to learn how to use it successfully. My Twitter address is @BrujosWay08sW.

Recently I sent the manuscript for "The Last of Our Kind," the final volume in the Buenaventura Series trilogy, to Sunstone Press. No formal publication date has been set, but some time this fall is likely. Presently I'm drafting short stories. See my June 4th post for instructions on how to obtain your free copy of the first such story  Read More 

Some readers have had trouble getting copies of MONTEZUMA'S EMERALD, a short story in which Don Carlos meets his mortal enemy, Don Malvolio, face to face. To obtain a FREE copy, simply email geraldm3@verizon.net/ and you'll receive the story as an attachment to a return email.

From A SCATTERED PEOPLE (pg. 1). "Every May when spring at last comes to western Massachusetts, a small batch of phantom lilies [narcissus] blooms in my garden near the swamp."
Today these bulbs--carried by generations of women in my family from East to West and now by me back to New England--are in full bloom. Read More 

A glimpse of THE LAST OF OUR KIND, vol. 3 of the Buenaventura Series.

The year is 1706. Santa Fe is threatened by Comanche war parties and French traders, and agents of the Spanish Inquisition have arrived in town in search of a brujo suspected of residing in Santa Fe.

That brujo, of course, is Don Carlos, who has been living in Santa Fe for two years under the name Don Alfonso Cabeza de Vaca, his true identity known to only a few close friends. Given the many dangers that threaten the town, will he be able to bring his brujo powers to bear for good and still keep his true identity secret? An amazing story with a spectacular ending is coming later in 2015. Read More 

For a recent birthday my dear friend Willie Van Ness wrote a long essay on the first two novels in the Buenaventura Series. I've quoted part of her summation below.
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Neither THE BRUJO'S WAY nor WHAT THE OWL SAW fall easily into familiar genres or marketing categories. Neither novel, therefore, is easy to characterize. In future blog postings I will mostly use the word "paranormal" as a more general category of the extra-normal as it occurs and functions in the two novels rather than "magic" and "supernatural," which I think would prematurely and arbitrarily limit how the author describes the varieties of extra-normal events throughout the two novels. The category of "fantasy" would also be limited and leave out a great deal, and "science fiction" would be almost wholly irrelevant.

The upshot of this is that varieties of extra-normal and normal events in the novels mix in ways that pretty much defy easy categorization. Both novels are at base relatively traditional forms of literature that reflect their author's roots in the special time and period of spiritual questing and popularization of the quest that took place in American culture during the 1960s and continues to the present day. I am going to further suggest the category of "opera" as a perhaps secondary reference--that McFarland has thus far written a two-act opera, an American prose opera with some kinship to the complex forms introduced by Rogers and Hammerstein in their early 1940s transformations of the American musical form in "Oklahoma" and "Carousel." McFarland's novels are set in their specific moment of early American history--the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico. The time and lives of the inhabitants of the Spanish colonial settlement of Santa Fe are carefully and respectfully portrayed. A no-frills portrayal of the period and location is faithfully rendered. Then elaborate special effects of spectacle-fantasy unexpectedly and repeatedly metamorphose throughout both novels to enrich a relaxed and seemingly mundane context. In the opera form everything is permitted!  Read More