Steve Devenyns art
Today I finished Fortin’s Furs, which is the 7th book in the Mountain Man Series.
It’s coming in at about 40,000 words and 175 pages.
Yeah, a little shorter than the other books in the series, but that’s alright.
With this book we’re rebooting the series, leaving mountain man John Colter behind.
We’re leaving Montana behind too, at least at the end of this book. From that point onward it’s west to the Pacific, Oregon country.
That’s where the Astoria Expedition of Wilson Price Hunt is heading and we tag along with them for quite some time in this book.
If you’ve been reading Free Fiction Friday’s lately you know all about this from stories like:
Those are all excerpts from this book.
What I haven’t touched upon much is the title of the book.
Fortin is for Case Fortin, a real-life trapper that had a band of three men with him – Jean Baptiste Champlain, Charles Sanguinet, and Jean Baptiste Beauvais.
The men found a lot of furs around the Three Forks in 1808, 50 packs in fact. That many furs had a value of $25,000.
In 2016 dollars they’d be worth $470,000.
We have no idea what happened to those men, and this book speculates on their fate.
More, we see a small party of men head out to find those furs.
The reason is simple – credit is tight in St. Louis, what with another war with Britain fast approaching.
It’s been just 30 years since the Revolution, after all, and many of those old wounds never fully healed.
It’s coming in at about 40,000 words and 175 pages.
Yeah, a little shorter than the other books in the series, but that’s alright.
With this book we’re rebooting the series, leaving mountain man John Colter behind.
We’re leaving Montana behind too, at least at the end of this book. From that point onward it’s west to the Pacific, Oregon country.
That’s where the Astoria Expedition of Wilson Price Hunt is heading and we tag along with them for quite some time in this book.
If you’ve been reading Free Fiction Friday’s lately you know all about this from stories like:
Those are all excerpts from this book.
What I haven’t touched upon much is the title of the book.
Fortin is for Case Fortin, a real-life trapper that had a band of three men with him – Jean Baptiste Champlain, Charles Sanguinet, and Jean Baptiste Beauvais.
The men found a lot of furs around the Three Forks in 1808, 50 packs in fact. That many furs had a value of $25,000.
In 2016 dollars they’d be worth $470,000.
We have no idea what happened to those men, and this book speculates on their fate.
More, we see a small party of men head out to find those furs.
The reason is simple – credit is tight in St. Louis, what with another war with Britain fast approaching.
It’s been just 30 years since the Revolution, after all, and many of those old wounds never fully healed.
There’s a lot of setup in this book, a lot of building to the second and third books in this tight trilogy that’ll take us up to 1812 or 1813.
I like to think of the second book in a trilogy as the one where everything goes wrong, and we’ll see that happen a lot in “Dorion’s Dilemma,” which I’ll have out in May/June.
Fortin’s Furs lays the groundwork, introduces us to the characters and their problems, and gives us a hint at what’s to come.
It’s a fun book and I read the whole thing yesterday while working up to the last chapter’s finish.
I finished that chapter at lunch today and now I just need to tie up some loose ends, give it a final proofread, then get it out the door.
I’ll start in on the next book right away, have already started actually.
These books are fun to write and judging from the sales, they’re fun to read as well.
Pick up a copy and find out firsthand.
And for the 75 or so of you that have finished the last book, you can expect to get Fortin’s Furs in another week.
Thanks!
Coming next week
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Coming next month
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