Thomas Cobb, of Foster, teaches writing at Rhode Island College and has written two novels and a collection of short stories.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

FOSTER — Thomas Cobb shoved the 700-page manuscript into an empty desk drawer one morning in 2000, and it did not see the light of day for another five years.

The typed pages told the story of a young soldier in the Southwest in the 19th century and had been his daily work for nearly six years. But the novel had been too long, too winding, too …incongruous. He could not find a publisher, so there it sat in the drawer.

Eventually, inspiration faded. Cobb, a Rhode Island College professor, threw himself into another work, a collection of short stories. Two years passed and the collection was finished and published.

Cobb returned to the manuscript with renewed vigor. “I remember seeing the novel in a different way after working with the short story form,” he says. Less than two years later, he completed a new version of the novel.

In February, Shavetail, the novel in its final form, was published by Scribner. It is available at local bookstores and online at Amazon.com. Cobb is traveling around the state and the country to promote the book, his first full-length novel since 1987’s Crazy Heart.

SHAVETAIL IS THE story of Ned Thorne, a 17-year-old boy from Connecticut who joins the Army to escape a shameful past.

Set in 1871, Ned finds himself stationed in a fort in a remote desert in Arizona where he must adapt to an alien environment. He is immediately thrust into a dangerous mountain rescue mission to save a woman taken by a band of Apache Indians.

Ned, in the Army vernacular of the time, is a “shavetail,” a reference to the headstrong and untrained young mules whose tails were shaved for identification. Along his journey to the Southwest and into the mountains to face the Apaches, he grows into manhood.

Cobb says he drew inspiration for the novel from the area’s rich history. The action takes place after the real-life massacre of American Indian women and children at Camp Grant, north of Tucson, in 1871.

The fictionalized Indian raid that propels the action of the novel, says Cobb, is presumably in retaliation for the massacre. Some of the characters are drawn from the accounts of soldiers stationed at forts in Arizona at the time.

But while the novel draws on historical events and characters, it is a work of fiction, says Cobb: “I love history, and I love to play around with history. I am not a historian.”

A native of Tucson, Cobb also drew from his own experiences.

Before coming to Rhode Island more than 20 years ago, he attended the University of Arizona. He was also a freelance journalist in the state, owned an independent bookstore in Tucson, and taught English to convicts at Arizona State Prison.

MOTIVATION FOR WRITING the book came from a failed project, says Cobb. In the early 1990s, Cobb toiled with a novel set in a prison. He rewrote it more times than he could remember, he says, but it was never published. One day he decided to kill it.

“Every writer has a sad story like that, something that you work and work, that it is rewritten so many times that it has lost everything it ever had, and it’s dead.”

Cobb moved on. He knew his next project would be set in the Southwest. He knew it would involve Army life, and it would be set in the 19th century.

But beyond that rough setting and group of characters, he had nothing. No plot, no clear idea of what he was going to write. It is how he prefers to begin the process.

“I don’t plan out a novel. I don’t know where I’m going. All I usually have is a place to start. Here it was this Army camp,” he said.

Cobb spent months wandering the ruins of old forts on the outskirts of Tucson for research. He consulted the archives of the state Historical Society and the U.S. Army Library. He bought books on the Apache wars and of Army life in the 19th century.

He returned to Foster, and the office loft he built above his garage. There, he chipped steadily at the manuscript, writing three pages each morning –– no more, no less –– five days a week.

Meanwhile, he kept up his responsibilities at RIC, where he teaches courses in creative writing and is director of the university’s Performing and Fine Arts Commission, which finances the various campus arts groups.

It took six years from the start of his research to the completion of the first draft in 2000.

But after 700 pages, the manuscript “just wasn’t right,” he recalls. His agent, whom he has worked with since his first novel in 1987, told him it was “too clumsy” and needed to be reworked.

Exhausted, Cobb walked away from it. “I knew someday I’d go back to it,” he says. And so the manuscript ended up in a drawer.

BETWEEN 2000 AND 2002, as the manuscript went on the backburner, Cobb began working on a compilation of short stories. For him, it was a throwback to his beginnings as a short story writer, and a refreshing change from the novel’s slower pace.

“Something was wrong and I needed to go back to what I had done best,” he says.

Acts of Contrition was published in 2003 by Texas Review Press and won the George Garrett Fiction Prize, an award given by San Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas. The success gave Cobb the energy to return to Shavetail.

In 2005, he pulled the text from its drawer and set to rewriting it. He didn’t rely too heavily on that first version, he says. “I started to see the arc of the novel in a different way and I found myself just doing the story over again and going back to the manuscript every once in a while to pick the good stuff,” he said.

In those intervening years, Cobb says, he had learning something of the novel style, and his writing showed it. His agent loved the new draft, now 200 pages shorter. This time, the manuscript was picked up by the second publishing house to which it was submitted.

On Feb. 12, the hardcopy version of Shavetail hit bookshelves.

AS THE SPRING semester at Rhode Island College ends this month, Cobb will put his energies into promoting Shavetail while also doing research into his next project.

“I learned after Crazy Heart [his first novel] that you need to be working on the next project midway through the first. I didn’t do that with Crazy Heart,” he says.

Immediately after Shavetail’s publication, Cobb went on an abbreviated book tour, with stops in Arizona, Oregon, Houston, Louisiana and Rhode Island. He’ll resume that with more promos in Arizona, Ithaca, N.Y., and around Providence.

Cobb looks forward to book readings, when he indulges in acting out the voices of the characters as he has imagined them. He has a drama coach to that end. Sales have been slower than he would have liked, but the promotion “has to be done,” he says.

“In a lot if ways, it is easier to do the writing that to try selling it,” he says. “Your whole relationship to the book changes. It becomes a product.”

Work on a new novel will take him back to the deserts of Arizona. He’s planning on taking a fictionalized account of Tom and John Power, a pair of real life brothers and draft dodgers, who, along with a friend, evaded the law in a dramatic manhunt into Mexico in the early 1900s.

Says Cobb, “It’s a great Wild West story.”

pmarcelo@projo.com