Month: June 2025

Dual Writers for Dueling Pirates: Toni Runkle and Steve Webb

I’ve co-written nonfiction books with some success (The Long-Distance Leader is in its second printing and seven languages.) While Kevin Eikenberry and I get along pretty well, and I’ve managed not to get fired in the process, it wouldn’t work the same when writing a novel. I can fake collegiality as much as the next worker bee, but my fiction is too personal and too dependent on whatever I call “my style.”

So it’s impressive that Toni Runkle and Steve Webb have done several YA novels together. I’ll let them fill in the rest…

So what’s the deal with you two?

Hi, we’re Toni and Steve—and we’ve always loved telling stories. We first met as grad students at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, then went our separate ways into the film and TV world. Years later, we were released for good behavior and reconnected. We decided to team up.—not for a screenplay, but to write novels for young readers. Our first book out of the chute, Glitter Girl, was published by Sourcebooks and got a shout-out from Kirkus Reviews for delivering “an empowering message about striving to be true to oneself.” Not a bad start!

These days, we are waist-deep in our biggest project yet: The Pirate’s Curse trilogy, which serves up equal amounts of heart, humor, and (yes) swashbuckling adventure.

A little about us: I’m Toni—I grew up an Army brat, which meant moving all over the world, but it also meant a unique childhood filled with lots of exotic locations and perilous escapades. These days, I love the beach, my garden, and scary movies.
And I’m Steve—I was born in England, raised in South Dakota, an oddity from which I still haven’t fully recovered. I’m a big fan of baseball, cheeseburgers, and not so scary movies.

We’re both married—not to each other, because that would get weird—and we live with our wonderfully patient families in sunny Southern California.

What’s the new book about?

Weight of Souls is the 2nd book in the Pirate’s Curse Trilogy. The first book is Brigands of the Compass Rose. The series is about a group of modern-day teens, mostly outcasts and foster kids, who discover they are descendants of infamous pirates and must band together to fight a 300-year-old curse. 

I am a sucker for a good pirate story. What is it about that period that intrigued you?

We were interested in the women pirates of the 1700s, particularly Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who had thrown in with the infamous Calico Jack Rackham. They disappeared from history after Rackham was hanged, and it got us wondering – what happened to them and their descendants? Who would their descendants be now? From there, we wove a tale of magic, curses and modern-day young people who must fulfill their destinies. We use actual history and real characters from the past, which we weave into our modern-day tale. 

Officially cool idea. Totally unfair question, but we’re trying to pimp books here. What’s your favorite scene in the book?

There are many. But one of our favorites is a scene when the young Brigands spend an evening hiding out in a swamp with older Brigands and they swap tales of their adventures. 

Where can readers learn more about your books and your work?

Our website www.runklewebb.com

Facebook.com/runklewebb

Weight of Souls (The Pirate’s Curse Book 2) by Toni Runkle | Goodreads

X @webbrunkle

TikTok   runkle.webb

Whether your tastes run to historical fiction or award-winning urban fantasy, check out all my work on my Amazon Author Page, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter.

What Bird Watching Means to my Writing

I have recently taken up birdwatching, albeit in a somewhat slovenly and lazy manner. I’m not yet that crazy person with the Tac-style binoculars and special squeakless soles on my shoes so as not to scare them off. However, I have begun watching, listening, and trying to identify the little critters, and that has impacted my writing. Stick with me.

Full disclosure. One seldom begins a hobby late(r) in life without some kind of defining moment. To me, that was when the Duchess looked me in the eye and said, “You need a hobby.” I think she meant it lovingly. There’s a more than zero percent chance she needed me to get out of the @#$^! house on occasion.

The first thing to determine was what I could do that isn’t very expensive. I’m a little late in the game for collecting Roman Antiquities or foreign sports cars. What do I enjoy doing? I’m pretty sedentary these days, but me and my new bionic knees do enjoy a good long walk. Okay, start with hobbies that involve walking but won’t sneakily try to turn into running or some other strenuous exercise. It can be a slippery slope

If you’ve been around since my Chicago days, you know I love birds. My officemate in Illinois was a very cranky cockatiel named Byron (after the Count in Count of the Sahara). He didn’t make the trip west, and I wish him

well in his new shangri-la cockatiel suite, his new owner has built for him. I was even a member of the Chicago Avian Society… or as my wife called them, the Bird Nerds.

Walking and birds pretty much limited the choices for me. But how does one just start birdwatching? You begin by looking online for like-minded people. Turns out there’s a monthly guided walk at the Henderson Bird Viewing Preserve. Then I found a nine-dollar pair of opera glasses… no sense investing in good equipment until I know I’m going to be serious, right? Finally, god bless modern technology, is the Merlin app (part of Cornell University and their big track-all-the-birds initiative.)

Using only vague descriptions or recording the songs, the app will help even an idiot like me distinguish between a tufted flycatcher and a mountain flycatcher. Instead of using a notepad, it will track all the birds I’ve seen and where and when I saw them. That first day, we saw 38 distinct birds. I was hooked.

Okay, okay. I’m at the point. I can’t drive to the bird sanctuary early in the morning as the day job must be performed. I do walk every morning, partly to clear my head and partly to clear out Mad Max, scourge of lizards, defender of the realm, and most manly of poodles. When I was in Washington, DC last month, I added to my list by paying attention on my walk from the hotel to the convention center.

Here are my rules for that walk, and I’m pretty strict with myself:

No earphones or earbuds. I instituted this rule quite some time ago. I don’t wear them at the gym either, and for the same reasons. I want to hear what’s going on around me. Who knows? I might hear a bird that needs identifying. More than that, I pick up snatches of conversation, or noises that need investigating. All of that goes in my writer’s brain and gets processed into dialog to use in the future. Conversations become story ideas (“okay, jeez, I cheated on her but it’s not like it was her mother or something…” is a prime example,) or just give my brain a chance to daydream and plot stories.

Pay attention to what you see, and keep your head on a swivel. When birdwatching, the little buggers can be elusive. Some of them are ventriloquists, of a sort. The whistle you hear may be coming from somewhere else entirely. Get your head up from your phone and constantly look around. This is also a guilt-free way to peek into neighbor’s yards, just saying.

And mere scanning won’t work. When your eyes get drawn to something, do you really see it? How would you describe it? It looks like a plain old chickadee but has a red spot on its breast. It’s a verdin, and I was able to add it to my list. I couldn’t have done that if I stopped at, “Huh, looks like a chickadee.” Then I add the sighting to my app as soon as I get home. Attention, description, documentation.

Don’t get impatient with Max, he might smell something you missed. In his incessant quest to devour every skink in the neighborhood, he indulges his poodle-y hunter instincts by snifing everything, all the time. The canine roomba occasionally flushes a bird or notices a strange song before I do. He also stops me from walking off curbs into traffic when my brain is otherwise occupado.

Taking what I hear and see, forcing myself to notice the details, then processing all that raw data is grist for the writing of a novel or story. It’s not just a mule, it’s a reddish, mangy Jackass with a canker on its top lip. Better descriptions paint more vibrant pictures. There’s a difference between “feathers” and “tufts of brown feathers on the crown, tipped with white.) Birding depends on that kind of specification. Otherwise, you come back and say, “Yup, saw a birdie today.” Doesn’t make a great story, and that kind of surface description makes for terrible art.

The Deserter has been the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It required lots of details to enhance the realism the story depends on, all the while describing a time and place I’ve never been. Using the very rudimentary birding skills I’m developing helps me bring things to their essence and really evoke an image, or a sound, or (in this book) a smell.

I think the novel is better as a result of this heightened attention I’m paying to the outside world. My writing in general is more descriptive and interesting. All because I aim to find that Say’s Phoebe that i used to see over on Desert Palm.

If you’d like your book or writer’s group to do a live talk or Zoom call on “what writers can learn from Birdwatching,” let me know.

Whether your tastes run to historical fiction or award-winning urban fantasy, check out all my work on my Amazon Author Page, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter.

Midwest Auto Racing and a Ripping Read with Marlis Manley

Like any historical fiction fan, I have my favorite periods to read about. I also have those about which I couldn’t care less (Civil War 1.0. Regency…) What I really enjoy, though, is reading about subjects I don’t know much about. Of course I’m less thrilled to find out some of those “historical” periods were around the time I was born. Ahem.

Fellow Black Rose Writing author Marles Manley Broadhead has written an engaging, entertaining and it turns out, deeply personal tale of auto racing in the middle of the 20th Century. Trophy Girl is a fun coming-of-age tale. I’ll let her tell you about it.

Okay lady. Who are you, and what’s your deal with auto racing?

I was 17, finishing my first semester at Wichita State University, when a family friend asked what I planned to do with my life. I said, “I want to be a writer.” My stepfather, who overheard, turned to us and said, “You can’t be a writer,” as if I couldn’t be serious. And I got it—no one was beating down the door of a white bread, midwestern teenage girl with a midnight curfew for thoughts on the human condition. But I’d written my first book at 10 (a school assignment) and developed an irreverent enough sense of humor to become the family’s funny-poems-for-occasions go-to gal. So I kept taking classes, and eventually I enrolled in their MFA program.

Not long after I started publishing poems and then short stories, my stepdad laughed self-consciously and said, “I guess you’ve proved me wrong.” But I wasn’t feeling it yet. As Vivian in the movie Pretty Woman says, “The Bad Things Are Easier To Believe. You Ever Noticed That? It was 32 years after starting my debut novel, Trophy Girl, I got brave enough to send it to a small but rapidly growing publisher, Black Rose Writing. The story inspired by none other than my step-father’ decades-long dirt-track racing career, and  received the William Faulkner Second Award for Novels.

I remember as a kid going to dirt-track stock car races in Canada and having a blast. What’s Trophy Girl about?

It’s summer 1957, and when

fourteen-year-old orphan Sandy Turner goes missing—along with one of her late mother’s hidden scrapbooks—Aunt Maggie can think of only one place the girl might have gone. Frank Haggard, the race-car driver in those yellowing news clippings, assumes the girl claiming to be his daughter is a fan acting on a dare—until Aunt Maggie tracks them down. Memories of his annulled marriage to Maggie’s sister flood over him, and the timing couldn’t be worse. With the first-ever National Championship for stock cars a week away, the last thing he needs is a child-custody battle with Maggie—as determined as she is beautiful. When the car he’s planned to pilot is turned over to a younger driver, Frank and Maggie make the riskiest deal of their lives—her savings for a race car, but if Frank wins, he gives up any claim to his daughter.

FunFact: My step father won that first national in 1957, and again in 1958 and 1968. Trophy Girl launched at the 64th  running of the Grand Nationals at the Fairgrounds in Hutchinson, Kansas. There’s a photo in the back of the book of him standing beside the famous Blue No. 55 with the trophy sitting on the hood.

Another FunFact: My father, stepfather, and uncle were all race car drivers named Frank and knew each other. My father Frank Manley raced with Sports Car Club of America, my stepfather Frank Lies raced stock cars and super-modified, and my uncle Frank Dickerson raced midgets. I spent hundreds of weekends in grandstands eating track dust while glued to the action on the tracks and straining to hear the “grown-up” conversations my mother carried on with other wives and girlfriends. Those memories and a long shelf of scrapbooks took care of my research, plus I relied on subject-matter experts for particulars. These were men who had raced with my stepfather and whose incredibly extensive knowledge and memories made it possible for me to write even more authentically about those races, cars, and men who were local and regional heroes.  

Totally unfair question, but it’s my blog and I can do what I want. What’s your favorite scene?

While I loved working out the coming of age, conflicts, and romantic elements of the novel, I have to say writing the descriptions of the six races along the circuit to the national was some sort of total immersion experience. I love hearing from drivers who say the action and emotions in those scenes are exactly how they remember it—the taste of grit, smell of hot oil on a track that gets harder and slicker as the night wears on, the sparks of metal skidding along a concrete wall, vibrations as cars “trade paint” until one pulls ahead or one or both spin out of control. And yet, the scene that made a guy friend of mine cry was the quietest moment, when near the end of the book, after all the subterfuge, confusion, and legal difficulties, with nothing yet resolved, Frank walks up into the grandstand just before the grand national races begin and fastens a chain with a small gold cross around Sandy’s neck—the only thing left behind when her mother’s family kidnapped her away from him and ended the marriage.

How can people find you and learn more?

Like most authors today, I’m wafting about in the ether (see links below to your favorite satellites), with my home base my website: https://marlisbroadhead.com. There you can check out reviews of Trophy Girl as well as my nonfiction book Is that Your Mother Calling? Advice that Echoes Down Through the Ages (based on hundreds of poignant, hilarious, and even wacky responses to a survey I sent out while teaching written communication at Iowa State University.) There are also samples of my poetry, some novel excerpts, and a link to my blog, https://heartlandstoriesandpoems.blogspot.com

 And of course you can sign up for my newsletter, Musings & Mirth, and visit my Book Shop where you will also find my poetry chapbook, The Mendocino Poems, began when I taught on the coast and started the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference (https://mcwc.org). This will be its 35th year, July 31st through August 2nd,  and while I feel fortunate to be writing fulltime now on a modest horse ranch in Kansas, I’m always eager to return to the redwoods and incredibly beautiful Mendocino coast.

https://linktr.ee/marlismanley

https://www.facebook.com/marlismbroadhead

heartlandstoriesandpoems.blogspot.com

https://www.instagram.com/marlismanleybroadhead_author

Whether your tastes run to historical fiction or award-winning urban fantasy, check out all my work on my Amazon Author Page, and don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter.