Why did you write a Western horse novel?

I wrote what I wrote. As a man nearing eighty, I answer questions without the slightest self-criticism.

As a book, “Horse Ranger” reflects the same attitude: unashamed, without hesitation, heading straight for the joy of writing.

If you’d like to know more, join the launch on Ascension Day, May 29, 2025, at 2 PM. Registration for the webinar is on my website, the address is in the image. This webinar will be in Finnish.

Here’s some background: My working life revolved around two things—writing and speaking—as a journalist, public information officer, teacher, trainer, textbook writer, entrepreneur, and more.

In my spare time, I also wrote fiction, poems, and stories. WSOY published my short story collection Seitsemän piippalakkia (“Seven Russian Caps”) in 1990.

In retirement, I kept writing bits and pieces until a couple of years ago when I had a wake-up call. Artificial intelligence had taken a leap into fiction writing.

I’ll skip over all that information technology and languages have meant to me throughout my life. My experience with them helped me understand that, by 2023, large language models had revolutionized writing and translation, among other things.

I stopped using a writing platform that lagged behind and switched to an AI-assisted platform called Novelcrafter.

Like all serious platforms, Novelcrafter was in English. That didn’t bother me—in fact, the opposite. I could write in Finnish and translate practically on the fly into English.

I was tempted to return to an old unfinished novel, Lintuetiketti (“Bird Etiquette”). I had gathered a lot of material and already written much of it. But perhaps the theme was too demanding for a first experiment.

What about using AI? Well, maybe it was best to try something lighter first. Like many men my age, I had a secret from childhood, youth, and even later: we liked Westerns. Comics, books, films, TV series—the world of Westerns fascinated us.

My novel Hevoskulkuri reveals why. Trying out AI as a writing aid was one motive; choosing the Wild West as a genre was a straightforward decision.

But that’s not all. My wife Leena and I have six grandchildren. The oldest are girls; the youngest are twin boys. When they were little, I told them bedtime stories that followed a familiar pattern: a big man versus Iipeli and Aapeli (the twins) in various situations.

Later, I moved on to the reliable works of children’s authors. To my delight, once the girls learned to read, they continued reading without any prompting from their grandpa.

I was more worried about the boys. From my time working in schools, I knew how poor boys’ reading habits often were. The twins did enjoy reading, so I decided to encourage them further with a “reading diploma.”

When they turned 13, I gave each of them a birthday book. If they read it by a set deadline, they’d receive a reading diploma, a small cash prize, and the chance to choose a new book for themselves.

So I had another strong motivator for writing Hevoskulkuri: a clear target audience of two young readers.

Of course, as always happens when I write, the project—or perhaps in this case, the “horse”—ran away with me.

I’ve written a novel that includes not only a Western tale but also:
a) a romance between a white man and a Black woman,
b) a road trip story of a young man aiming to be the fastest gun in the West,
c) a Western horse’s Lassie Come Home-style narrative.

You can question the durability of the story’s weave. But fiction is fiction. Thanks to AI, the novel is historically plausible.

Thanks to the excellent universities in the USA, it’s possible to verify historical context from digital archives. For the period depicted—the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the subsequent Reconstruction—those archives are more complete than any digitized archives elsewhere in the world.

What about other uses of AI? I wrote the entire manuscript in Finnish—I couldn’t have done it in any other language. I translated it scene by scene, chapter by chapter, using Claude Sonnet (versions 3.5 to 4).

During the writing, I researched sources using ChatGPT. I finished the manuscript with the same Claude model, without using a traditional editor. For the music, I used an AI called lyricsintosong, and for images, Grok AI.

In summary, I’ve learned a lot. At least for my writing, AI models are here to stay.

Why publish it on Amazon’s KDP bookshelf? It’s the most flexible way to start indie publishing. Why in English? For a Western, English feels like the natural choice.

I’ll publish the original Finnish version elsewhere—for example, on my website: https://ilpohalo.com .