My name is Bob Giel.  I'm a writer of western adventures that take place in the latter part of the 19th century.  I got into writing sort of through the back door.  The majority of my life was spent trying to be the best husband, father and provider I could be.  But, always in the back of my mind, was the western.  It was what I grew up with, having been a child of the 1940's during the time when B-western movies were still in their heyday, although they would decline and disappear, much to my chagrin, in the late 1950's.  I've kept them alive, however, through my collection of western movies.  Saturday afternoons would find me at the local movie house to watch the likes of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Wild Bill Elliott, Rocky Lane and others wipe out the bad guys and ride off into the sunset.  That genre helped to shape the way I live my life.  Because of the values those movies instilled in me, I keep my word, I'm a true friend and I finish what I start.

 

I conceived the original plot of "Macarastor Book One: The Mountain Men" when I was twelve and that thing rattled around in my head for the next fifty years or so, while I lived my real life.  Later, I became interested in guns and shooting and used this as a way of relaxing.  My interest in the guns of the era in which I write brought me insights into the mistakes that many writers make about the types of weapons that correspond with certain time periods.  For example, you can't write a Colt Peacemaker into a story that occurs in the Civil War because that revolver was not manufactured until eight years after the end of the war.  And so, the guns in my books are as historically accurate as possible because that's the way it should be.  Fiction is fiction, but it becomes fantasy if it's not at least based in reality.

 

Fast forward to my retirement from the corporate world when "The Mountain Men" finally made its way from the back of my mind to its rightful place up front and I actually started writing it.  To my amazement, it practically wrote itself, taking on a life of its own.  The characters had become old friends about whom I was telling stories so vivid in my mind that it did not matter that I had never lived further west than Illinois.  (I grew up in New York City and currently live in New Jersey.)  I saw the landscapes.  I saw the action.  I felt the characters' pain and joy.  "The Mountain Men" suddenly became book one of a series of four because I could not show the characters' growth in just one book.  And so, my second career was launched.

 

On this website, you will be introduced to my friends, Cason Macara and Tom Cord, and you will have the opportunity, through the "Macarastor" books, to witness the growth and development of a trading post into a city that influenced the path of Wyoming from a territory into the 44th state of the Union.  Recently, I broke the mold and ventured into new stories and new characters, although that does not preclude the conception of more Macarastor yarns.

 

 Thank you for visiting my site.  I hope you enjoy reading my works as much as I enjoy writing them.