“But to lose my idealism, to quit believing in the ability of human beings to rise above their baser instincts, was to become old and bitter and of no service to anyone, not even myself.”
― Joe R. Lansdale, Savage Season

About a dozen or more years ago I was working on my first novel, Correction Line, and I was swapping chapters with a friend from Rhode Island. My story was a combination of a lot of things I loved, literary fiction, the prairies, baseball, bad guys with guns, and oh yeah M...