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ELL, IT’S DECEMBER. THE canning is done, the hog’s in the smokehouse, the cattle have been driven down to their winter range, and the firewood is cut and stacked for winter. It’s been one heck of a year for most of us. Seems like every industry has experienced supply chain challenges and unpredictable delays. Many have found new careers or new ways of doing business. And like cowboys have always done, we’ve cowboyed up, met the challenges head on, and gotten the job done. But it hasn’t all been tough news. Thanks to a group of truly outstanding writers, Saddlebag Dispatches and our parent company, Oghma Creative Media, harvested a crop of award-winning stories that we think would make our dearly departed founder, Dusty Richards, proud. We started out with Rod Miller’s short story, “Black Joe” (Saddlebag Dispatches/Summer 2020), which won the Western Fictioneers’ Peacemaker for Short Western Fiction. Two more of our contributors were finalists. Regina McLemore for Best First Western Novel with her
Cherokee Clay (Fife Press/Young Dragons Press) and John T. Biggs for Short Western Fiction with “The Last Photograph” (Saddlebag Dispatches/Summer 2020). Summer also saw our first winner in our own Mustang Award for western flash fiction. The competition was fierce with multiple award-winning authors submitting their work. The top eight entries were published in our Summer issue. In the end, Andrew Salmon’s “High Stakes” took top honors and a cash prize. October was a busy month with judging for another Dusty and Pat Richards Memorial Oxbow Award for short fiction from Ozark Creative Writers. The winner was Nancy Smith Gibson, and her winning story, “Wherever Life Leads,” appears in this issue. Mid-October saw our authors and staff attending the Will Rogers Medallion Awards in Fort Worth. Paul Colt’s riveting novel, Grasshoppers in Summer (hardcover 5Star, paperback and eBook Oghma Creative Media, 2020), collected a respectable 4th Place in Western
