Meeting Mercedes

They say you can’t outrun your past. Mercedes never tried. She knows that’s what they made fast horses for.

Meet Mercedes Lopez — seventy years old, sharp-tongued, and the kind of outlaw who just keeps missing out on a quiet retirement.

When I first started writing Mercedes Lopez as a character, I had no idea she’d stick with me the way she has. She started off simply enough – in fact, she came into being because I saw an image of a blood stained stretcher. It was a woodburytype from 1876, created by Elijah J. ward and titled “Rupture of the Ileum by the Kick of a Mule, 1876”.

That image stuck with me, churning around in my brain. Long before I had any concept of a plot, I knew I wanted to make my main character live through that moment. Mercedes Lopez was going to be kicked by a mule, one way or another. While writing that first story about her, somewhere along the way, she became a symbol of endurance for me.

Mercedes is the heart of my western stories, and a figure I’ve come to dearly live writing about. She’s a woman who’s seen more than most, lost more than most, and still finds enough adventure in the world to keep going.

I can’t wait for you to meet her!

To that end, I'm having a Q&A prep session on my Instagram, for a few days, where anyone interested can submit questions about Mercedes or about other aspects of my writing. I'm really getting eager to connect with people more and get some dialogues going about writing the wild west for our modern world.

Referenced:

https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.590/