Arkansas Valley

“Arkansas Valley” is a series of Christian Western novels by California native R. William Rodgers. The first novel of the “Arkansas Valley” series was “Toward a New Beginning” that was first published in 2002 to be the first of the still popular and ongoing series. While he was born in a relatively urban town of California, Rodgers moved to Colorado in 1981 and draws much of the inspiration for his Westerns from his life there. Even as the series was his most popular it was not his first endeavor at writing as he started writing fiction in 1997 while he was vacationing in the Sangre De Cristo Mountains. His desire to pursue a career in fiction writing was inspired by reading the novels of Al Lacy the Evangelist/Author. It was after his wife, friends and family loved his first draft so much, that he decided that he would be a writer after all. It was the experience of having his close family and friends read and love the characters and story lines of his draft that resulted in the novel “Toward A New Beginning” five years later. He credits Al Lacy with lighting the fire for writing Christian fiction in him when he picked his brain at lunch.