Back in my elementary-school days when I lived in Southern California, I never had to worry about getting chosen to play on a baseball or softball team for a neighborhood pickup game. Everybody knew me, knew I played in Little League. I was a pitcher, second baseman and an outfielder. I was good and knew I would be chosen early by one of the two makeshift teams.
At the time, I didn’t realize how comforting that was knowing your peers knew you were a skillful ballplayer. I just accepted that fact. All changed in 1965 when the family moved back to Ohio and I was enrolled in the eighth grade at Wadsworth Junior High.
During gym class in the fall and spring, the gym teacher would have us pick teammates for a pickup softball game. Newly enrolled, living out in the country a mile from the town limits, no one really knew me or my skill level at softball. It was inevitable. I was always one of the last guys picked.
It turned me off to sports. When I reached high-school age, I refused to try out for the baseball team, both at Wadsworth High and later at Fort Frye High School. Instead, I focused on developing my skills as a writer.
As an adult, I was a newspaper reporter, and one of my responsibilities was filling in covering sports including baseball. So I did get to take advantage of my knowledge of baseball. I wrote sports stories about high school teams in Ohio and North Carolina.
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I’m Mike Staton and I’m an author with six published novels. Three are sword and sorcery novels, and the last three have American Civil War settings. The latest, which debuted on May 1 of 2023, takes place during Reconstruction in North Carolina, and stars a newspaper editor, and his wife, a graphic artist. It’s part of a four-book series that will see my main characters head westward into the American frontier in the final novel, now being written. I’m currently writing that fourth book, which I’ve titled ‘A Wyoming Dawn: A New Beginning.’
Writing Wranglers and Warriors 