by Henry McLaughlin @RiverBendSagas
People have asked where my characters come from. My response frequently is, “I don’t know. He just showed up one day and said he had a story to tell.”
That’s how Michael Archer, the protagonist of my Riverbend series, came to be.
The first glimmer of book one, Journey to Riverbend, came, like most of my story ideas, from an image. There was a guy standing on a ridge looking into a valley. The sun was setting. He wore a cowboy hat and held the reins to a horse. OK, I thought, it’s a western. I like westerns. Other than that, he was a dark silhouette, a mysterious shadow.