In the 1960s, Ralph Inmon logged all day in a company he owned with Herman Steele, returned home to his 100-acre farm at Riffe about 3 p.m., and swapped his calk boots for barn boots. He worked in the woods all day and each evening on the beef cattle ranch he’d built from scratch.
Then Tacoma City Light officials showed up waving papers that gave the utility eminent domain to claim the farmland, with the result that it lies buried beneath what today is Riffe Lake.
“I just remember him looking at the newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, and saying, ‘I don’t understand.’ My dad couldn’t understand how somebody could just come and say, ‘We’re going to take your property,” said his youngest child, Patrick Shawn Inmon, a 1978 Mossyrock High School graduate. As the author of 50 books, he will address “How to Succeed in Publishing Without Really Selling” at the Southwest Washington Writers Conference master class on the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 12. When Sasquatch Press editors canceled, he agreed to teach on short notice.
Shawn was only 5 when his 47-year-old father died from a heart attack on Halloween in 1965, a death attributed by the family to the stress of losing his farm, where they raised everything they needed.
“My father started with a small piece of land, and every time he got a few dollars ahead, he would buy 5 acres from somebody else,” Shawn said. “And by the time I was born, we had this huge spread.”
Shawn’s three older sisters had already moved out by then, but he and his 15-year-old brother lived with their mother, Ruth, who fired a shotgun over the heads of loggers on heavy equipment who showed up at Tacoma City Light’s request to harvest old-growth trees on her farm without her permission.
“They left, and they never came back,” Shawn said, recalling a Chronicle reporter who interviewed his mother referred to her as Shotgun Ruthie.
The widow and single mother also had to fight the utility in court when it offered only about $70 an acre for the farm. With construction of Mossyrock Dam, Cowlitz River water flooded the town of Riffe and the farmhouse where Shawn grew up.
“So we went from living on that ranch to living in a double-wide mobile home in a trailer park in Mossyrock,” he said.
A few years later, his mother married Robert Shelton, a construction worker helping to build the dam, and they moved in 1970 to a half-acre parcel on Damron Road off the White Pass Highway.
“I was lucky. My mom taught me to read when I was 3, using flash cards to learn my ABCs, so I could read already when I got to kindergarten.”
And Mossyrock provided a good education.
“The education I got at Mossyrock High School to me is unbeatable,” Shawn said. “I don’t think I could have gotten a better high school education anywhere else. I had such good teachers there.”
One was Dennis Mers, who encouraged him during his sophomore year to submit a 2,500-word story to a writing contest, which he “banged out” on his mother’s electric typewriter the night before it was due after tossing a ball back and forth with a neighbor boy. He wrote of two soldiers — the last surviving American and German — who hunted each other in a fire-bombed city like Dresden in World War II. He won Washington’s Best Young Writer award. The prize was a three-day trip to Fort Worden at Port Townsend, where he was paired with an adult author, Alan Furst, now a New York Times bestselling author of historical spy novels.
“The very first day, I’m sitting there all wide-eyed, and at the time, he looked like a hippie,” Shawn recalled. “He had kind of crazy black hair and a beard. His first book had just been accepted by a traditional publisher.”
Furst’s first piece of advice was to disabuse young people of the notion that they could earn a living as a writer. In the end, though, Furst did, and so does Shawn — to the tune of $250,000 a year in royalties from his 50 books.
Shawn also won the award his junior year.
“It was fun, and it was inspiring,” he said. “So that planted this idea that I want to be a writer, and then I just needed to make a living instead.”
Another Mossyrock educator guiding his education was Dayton Grimes, his English teacher who loves to read mysteries. So, for his 51st book, Shawn wrote a mystery dedicated to the retired teacher who now lives in Lacey. Jim Bartee also taught him for three years, and Lynn Warfield veered him onto the right path by teaching him to think for himself and learn.
“I’d always just kind of skated through my classes,” Shawn said. “My freshman year, I had a term paper. I just got the encyclopedia out. I kind of copied things, and I turned it in, expecting to get an A, and he gave me a D on it.”
He said Shawn needed to think for himself, which changed his life. As a guidance counselor, Warfield pulled Shawn into his office and told the sophomore that his grades were too low for entrance into a university. He’d need to bring up his grade point average by earning high grades his last 2½ years of high school.
“I buckled down, and I did it,” he said. “I would have just floated through, got to the end, and found out I can’t get into the University of Washington.”
While living on Damron Road, Shawn met the love of his life, the girl next door, Dawn Welch, who was 12 when he was 15. He asked her to a movie when she was 14, and they saw “Star Wars” on Dec. 27, 1977. They dated until he graduated and left for the University of Washington, where he studied prelaw. They drifted apart, largely because her parents disapproved of him.
During his freshman year of college, Shawn plunged into depression over the breakup, dropped out, and later enrolled in the Ron Bailie School of Broadcast, where he graduated in 1980. He worked as a disc jockey, moving from one radio station to another in Washington, Montana, Wyoming and California, spinning records for a decade. The 400 jobs he’s held throughout his life (which he admits is an exaggeration) include door-to-door sales of seeds, Christmas cards and Grit Magazine as a boy and Kirby Vacuums and Cutco Cutlery as an adult. He worked as a short-order cook, traveled for three seasons with the Unlimited Hydroplane Tour, ran a video store, toiled on a crab ship in Alaska, and worked as a business consultant and later a retail buyer for a department store. He even performed in a KISS tribute band, although he said, “I’m too old to be prancing around in seven-inch heels, breaking an ankle.” He spent 23 years as a real estate broker and agent and survived the 2008 market downturn, but it burned him out.
And that’s when he ran into his first love when he stopped for a burger at Bill and Bea’s in Centralia after collecting duplex rents in Longview.
“I hadn’t seen her at that time in 27 years,” he said. “I knew instantly who she was, and she had no idea who I was.”
They had each married other people in 1986. He fathered three daughters with his wife, and she raised two daughters with her husband. She was separated, and he described his marriage as “rocky.”
“I said, ‘Dawn, it’s Shawn.’ And if you ever need an ego deflator, here it is. She said, ‘Shawn who?’ I’ve been thinking about her every day for 27 years.”
He wrote about his love for Dawn and posted it online, where her daughter discovered it. Dawn emailed him, furious and mortified. When they met, he invited her to dinner. Their love reignited, and he proposed. They divorced their spouses and married each other in 2010.
And in 2012, Shawn published their love story in his first book, a nonfiction memoir called “Feels Like the First Time,” which sold 30,000 copies. He followed it with a second memoir in 2013 from Dawn’s perspective called “Both Sides Now.” Both have garnered more than 2,300 reviews with 4.2 stars out of five.
Between them, they have five daughters — Desiree, Samantha and Sabrina (his) and Connie and Danielle (hers) — and a dozen grandchildren.
With the success of his first two books, he decided to write full time and quit his real estate career. According to his website, “Every morning, when he wakes before sunrise and makes the twenty-foot commute from his bedroom to his office to write his stories, he knows he is among the luckiest people on Earth.”
They both quit their jobs, drove to all four corners of the United States, tapped into their savings to survive. Then Shawn wrote a travel book.
He published his first novel, “The Unusual Second Life of Thomas Weaver: A Middle Falls Time Travel Story,” in 2016. It has nearly 2,000 reviews with a ranking of 4.4 out of five stars. He has since published 24 Middle Falls Time Travel novels along with nine books in the popular Alex Hawk series, which debuted in April 2020.
“It just took off,” Shawn said. “So Middle Falls was doing well enough to support us, but then Alex Hawk was like rocking. That Alex Hawk series pushed me over six figures for the first time.”
I first learned about Shawn while reading posts on a Facebook page called 20BooksTo50K® where authors share what worked for them in writing, editing, designing, publishing, and marketing books. Shawn shared his earnings along with wise advice, so I looked up his books and his bio. I saw he lived at Seaview, Wash., so I thought I’d invite him to teach at the Southwest Washington Writers Conference. It turns out he’s even closer, residing in Tumwater.
Shawn publishes six or seven books every year. How does he do it? He writes 2,800 words every day, seven days a week. He sits at the computer, reads and edits what he wrote the previous day, and pounds out the next scenes in the story. It takes him about two hours a day.
“My very first month as a full-time writer, I barely made $300,” he said. But after releasing his first Middle Falls book, he earned a decent income, and by 2020, he broke six figures. He’s also launched the Lost Eden series where people step through a portal to the land of the dinosaurs and struggle to survive.
With Middle Falls, he said, “Every one of them focuses on a different protagonist and everybody gets a do-over. I think that’s just such a popular idea because we all have things we’d change. I know I do.”
More than 7,200 people follow him on Facebook, where he posts every day and has for 13 years. He recently shared a photo of candy cigarettes and asked who remembered parents giving those to them as kids.
He’s a self-taught writer but worked with two friends who critiqued each other’s work once a month. They still meet in Tacoma for lunch twice a year, but he’s the only one still writing. He has two other writer friends he speaks to via Zoom every day, talking about stories and plots and obstacles.
His favorite writing books are “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott, “The Secrets of Story” by Matt Bird, and “Writing into the Dark” by Dean Wesley Smith for seat-of-the-pants writers who don’t outline their stories. He’s worked with the same editor for nearly two decades and hires people in Ukraine to create his covers. His audiobooks are produced and sold by Podium Publishing, now Podium Entertainment. He sets the mood for each story with a song that he plays until the novel is finished.
Shawn spends about $3,000 a month on Facebook ads and hires a woman to run those for him. But he doubles that investment in sales.
And Warner Bros. is negotiating with him about the possibility of turning his Middle Falls books into a series for streaming.
Marketing the book is by far the hardest part, he said. Writing is the fun part.
“What I tell people is you’ve got to be patient,” Shawn said. “I published my first book on Sept. 5, 2012. I hit $100,000 in income eight years later. Not exactly an overnight success. And in between those eight years, all I was doing was writing, writing, writing, and believing that success would come.”
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
