Wyoming-based New York best-selling authors, Michael and Kathleen Gear, have just finished book No. 88 and have now entered a bidding war between three publishers. As they wait to see who will publish their latest novel, the prolific couple are already busy at work on their next project to meet an ever-looming deadline.
“For most of our lives, we wrote about 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Kathleen said, explaining the hard truth of a writer’s life. “We've cut down a little bit recently, so I think now it's probably 7 or 8 hours a day.”
This is in addition to the two hours a day they devote to their various social media platforms, talking to their fans across the world.
“Much of the writer's life has changed,” Michael said, referencing over four decades of writing. “Social media is a requirement for survival in the modern age.”
The Gears don’t just use social media to connect with their fans but also use the platforms to educate and collaborate with other experts in their various fields.
“Social media is absolutely essential because you're educating at the same time that you're coordinating with people online,” Kathleen said. “You're trying to post content to help them understand whatever it is that you're writing about.”
Wyoming Inspired
Although their books range in genre from science fiction to prehistoric, the books all share one thing in common – Wyoming.
“Wyoming influences everything we write,” Kathleen told Cowboy State Daily. “Even if we're writing a book set in a different part of the country, if we're writing about wildlife or the angles of sunlight or what the moon looks like on a full moon night, we reference our experiences in Wyoming.”
During one of their early book tours in the 1980s, the couple were confronted by a journalist who told them they couldn’t be real authors because they were not living in New York City.
The Gears pushed back and said that being in Wyoming was what made them good authors.
“Look around you,” Michael said. “Look at the magic that is our state.”
The Beginning Of The Gear Fiction
Before Michael and Kathleen had even met, they had each individually been bit by the writing bug. For Kathleen, it was all in the family and also a fascination with her Native American heritage.
“My father wrote short stories, and my mother was a newspaper journalist,” she said. “Every summer we visited Native American archaeological sites and historical sites around the country. I wanted to write about those things. That's how I got started.”
For Michael, his desire to write fiction came about because of a Western novel he read that was full of inaccuracies. After reading that a herd of steers, castrated male cows, were suddenly calving, he threw the book across the room and said he could write something better than that.
It was winter and his job as a contract archaeologist for the Western Wyoming College had come to a standstill during a Thanksgiving blizzard. This gave him the time to work on the All-American novel.
“That's how I got started,” Michael said. “I sat down with a typewriter and in two and a half weeks, I wrote a 550-page Western novel.”
“It was terrible,” Kathleen said, and Michael was quick to agree.
Although he loved the characters and had the time of his life writing the book, Michael said he made every novice mistake you could imagine. The manuscript is now hidden away at the American Heritage Center. He is horrified that someday; someone will actually read it.
It took him writing another eight books before he had something he felt was worth publishing. It was this tenacity and hard work that has led to a lifetime of writing for the couple. They write both individually and together on their novels.
“We focus on a particular time period, like an archaeological site or a culture,” Kathleen said, explaining their collaboration. “Then, whoever's expertise we're dealing with drafts the bare bones of the story and the other person comes in and adds internal thoughts, hones the dialogue, does descriptions and the rewrites.”
After so many years of working together, when they are done with a book, they can’t spot each other’s writings since it has become so well blended together.
Kathleen Gear at her desk, researching for "Cries from the Lost Island." (Courtesy of Michael and Kathleen Gear) 
Michael Gear while writing "This Scorched Earth." (Courtesy of Michael and Kathleen Gear) 
Pia, an orphaned bison calf Kathleen and Michael Gear rescued, bounces on a bed. (Courtesy of Michael and Kathleen Gear) 
Michael and Kathleen Gear with Pia, a bison cow they found as an orphn when she was a calf. (Courtesy of Michael and Kathleen Gear) 
Michael and Katheleen Gear at conducting an archaeological survey at a historic cabin in 1983. (Courtesy of Michael and Kathleen Gear)
Switching Gears To Short Stories
As writers, the Gears are constantly learning and evolving. Their latest evolution has been discovering the art of the short-form story.
While their latest full-length novel is in a bidding war, book No. 87 is their first book of short stories called “Switching Gears.” Although they have written a couple of hundred nonfiction articles, this was their first time to venture into short fiction.
“Short stories have always been one of those things that we were never sure we were smart enough to know how to write,” Michael said.
“It is a totally different art form,” Kathleen agreed.
It would never have come about if their publisher hadn’t asked Kathleen to write a story for the Rebel Hearts anthology. It was a challenge that Kathleen accepted, and it took her a month of writing and refining to complete. The result was that her first short story won the Spur Award, became a finalist for the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award in Short Fiction and then won a Will Rogers medallion.
While still congratulating his wife on her awards, Michael was approached and told that the publisher was now expecting a short story from him. With the bar set so high, this seasoned veteran was nervous as he plunged into the new genre.
“I invested everything I had into it,” he said. “It went out and I was terrified. I thought, well, if nobody notices, maybe I can pretend like I never wrote it.”
Michael was pleasantly surprised that, instead of being ignored, his story also won a Spur Award and a Will Rogers medallion.
“It was vindication,” he said. “We had so much fun doing those two short stories that we pitched to the publisher an anthology.”
“Switching Gears” was the result. It was a series of short stories, each with comments from the couple giving insights and perspectives on what inspired each particular story. The journey to write a short story, the couple discovered, was much different than that of writing a novel.
“In a novel, you are essentially following the emotional journey of one character to the end,” Kathleen said. “It is just so different with a short story, but we’ve had a lot of fun doing it.”
As they continue to write, the Gears say that Wyoming remains their biggest influence in their stories. They have been in the Cowboy State for nearly 50 years and have a deep love for their adopted state.
“It's that feeling of being absolutely connected to the land and the animals and the people,” Kathleen said. “The incredible people in this state are an inspiration for every single character that we write. We really love Wyoming.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
