Wendy Corr:
Well, hey there, folks, welcome to the Roundup! We are a Cowboy State Daily podcast that focuses on interesting people in the Cowboy State. I'm your host, Wendy Corr. And I am so thrilled today to introduce to people - if they have not heard of Mike and Kathy Gear, you will go out and buy their books after this conversation, I'm telling you! Because they are prolific writers, prolific authors in a wide variety of genres - not just in fiction, but in archaeology and in actual real historical facts. And it's just been a pleasure to get to know this couple, who lives up here in Northwest Wyoming and have made Wyoming their home for many years now.
I'm just going to go ahead and say hello to Mike and Kathy Gear. Hello, you two! I'm so glad to have you on the call today.
Kathy Gear:
It's a pleasure.
Wendy Corr:
I have to say, I had the pleasure of introducing our Cowboy State Daily readers to Mike and Kathy a year and a half ago, or something like that. And since then, they just keep coming up with more books. And I want to first off start off by saying, welcome. You guys are just - you don't stop working, but you both look lovely and rested. So I guess that means that you're doing something right, you're doing things that you love. Tell us about - let's start off with, how many books have you written so far? Each of you individually? But I will say and introduce people to the idea, the fact that you guys actually co-author everything. Yeah.
Kathy Gear:
So I have written 15 individually, Mike has written 20 individually, 22 individually? We can't even remember. And I think now we have 90 published.
Mike Gear:
Yeah, the problem is because some of them are reprints. But I think we could easily say 88 individual stories.
Kathy Gear:
That have been published so far. We have many more in drawers.
Wendy Corr:
You've got many more in drawers that are just waiting to come out?
Kathy Gear:
Just waiting to come out - actually, they're early novels, Wendy. And if there is justice in the universe, no one will ever read it.
Wendy Corr:
Really? And why is that? Because my gosh, we've been blessed with your stories for so many years. I think your first one came out in 1988, is that correct?
Kathy Gear:
That's right. Yeah. But those early novels, Wendy, are works in progress, where you're developing how to plot, how to create characters, how to describe the environment, and we weren't very good at it when we got started, which is why no one bought those. Wise decision.
Wendy Corr:
But you now have this years of experience behind you, where you might be able to revive those plotlines at least right?
Mike Gear:
Some of them. For example, the first novel that I ever wrote is so bad that if there's justice in the universe, like Kathy said, no one will ever see them. And I thought, quite honestly, because it had been up in the attic at the ranch house, and then the pack rat moved in and he kind of, like, crapped all over it. And so - I had my opportunity, and I was able to say, look, this has got to be thrown away. And I thought, thereafter, I was safe. No one would ever pick that up and go, ‘Jiminy Christmas, this is real junk.’ But then it turned out, after my mother died, we found another copy in her papers. So I'm still not off the hook.
Kathy Gear:
It’s set in Wyoming, though.
Wendy Corr:
Okay, hey, that’s one of the neat things, is that you have set many of these stories in Wyoming. And then you've set many of them off into far off galaxies, which I just - let's talk about the idea that you guys cross genres. I mean, most people, they start in one genre, and they just stay there their entire career. That's what they know and they love. Not you two.
Kathy Gear:
No. And you know why, Wendy, it's because we're anthropologists and historians, so we study human beings across the course of time and around the world. And human culture doesn't just stop now. It actually, we can trace trends into the future, what is likely to happen with human beings by knowing what's happened in the past. Which is also why knowing the past is so important. But, so we, just limiting ourselves to like pre-history or science fiction would eliminate half of anthropology.
Mike Gear:
Yeah, and our publishers always hated this. Tom Doherty, who did the ‘Peoples’ series with McMillan, which we are best known for, always said, ‘No, I want you to write pre-history, I want you to write pre-history.’ But Wendy, if we had been stuck writing pre-history, the well would have gone dry. And being able to stop and do something else, to write, for example, the Anasazi mysteries, or the Contact series on the DeSoto expedition, or one of the genetic thrillers like ‘Dark Inheritance,’ or ‘Raising Abel,’ or ‘Dissolution,’ although that was actually pitched by the publisher.
Wendy Corr:
Yeah, I have to say, ‘Disillusion’ - I was blown away. I mean, I was literally caught from the very first page. And the idea - because it starts off, it's set in Hot Springs County, and in Cody, and all of these places that are so familiar. But this story, and this is the scariest part, because this is not a horror book at all - but this is a scary story, because it could happen tomorrow. And that's the part that is frightening. It's almost a roadmap, which - I looked at ‘Dissolution,’ after I read it, I'm like, ‘I need to mark off all of these things that I need to be prepared for, because this could happen tomorrow.’
Kathy Gear:
Yeah, when we first pitched this idea to our publisher - well, actually, he pitched it to us. He said, ‘I want you guys to do a near future novel based on your anthropological knowledge.’ And we said, ‘That's a scary story.’ And so that's how we got started writing it.
Mike Gear:
And at the time, they had a number one Times book, ‘Fortunes: One Second After.’
Kathy Gear:
Wonderful book.
Mike Gear:
Wonderful book. And Tom, Tom Doherty, our publisher, said, ‘You have been writing the collapse of ancient civilizations for most of your life - what happens when you turn your perspective to ours?’ And of course, EMPs from a nuclear explosion…
Kathy Gear:
Electromagnetic pulses.
Mike Gear:
… had been done. And we had to come up with another way to bring down the economy and the country.
Kathy Gear:
There were a lot of choices.
Mike Gear:
And we used the banking collapse, and then looking at it from the perspective that anthropologists have, and Wyoming can survive.
Wendy Corr:
Which is awesome. That's good things for us here in the cowboy state, we can survive an EMP, banking dissolution, I mean, all of these things - we've got what we need here. But there are some really fantastic observations on human behavior, which I found in this book. And I think that's probably where you excel, though, in your storytelling?
Mike Gear:
Yeah, one of the things that we do with all of our books is we talk about the choices that human beings have to make, when you have nothing but a host of really, really bad decisions to make. When you make one, how do you live with it afterwards? So that's where we really go as anthropologists.
Wendy Corr:
So let's talk about anthropology. That is what brought the two of you together, all these years ago. Tell us, I want to know, and I know our listeners want to know, your backstory - because you're not just authors, you are people. You've been together for many, many years, you are still obviously in love, which I just absolutely - that just thrills my heart every time I see you two together. But tell me how your love story got started.
Kathy Gear:
We met at a Wyoming Association of Professional Archaeologists meeting in Laramie in 1981. And honestly, people say love at first sight does not exist. But I took one look at him and went, wow. I really like this guy.
Mike Gear:
I thought she needed an ophthalmologist at the time.
Kathy Gear:
And then we went out to lunch together. And it was just magic. It was absolutely magic.
Mike Gear:
We argued about history. And we argued about archaeology and great scotches and good stouts. And I don't know, Wendy, everything just clicked.
Wendy Corr:
And you've been together since 1981.
Kathy Gear:
We have.
Wendy Corr:
And how long have you been writing together then? Since your very first book came out in 1988?
Kathy Gear:
On our first date, we talked about the fact that we wanted to write books. And I said, ‘You know, it takes me three months to do an 80 page archaeological report. I'm never going to be able to finish a novel.’ And Mike said, ‘Oh, yes, you will. I've written five.’ And I went, ‘Really? You've written five novels?’ He said, ‘Oh, yes, you want to read them?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’
Mike Gear:
She's never been very bright.
Kathy Gear:
These were terrible, Wendy. But he had talent.
Wendy Corr:
But he had talent. Okay! Well, that just leads me then to the archaeology side of things. So that's how you met, you both worked in the archaeology field at the time.
Kathy Gear:
We did. I was working for the Bureau of Land Management in Cheyenne and Mike had his own private research company.
Wendy Corr:
And then you took what you've learned and the things that you loved about that, and you've created these fantastic stories. How do you turn the study of history into a book about - I just got started on the Donovan series. And how do you take that look at ancient history, and put that out into outer space? 200 years, or just actually 125 years in the future?
Mike Gear:
Yeah, well, Wendy, you have to understand that all of these are essentially frontier novels. They're stories about human beings on the edge of civilization, and in the case of the Donovan books, I mean, they're way out there. They're 30 light years away, stuck on a planet. And navigation isn't very good. Part of it was kind of a reflection of what happened with the Europeans, when they first landed on the North American coast. But it's that whole - you throw the characters into the situation, they haven't been resupplied in years. They've been left on their own from a highly organized technological society. And all of a sudden, they're on this incredibly rich planet that will do anything it possibly can to kill them.
Kathy Gear:
Everything is against them, the wildlife, the plant life, everything.
Mike Gear:
They're losing. They're going away in dribs and drabs. And suddenly a supply ship shows up, and it's from the corporation, and they expect everything to be like it was. And so I mean, automatically, that sets up that conflict. And then you also have the wildlife - we had to build an entire biology.
Wendy Corr:
I noticed that - oh, my gosh!
Mike Gear:
Well, and you're gonna get more of it in the second, third and fourth books. But it's all based on - you have to have that understanding of organic chemistry. And then how do you change that with a different polymerase to make, instead of DNA, TriNA, and just build the entire thing from there. It’s wonderful fun, wonderful fun.
Wendy Corr:
But how long does it take you to do that, though? Because, my gosh, how much research do you have to do for each of these individual directions that you go off to? So - okay, I'm going to back up a little bit. How many different series do you have between you?
Kathy Gear:
Oh, my gosh.
Mike Gear:
Okay, there's the Peoples series, there's…
Kathy Gear:
I’d say there's a dozen, just offhand.
Wendy Corr:
So a dozen different series set in a dozen different places at a dozen different times. And you have to research all of these things before you even write the first book. How long does it take you - and then you're still cranking out books at the same time?
Kathy Gear:
It depends on the book, Wendy, but just as an example, if we're writing a historical novel, or a prehistoric novel, we have to go to the actual sites that we're writing about. We have to talk to the archaeologists, the historians who are working on the subject. We have to read the literature - a lot of it with archaeology is ‘gray’ literature, which means it's unpublished archaeological reports, because that's how you get the latest information. And all of that takes about six months, but you're writing at the same time.
So you start the story, and then you know that you don't know this. And then you have to go and ask somebody, ‘What do you think?’ And, we have spent our career researching the entire time we're writing books, because we discover how much we don't know about the subject that we thought we did know about.
Mike Gear:
My answer to your question is, ‘How long has it taken us? It's taken us all of our lives.’
Wendy Corr:
Well, that's very true. That's very true. You two, we talked about the different, you know, this one says it's by W. Michael Gear and this one says it's by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, and yet at the same time, the two of you are writing these together. How does that work? \
Mike Gear:
Okay, in the case of the Wyoming Chronicles - ‘Dissolution’ and ‘Fourth Quadrant’ and ‘After the Eagle Has Fallen,’ my name is on that book because Kathy had an entanglement with a literary agent. And I sold the trilogy, and somehow or another after I did all of that work, we couldn't quite justify giving him 15%. But the Wyoming Chronicles are completely co-authored, but something - for example, ‘This Scorched Earth,’ which was a Spur finalist and they campaigned it for the Pulitzer. That book, I might have done most of the writing on, but Kathy still went through it. I mean, nothing comes out of this household that doesn't have both of our imprimaturs on it.
Wendy Corr:
And that's phenomenal. I just love that. I love how well you two work together. And let's talk about this being put out there for a Pulitzer. Tell me about ‘This Scorched Earth,’ because that's, fantastic. And the Spur Awards, you guys have won several Spur Awards, which I’ve got to say, that I'm sure never gets old.
Mike Gear:
Yeah. And then they were scraping the bottom of the barrel a couple years back, and they put us the ‘Wister’ and put us in the Western Writers Hall of Fame, which goes - but the good news is, is now there are four writers from the state of Wyoming who are in the Hall of Fame, and we're very honored by that.
Wendy Corr:
That's fantastic. Congratulations. Oh my gosh. Tell us about ‘This Scorched Earth’ and why it was being put out there for, and considered for, a Pulitzer.
Mike Gear:
‘This Scorched Earth’ goes way, way, way, way back probably to 1982. And Kathy and I were coming home from the Society of American Archaeology meeting, and we happened to stop at the Shiloh Battlefield in Tennessee, on the exact anniversary of the fight itself. So we're walking through, and it's a wonderful battlefield. You can follow where every single company and division went, going through like the Peach Orchard…
Kathy Gear:
And the pink petals falling into bloody pond.
Mike Gear:
It was just stunning. And then you read the interpretive sign about how it was the only source of water for men who were dying.
Kathy Gear:
Which is how it got the name, Bloody Pond.
Mike Gear:
Because a lot of them died bleeding to death in the pond. And that image just stuck.
Now that's 1982. So other things happened, I wrote other things. The prehistory series takes off and hits the Times list and just goes like rockets. But periodically, I’d drag out that manuscript, and I would rewrite it and try and submit it and be told, ‘Well, we only want you writing pre-history,’ or ‘large Western sagas don't sell today.’ And so this went on - our agents would not represent it. This went on for years and years and years. And finally, Kathy and I were having lunch with our publisher, Tom Doherty, in New York while we were there for Thriller Fest, and I said, ‘Tom, I've got this novel.’ And he finally said, ‘I’ll buy it.’ So he went back to the office and told our editor at the time and said, ‘I just bought this big rambling historical from Michael Gear.’ And Claire, who's not really a Western editor said, ‘Oh, really?’ And Tom said, ‘Yeah, we're gonna do it.’ She said, ‘Shouldn't they be writing prehistory?’ Anyway, when I turned the novel in, and it lands on Claire's desk, she sent me back a one word response. ‘WOW,’ in capital letters. So Wendy, that's kind of like the centerpiece, the keystone for my literary career.
Wendy Corr:
That's fantastic. Oh, my goodness. And those are the things that people don't often think about when we're talking about authors. You two, you are prolific writers. But it takes more than just your talent and your perspective and your words, to make a book into a bestseller. And so you have this team of people there that helped to mold and shape and market what you do, that have allowed you to become so successful. Is that a fair statement?
Kathy Gear:
Yeah, a book is not just the author's, you are quite right. It takes an entire publishing team to make this work, and it starts with the publisher. You have to have a great publisher who understands what you write. Otherwise, they're not going to do anything with your books. And if you have a great publisher, then they need to give you a great editor, a great marketing staff, a great sales staff, you need the bookstores in America to care about putting your book on the shelf is absolutely critical. It's a huge team effort.
Wendy Corr:
And you two get to get out there, and you get to go to the bookstores and you get to go to these places and do book tours. You just came back - I love the Facebook post, the social media post about your boots, Kathy, they are phenomenal boots. I’m just saying, I want to see those boots sometime, because they're pretty great. But you do get to get out there, and you get to meet one on one with your readers and with the bookstores and things like that. How rewarding is that for you, as an author, to see people really taking - it's no longer just, ‘Oh, I've got this book on my shelf, and this took up how many months of my life and now it's done.’ These books live on, these adventures live on in the imaginations of the people who read them.
Kathy Gear:
Especially in the digital world they live on forever.
Mike Gear:
Forever.
Kathy Gear:
But still, you're absolutely right, Wendy, that without readers, we wouldn't be anywhere. You have to have people who care about what you're writing about, or no one will buy your books. And it is always a joy for us to meet someone who tells us that our books made a difference in their life.
Mike Gear:
Yeah, this is a while back now. But we were doing a signing for AFSC Army Air Force exchange service, at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado. And it was a really nice signing, we were, you know, talking to a lot of people, most of whom hadn't read our books before. And this young man in uniform walks up and kind of walked past the booth, and looked, and came back. And he picked up a copy of ‘People of the Masks,’ which is a book about the Iroquois in the ten hundreds. And he looked at us and he says, ‘Did you write this?’ And Kathy and I said, ‘Oh yeah, can we tell you something about it?’ And he broke into tears. And he put the book down, and he said, ‘I just finished this. I just, I'm returning from Afghanistan, and I wasn't sure that I could make it.’ And he said, ‘I read your book,’ and he said, ‘I want you to know your book saved my life.’
And that's the kind of thing that you never really realized, because you get carried away in structure writing, can I get this done, I've got a deadline, we have to do all this publishing bullshit, all the other stuff that goes along. And you forget that something that you write can have the ability to transform someone's life. And that's that's a remarkable and humbling, humbling, humbling realization.
Kathy Gear:
And a huge obligation.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely. Oh my gosh, there's a lot of weight that goes along with that.
Kathy Gear:
There is.
Mike Gear:
Yeah.
Wendy Corr:
So talking about going to all these places, you guys chose to make Wyoming your home. And I love that. I love that. What is your, what are the things that you love about living here in Wyoming? Is it the people that say, ‘Wow, we have Mike and Kathy, they are ours?’ I like to say that. ‘Yeah, Mike and Kathy, they're ours. We're glad to have them here.’ But do you get that kind of feeling? Do you feel like Wyoming has embraced you as much as you have embraced it?
Kathy Gear:
Oh, yeah. Do you know what, the great thing about living in Wyoming is, nobody cares who you are, they don't care who you are as a celebrity - they care who you are as a member of the community. And for us, that's hugely important, because we don't like being on stage all the time. You want to just be a member of the community. And Wyoming has been so wonderful for us. One of the major reasons we're here is because of the people of Wyoming - it's the archaeology, the history, the wildlife. I mean, that is the greatest inspiration for us. We couldn't write a book like ‘Dissolution,’ without knowing the people of Wyoming.
Mike Gear:
Yeah, we consider ‘Dissolution’ and those books to be our love letter to Wyoming.
Wendy Corr:
Well, I think they're wonderful. And again, I just think everybody - because they're not frightening. Well, they're frightening, but they're not ‘out there.’ They're not science fiction. They're not way in the future. They're not way in the past. They're now - and it's the people of the now that are in these books.
Mike Gear:
One of the really cool things is that we were finalists for the Spur Award for ‘Dissolution.’ And we like to say that we have just invented the brand new genre of Western Apocalyptic Fiction.
Wendy Corr:
That's true. Oh my gosh, okay, so you're the first ones - we can now associate that Western Apocalyptic Fiction with Mike and Kathy Gear. Of course! But one of the things that I really appreciated about ‘Dissolution,’ like say, the opening chapter, you're in Hot Springs County, you're in a van going up into the Wind River Mountains, right? And they're these people who've never been to Wyoming before, who are learning about, like, ‘Wait, what am I doing here? I'm a city kid.’ But you set that there, I'm assuming because you lived in Thermopolis for a long time, and you had a ranch there.
I want to veer off into the ranch, because you guys had a Bison Ranch in Hot Springs County. And I love that. Tell us about that.
Kathy Gear:
We had Red Canyon Ranch for about 30 years, we raised bison there. And we started wanting to raise bison when we first started archeology, because in the West, you're always excavating bison remains. And you're always working with the native peoples to help us understand their respect for bison. And so when we first bought bison, in Custer State Park in ‘92 - oh, but you know what, our first bull was in ‘91. We bought him from Hot Springs State Park. Yeah, he was great. But anyway, so, raising bison taught us so much about living in the West, because they were such a hugely important part of living in Wyoming.
Mike Gear:
Yeah, and when we originally bought - we were living in Dubois at the time, and ‘People the Wolf had just come out.’ We came back from elk camp, after being gone for a month. And we got the elk unloaded and went up, and the answering machine was just, you know, full. So we started playing it back, and it was John Order, who was an editorial assistant. And he said, ‘We're getting these really weird letters, and we got weirder letters and weirder letters and weirder letters.’ And of course, we're not answering the telephone because we're chasing the wily wapiti through the black timber up in the Gros Ventre. And by the end of it, John says, ‘I have called the sheriff's office, and they just called me back and said that there was no one home.’
Kathy Gear:
‘Are you guys okay? Are you all right? Are you dead? We've gotten 147 death threats in the last week.’
Wendy Corr:
Whoa, wait a minute, death threats?? What was that about?
Mike Gear:
We were on the top 10 hit list for a group called the ‘New Inquisition’ out of Saginaw, Michigan.
Kathy Gear:
That’s like Robert Jordan, I don't know if you're familiar with his books, wonderful fantasy writer.
Mike Gear:
And Clive Barker and Stephen King. I mean, we made a great list. But their objection was that our native characters have animal spirit helpers.
Kathy Gear:
Which is clearly satanic. And therefore we're writing about Satan. It was so depressing.
Mike Gear:
It's one of those things, you know, we're right across the, essentially within a mile of the Shoshone Arapaho reservation. And we have a lot of really, really good friends who had absolutely no clue that they were satanic.
Wendy Corr:
I guess, obviously not.
Mike Gear:
So we wanted to move to a place that was at the end of the road, that we could lock the gate. And that's what took us to the ranch. And at the time, when we bought it, we both come from agricultural families. And beef wer selling for $1.07, and bison meat was selling for $3.30. Now, I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but I saw something in here that was - and Kathy pretty much said, ‘Let's do it.’ And we have never ever regretted that. It was 30 years of magic, working with those animals.
Kathy Gear:
Well, and like you mentioned, Kathy, the archeology part of your background and the association with Native Americans, that just goes right into, I'm sure, and really helped give you more background on your first Native Americans series. Because you're literally living with these animals that meant everything to that culture.
Kathy Gear:
Yeah. And it's only when you start living with bison, that you really understand why they were considered mystical, magical characters, because they actually are mystical, magical characters.
Wendy Corr:
Oh my gosh. So we need to have a whole nother conversation about that. But I'm sure even - go ahead, Mike.
Mike Gear:
They will teach you humility in a great, great hurry.
Kathy Gear:
Very intelligent.
Wendy Corr:
Well, so talk about how your daily lives and the things that you've learned have come across in your different genres of books - because we're actually almost out of time here, which is just killing me because there's so many more things to say! But the various genres that you have - so you've got North American Native American history, you've got climate science, you've got archaeology, you've got science fiction, you've got Western Apocalyptic… what are some of the other genres? You've got children's books?
Kathy Gear:
We've done a lot of nonfiction, too, on bison, bison history, bison genetics. We've done short stories for kids.
Mike Gear:
A lot of articles on writing, teaching writing, how you actually do it, the business of writing. Then, we've never had a chance to do anything with short stories until two years ago, and one of our publishers contacted Kathy and said, ‘We're doing an anthology of our female writers, we would like you to do a short story.’
Now, Kathy and Mike don't do short stories. So she spent a month trying to figure out how to write a short story, and wrote ‘No Quarter,’ about the slaves who were stuck in the Battle of the Alamo. And they had a very, very, very different goal. They wanted the Mexicans to win.
Kathy Gear:
Yeah, we always try to do characters who have been neglected in the historical story. And the slaves - Jim Bowie’s slaves, for example - who were in the Alamo, did not want Texas to win. They wanted Mexico to win, because slavery was illegal in Mexico. And they knew that if Texas won, it would be reestablished, which it was, after Texas won.
Mike Gear:
So her very first short story is published in the anthology, and I'll be darned if she doesn't win the Spur Award for Best Western short fiction. And then the next year, they asked me, they said, ‘Well, we're doing the men's anthology. Now, Michael, we would really like you to do a short story.’ I said, ‘Okay, no pressure, right?’ She won the Spur Award, and now everybody knows Kathy does the good stuff, and I do everything else. So I, when in writing ‘Bad Choices,’ I thought, ‘My God, how do I?’ I have to at least put out something credible, so people don't look and say, ‘Boy, she really could have married a lot better.’ And so with ‘Bad Choices,’ I was just honored to find out that it's the 2024 Spur Award winner in short fiction - and you're gonna love it, because it's in the Wyoming Chronicles universe.
Wendy Corr:
No kidding.
Mike Gear:
So we can add short stories to our repertoire of…
Wendy Corr:
…genres and different ways that you guys get your stories, and these amazing, wonderful tales of these really interesting people that you get to care about. And that's what I love about them. I am all about character-driven - even if it's set in a very strange universe, that I would be something that I wouldn't normally do - if I like the characters, hose are the books that I'm going to read. And so that's what I love about the Mike and Kathy Gear duo, is that you're creating characters that I care about, and I want to thank you for that.
Mike Gear:
You're so very welcome!
Kathy Gear:
Thank you for being a reader, Wendy, we appreciate that.
Wendy Corr:
Oh, my gosh, absolutely. I have way too many books.
Mike Gear:
Do you know how rare it is to actually do an interview with someone who's read the books?
Wendy Corr:
Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. Well, I most definitely have read the books, and I absolutely love them. And I want everybody else who's listening and who's watching this, to be able to go to their local bookstore or their library and pick up your books as well - and I want them to go to your website, because you keep that. You've got a newsletter that you put out - and is it a quarterly newsletter?
Kathy Gear:
We try to do it every month, but sometimes it's quarterly.
Mike Gear:
It hasn't come out this month because we had the trip to Oklahoma and had to do all of the…
Kathy Gear:
It’s coming.
Mike Gear:
We do get to it. It's kind of - sometimes there's a rafter of them that come month after month, and then of a hiatus.
Wendy Corr:
Well, we are grateful for what you are putting out there, for what you're bringing to our bookshelves, and to our nightstands, and to our Kindles, and to our audiobooks, because it just brightens our lives and makes it so much more colorful. And we learn things, too, which is, I think, one of the best things you can say - you can come away from something and say, ‘I did not know that about the world that we live in now.’ And so thank you for that.
Kathy Gear:
Thank you, Wendy.
Mike Gear:
You’re very welcome.
Wendy Corr:
Absolutely. And folks, thank you for tuning in to The Roundup, and getting a chance to meet and know - if you did not already know W. Michael and Kathleen O'Neal Gear, now you've been introduced, and I urge you to go out there and read their books, because millions and millions of readers cannot be wrong. And I'm telling you, they're not.
So, Mike and Kathy, thank you so much for being on the show today. And thank you for tuning into The Roundup. Stay tuned - next week, every week we have phenomenal authors that are Wyoming people, that are Cowboy State characters, and we don't want you to miss out on any of those. So, tune in next week for another fantastic conversation with another Cowboy State character. I've been your host, Wendy Corr. Have a wonderful day.
