Once upon a time (many years ago), I briefly found myself in a clapboard, rusty trailer, semi-ghost town in Nevada. The hotel I stayed in was a rundown has-been, where ceilings soared high, and the lumpy, almost colorless wallpaper was surely a century old. Outside, an ever-buffeting wind dragged dust across the frozen ground, rattled low-lying grasses, and set the wooden doors of abandoned shacks tapping. The only warmth to be found was in the hotel’s shabby bar room where, under an ancient tin ceiling, a talentless band whined out bad country music, and eccentric locals dished up tall tales, wry humor, and suspicion. It was a singular place, that community, eerie, even magical, and I’d give anything to be able to go back to it…

But where was it?

Believe me, I’ve searched for it over and over, traveling back and forth across Nevada, peeking into shabby trailer communities, fading towns, boom towns, ghost towns, and I’ve never found it. What was it called? Was it the way I remember it? Perhaps my recollection has so distorted the place, I would never recognize it today. Even more troubling, has memory played me a trick, created a place that never existed?

Is that a bad thing? Certainly not. My faulty memory has helped create the semi-ghost town of Blake’s Folly, Nevada. Blake’s Folly is a backwoods community of abandoned clapboard shacks, endless wind, and scraggly vegetation with strange local names like snatch-it shrub and sticky snakeweed. Back in the late 1800s, this former boomtown boasted three mining companies, a railway line to Reno, a lot of money, many saloons, and quite a few brothels.

But the glory didn’t last. It was soon clear that the silver was running out, and by 1904, those sane enough to do so were pulling up stakes and leaving. But a few did stay on — the courageous, the cranky, the loners, the rebels, and the sort of people who love windswept places and closely-knit communities.

And here they all are, waiting to be read about in my Blake’s Folly Trilogy. So why not come in for a visit?

 

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