Defiance Press: Rick, your characters feel incredibly authentic and lived-in. Let’s start with your protagonist, Wyatt. He’s clearly a complex man with a troubled past. Can you tell us about creating him?
Rick Steeby: Wyatt is someone I like because he’s been through the meat grinder of life, and that resonates with a lot of people, especially veterans. He has a family legacy he felt trapped in from birth but questioned if he was up to the job. His father and another uncle are or were Texas Rangers. The weight of that family tradition is enormous.
On impulse, he joins the military to avoid serving under his uncle as a deputy sheriff – he’s trying to escape that predetermined path. In the army, he signs up to be an airborne ranger, only to discover in jump school that he’s afraid of flying. But here’s what I love about Wyatt – that flying becomes the first time on his own that he forges ahead, facing his fear. He doesn’t get over it, but he doesn’t let it stop him.
Defiance Press: The Korean War seems to be a defining experience for him.
Rick Steeby: Absolutely. When the Korean War breaks out, his unit is assigned to accompany the marines deep into North Korea, and they become trapped with them when the Chinese join the war. My dad was a Korean War veteran, and his brother was a World War II veteran. I drew on stories I heard growing up, but also the reality of what that generation went through.
Wyatt returns home after the war with unresolved issues, and drinking costs him his job with the Fort Worth Police. He leaves in shame to be a vagabond, moving from job to job, but slowly recovering. The thing is, he’s a better man and a better lawman than he realized, but it takes meeting Amy and the circumstances in Alaska to force him to confront his demons.
Defiance Press: Speaking of Amy, she sounds like a remarkable character. You’ve described her as a “bulldozer driving angel.”
Rick Steeby: [Laughs] That’s exactly what she is! Amy has a desire to excel in a male-dominated world and make up for time wasted in her first marriage on a man who didn’t measure up. She’s based on my friend from sixth grade whose family owned the gold mine in Chicken. Her dad was my basketball coach, she was a cheerleader, and she sang in a family band.
Amy becomes the catalyst that makes Wyatt’s recovery trajectory turn skyward. She forces him to step up or lose her. There’s a scene in the book where Wyatt is performing cowboy poetry at Dottie’s bar – he loves cowboy poetry and memorized it as a kid. He’s filling in for a late band, and when he completes his act, enthusiastic applause comes from the band waiting to take the stage: Amy and her brothers. She’s surprised by his recital as much as he is by her family band. As she passes by, she says, “And here I thought you couldn’t talk.” And he turns red, unable to speak. Up to that point, Wyatt has been tongue-tied around Amy.
Defiance Press: Tell us about some of the supporting characters that bring this world to life.
Rick Steeby: Dottie is really special to me. She’s the bar owner who becomes like a mother figure to several characters. She’s a compilation of strong, attractive, intelligent, successful women I knew growing up in Alaska – single women who came to Alaska during construction of the Alcan Highway. These women had survived the Depression, made some tough choices, but went on to build successful lives.
Then there’s Miss Gail, one of the permanent quirky residents. She has a mysterious past, including work as a shooting demonstrator for a firearms company and then as part of a traveling show. She ropes Wyatt into assisting her with an Annie Oakley-type show during the Fourth of July celebration. She makes jokes throughout and earns Wyatt the nickname “Red Face” because Amy has a way of making him blush, and he’s very polite around the ladies.
Defiance Press: How do you develop these characters as you write?
Rick Steeby: I “what if” my characters the same way I do story ideas. I try to instill characteristics that I find endearing or sometimes repulsive in the same character. My hero never sees himself as a hero – he has a job and desires, and I make his life a living hell. He isn’t perfect, but he’s trying to improve for the sake of others. He isn’t dumb, but he isn’t always the smartest person in the room.
Perseverance is key – he’s trying to do the right thing even when he has no idea what the right thing might be. He’s a bit reckless in his pursuit of justice, and when he gets hurt, it doesn’t heal overnight. In the spirit of Louis L’Amour and the Old West, he always survives to fight another day, smarter, braver, and thankful for his friends and family.
Defiance Press: The badge seems to be almost a character itself in your story.
Rick Steeby: That’s very perceptive. One of the main themes in Gold Miner’s Daughter is the weight of Wyatt’s badge – not the heft in ounces but the implied responsibility amplified by his family legacy and what he perceives as past failures. It’s far more meaningful to Wyatt than he realizes until he’s stripped of everything.
Faced with trying to stay alive, the one thing he can’t give up is the badge, and it comes full circle at the climax of the story. My artist friend Dan Mills painted a picture of the badge from my description for the cover. The badge is really the only part of his painting we used, except for the idea of the main character with his hat and light shining off the badge.
Defiance Press: How much of yourself do you put into Wyatt?
Rick Steeby: In my first manuscript, Escape from Playa del Carmen, the character was based on the person I know best in the world – me. I originally wrote it in first person. But Wyatt is different. He’s based more on the kind of men I knew growing up – my dad, his brother who was a WWII veteran, the Alaska State Trooper who arrested me and my cousins as juvenile delinquents when I was 10. Three of the four of us went on to become police officers, inspired by him.
Wyatt represents that generation of men who did what needed to be done, often without recognition or thanks. They had a code, a sense of duty that went beyond just doing a job. That’s what I’m trying to capture in his character.
Defiance Press: What do you want readers to feel about these characters?
Rick Steeby: I want readers to care about them the way I care about characters like Tell Sackett from Louis L’Amour’s books. I waited sometimes for a year or more for Louis to write another book with Tell Sackett in it. That’s the goal – to create characters so compelling that readers are invested in their futures.
These characters are flawed, they make mistakes, but they keep trying. In the end, that’s what life is about – perseverance, overcoming the past, continuing to push ahead, and finding redemption in the future. If readers finish the book wanting to know what happens to Wyatt and Amy next, then I’ve succeeded.Meet Wyatt, Amy, and the unforgettable residents of 1960s Alaska in “Gold Miner’s Daughter” – coming soon from Defiance Press and Publishing.
