Muse: Michael, first of all, Whispers of the Muse welcomes you and I Shot Bigfoot & Other Stories to the site. Tell us a little about yourself. What part of the world do you live in? Tell us about your background?
Wells: I live in between the Salmon and Payette Rivers in west central Idaho. I am originally from Kentucky and lived in Missouri before moving out to Idaho three years ago to work as a reporter. I came out to Idaho for the chance to see and write about salmon.

Muse: Who are your favorite authors?
Wells: Ernest Hemingway, Elmore Leonard, Sebastian Junger, Franz Kafka, Paul Russell Cutright, and Stephen King. Then there are the currently unknowns Geoff Thorne, S.P. Miskowski, Paul House, M.M. Bennetts, Matthew Dick, Jeff Blackmer, Pat Black, William Aicher, Simon Andrew Stirling, Simon A. Forward, Jason Horger and Dan Holloway who will all be household names if I have anything to do with it.

Muse: Why do you write?
Wells: Always have, wrote plays in the fourth grade, started a newspaper in the fifth grade, wrote comic books through middle school, wrote comedy sketches, bits and monologues through college, went to work as a serious journalist immediately following college. Though, I must say, I never really excelled in writing classes. I only remember one writing assignment in high school where the teacher gushed, everything else was merely serviceable.  I am not much of an I dotter or T crosser. I am all about creating a story that excites me with characters delivered through dialogue. Many times, I have found prose to be boring, unless delivered by someone with a great lyrical talent.

Muse: What is your writing regiment? How often do you work on a novel? Do you set daily time or word goals? What keeps you meeting your deadlines?
Wells: I don’t really set goals, I have at any one time 15 competing stories and all of them have serious holes in them. All of them could be a very good novel, but my mind hasn’t worked them all out yet. Typically, and I don’t fight it, the story that is to written next reveals itself to me, either in a dream or a random thought during the day that fills in that hole and then I write out a rough plot and usually a rough synopsis. Then I take what I had started with (because every one of those competing stories gets an initial writing of about 500 to 2,000 words, in some cases 20,000 words) and I see what still fits. Or if that initial start is really the start or just something in the middle, I either fix it if it is the beginning or I write to it if it is really in the middle and then I go from there. If the story is really beating me over the head to be written, I can churn out 10,000 usable words on it in a day, but more likely I average about 2,000 words that are usable.

Muse: Michael, in I Shot Bigfoot & Other Stories, you have a very interesting outlook on life, sparked with humor and tongue-in-cheek observations. Are you anything like your main character in the initial, title story? Does the way you personally look at life reflect in your writing style?
Wells: It does in some ways. I want to believe in Bigfoot, not sure that I do, but I want to believe we haven’t figured everything out yet and that there is something out there that eludes us and it is right next to us and it occasionally scares the poop out of us.

As to the characters in the book, I wish I were in some ways my protagonist Jack Lafayette, he’s rich and his books sell millions of copies, but he doesn’t have any awards to show for it. He owns a home on the coast and a home in the mountains that would be nice. However, I don’t quite drink as much as he does, and if I shot Bigfoot, I’d fire center mass so there would be no doubt and I would call the media first, authorities second and I would milk it for what it is worth.

As to the characters, many of them hold popular beliefs held by Idahoans. Most backcountry Idahoans don’t much care for the federal government or their wolf experiments. The more urban you are and the farther you are away from wolves the more likely you are to believe backcountry folks are stupid rednecks who just want to shoot every animal that walks by, quite the contrary, only half of them. I’m hopelessly split on the issue, I like wolves and other predators, but I can’t support the government forcing Canadian wolves or anything else on the people of Idaho.

I have friends who are much like Jack’s friends, I am like Jack’s friends, as well. We enjoy the comedic situations and are ready to experience them whenever they arise and we will add to them.

The forest service comes out as ineffective in the book, this is a commonly held belief by the people who are their neighbors, backcountry folk. It’s funny, but local government officials come out pretty well in the book. Idaho Fish and Game came out as the bad guy, but that was just for the story. I don’t agree with everything they do, but if I weren’t a writer, I’d being doing fish research somewhere, probably for a state agency.

I believe there is nothing that shouldn’t be made fun of in some way and so I go for jokes even if I do not personally hold the belief that inspired the joke, but I know someone or many will find it quite funny.

Muse: What are the creative jumping off points for you? Are you inspired by dreams? Music? Nature? What triggers your imagination?
Wells: Dreams, or a drive into the backcountry (nature), followed by a hike or a trip down a wild river. Native American words and legends are an inspiration. My camera is a huge inspiration, I will look at photos for hours from an area where I want a story to be set and write with the photos burned on my conscious. Other inspirations are the very dull government meetings I have to watch over as a journalist, nothing inspires a good government dig in a story like sitting through eight and a half hours of pompous government types coming up with better ways for you and I to live our sad, pathetic lives.

Muse: What was your inspiration for the title story?
Wells: I had written “Bad Off”, a story about a couple of guys who after a plane crash realize they are not alone in the wilderness, and I had written a good portion of “The Dog Man of Poverty Flats”, but I didn’t have a title story and I just couldn’t come up with one, consciously that is. Then I awoke from a dream that had a man standing up in a courtroom proclaiming “I Shot Bigfoot,” and I immediately went to my computer and wrote the first draft at 3 a.m.

Muse: What is your favorite story in this wonderful short story collection and why? Wells: That’s a tough one, can I cop out? Alright, a compromise then, I really, really appreciate “Bad Off”, without it there would not have been a book, but “Who Will Stand Up For The Hermit?” Is an allegorical tale about backcountry Idahoans and their struggle with federal bureaucracy and policy during the forest fire season, it uses the Bigfoot characters, but Bigfoot is only mentioned for the occasional dig on Jack. The damsel in distress represents backcountry Idahoans during fire season. She is deaf and blind in one eye. She is deaf because so much of the information given to property owners is misinformation during fire season. She is blind in one eye because their perception is off due to policies set back in Washington, D.C. and they can only see the danger when it is coming over the closest ridge. “The Promises We Make”, is another favorite of mine because it has a mixed message. A white man made a promise to a Nez Perce friend of his and due to circumstances beyond any single man’s ability to control, his promise will probably be broken by an encounter with the very people I wanted to highlight in the story. The moral is nothing is ever clean and pretty. Some have cried, but mostly I want it to gnaw at you a bit so you think about it. It is important that we not look at races of people and cast generalized judgments on all be they white, red or black, but rather look at the individual. Also, because it is a western and the western genre is important to America.

Muse: Have you written other books?
Wells: Not that are available at this time, though do a search on Amazon sometime soon, I’m rolling out a novel. I may roll out more by year’s end.

Muse: How do you feel about the current publishing marketplace?Wells: I think it is exciting, the gatekeepers are going to have to build a better mousetrap and the mice are going to have to find a better marketing and editing machine if they want, like I do, to cut the time from written to published. It is a new age and I welcome it. I’m a libertarian, classic liberal in the mold of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry et al, individual over the state or collective, and thus all of these new ways for the individual to compete in the marketplace are something to be embraced. I would much rather seek market validation from the readers in the marketplace than from a small group of people who claim to hold the keys to those readers. Whether that is right or not is not really a concern of mine. I’ve never been one to climb aboard the band wagon. They are quite noisy.