Talking About Revolution…

06. August 2009 · Comments Off on Talking About Revolution… · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Politics, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine...

Really, the title of this ought to be “talkin’ ‘bout revolution” but WP does not handle apostrophes or any other weird punctuation in titles for posts. It tends to frell comments, but comments are frelled anyway, but against the moment-hour-day when they are unfrelled… old habits.

Anyway – my point, and I do have a couple – is that a certain shake-up to the established order of several things has been in progress over the last couple of weeks. And having had some small part in bringing a tiny corner of it to pass, I have to say that I am sorta thrilled. And relieved, and reassured … and laughing my ass off at the reaction to the Obama-as-Joker poster. I first saw it early this week, and called in Blondie to have a look: it was disturbing, subversive, and very much to the point, which is good, and going viral, which is even better, because it has tapped into a rich vein of untapped derision for our very own “Dear Leader”. It’s not the first crack in the perfect façade, but it’s the breakout one … and watching the very same people and publications who thought it was just jake to have GW Bush parodied as an ape, a vampire or a NAZI melt-down in hysterics is absolutely rich. As in two-scoops of Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey with some whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top rich. Talk about an intellectual glass jaw, and people who can dish it out but can’t take it. Not everyone adores the Dear Leader, people – adjust. Let the derision flow, freely. It’s good for the body politic, and for the last eight years weren’t these the same people claiming that dissent was patriotic?

So, the town-meetings held in their home districts by our resident congress-critters are meeting with … shall we say, a somewhat less than cordial reception? That almost universally, the congress-critters are meeting up with constituents who are angry, frustrated and have a mind – as citizens of a free republic – to voice their opinions instead of having said opinion manufactured by so-called public interest groups and lobbyists. And that the congress-critters are having their feewings hurt, by people yelling at them for not reading the damn bill, or the stimulus bill before it. OK, all with me, and all together: Awwww! Tough titty, said the kitty. Deal with it, congress-critters. Remember, we hired you, through elections to work for our best interests, and we actually might have a strong opinion on what that best interest is. Don’t let Washington and the life of privilege inside the Beltway go to your head.

Apparently, some of the brighter sparks in the Democrat Party establishment (Ooops, almost called them the House of Lords!) are sure that everyone protesting current administrations dictates and policies must be hirelings of some anti-national health-care org, or maybe the Republican party, or some malevolent right-winger mirror image of George Soros, or someone. If this is true, can they tell me where and to whom I should turn in my time sheets for work performed over the last five months? And should I charge varying rates for general secretarial work, as I would for drafting news releases, doing radio interviews, and standing on the sidewalk, holding a sign in front of a senator’s office. Can I also charge for prep-time, for TV interviews? What about hastily cleaning up dog-poop in my garden, so that KENS-5 can do a quick stand-up interview? Does that count? Maybe I should have hired someone else to do that, and spread around the wealth a little bit? Let me know, in any case

Finally, a commenter over at the Belmont Club pointed out that maybe it is time for a middle class revolution – our natural elites, of the upper classes in everything – appear to have abandoned everything but the appearance of a democratic republic. Our so-called leaders are happily looking forward to being the oligarchs, feudal nobility, or nomenklatura in whatever would come next, secure in their superiority and their natural ability to rule. Nothing would appear to excite them more than am ability to discipline and silence those uppity lower-classes, that rabble who have the nerve to think they can run their own lives, when really … they didn’t go to the elite schools, know the right people, speak with the correct upper-class accent and mouth the politically-correct verities. It’s up to the remains of the middle class to do it – the poorer are already choke-chained and leashed, with the necessity of earning some kind of living, or by whichever power which controls whatever subsidies they receive. It’s left to us, while we still can, before the serf’s collar is riveted around our necks, and we are no longer free citizens, controlling our own lives and our own property; but rather a species of two-legged, talking sheep, to be sheered whenever the rulers feel the need to pass another subsidy to a well-connected member of it’s own class.

What Sgt. Mom Did on Her Summer Holiday

27. July 2009 · Comments Off on What Sgt. Mom Did on Her Summer Holiday · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Working In A Salt Mine...

I went on a road trip to Fredericksburg on Thursday afternoon. It’s about an hour and a bit, driving north on IH-10 as far as Comfort, and then another jaunt down a side road up and downhill to Fredericksburg. A lot of Main Street is pretty much tourist attraction – and local residents laughingly confess that they try and avoid Main Street on weekends – and in fact, all the shops that they personally shop at are anywhere else than Main Street, or at least, that stretch of it for about four blocks either side of the Marketplatz. I have noticed that the only mercantile establishment stocking items that ordinary, non-tourist shoppers might have a need for is the old 5 & 10. Which didn’t have AA batteries – but that’s a minor point. My daughter’s camera did have enough juice for Thursday afternoon and evening, when I had a signing at the Pioneer Museum. This would be the second event that Richard Bristol, the director, has set up for me – the first being in January, when I had just launched the Adelsverein Trilogy. Although two of his ancestors (one on the paternal, and another on the maternal side) are mentioned in the Trilogy – he still hasn’t had the time to read it. He is taking his own copies of the Trilogy on his vacation, a cruise to Alaska, and plans to read all three books then. When he has time. A museum director’s job is never done. Blondie tried to talk him into adopting Rossi, one of our resident rescued cats, who- from the way he makes nice to male visitors – was a man’s cat. No luck – but we’re kind of fond of Rossi, anyway.

The museum volunteers’ dinner was in the old Methodist Church parish hall: the Historical Society offices are in the facility – and the sanctuary is now available for weddings. Otherwise, it’s all part of the Pioneer Museum grounds. I’ve done a talk there before – and it’s a church parish hall, which is the sort of place which is comfortable and familiar to me. There were about fifty people there; much the largest crowd I’ve given a book talk to. Dinner was terrifically good – catered by a local small firm: Blondie wishes she had the chutney recipe for the grilled pork skewers. I asked one of the ladies to take me around and introduce me to everyone: one of the awkward things about this ‘guest author/stranger’ things is that people are hesitant to come up and talk to you: so best ask someone else to take you around and break the ice. It turns out that about half the people present had read the Trilogy – which was wonderful for me, since most of them liked it very much. Kenn Knopp, who is a local historian and member of the Historical Society – and had read the Trilogy in manuscript – did an introduction. I had been referred to him by David and Jenny at Berkman Books, yea these many months ago, as the local history expert. I was nervous about the Civil War portion of the Trilogy, and wanted to have someone who was pretty much immersed in local history, have a read-through. He confessed at first that he was pretty unenthused about the whole prospect of reading a MS by a relatively unknown author – and moreover, one that ran to about the same word-count as Lord of the Rings – but he was won over within a very short time. After my father, Kenn is about my biggest fan; he is sure that I was inspired and guided by something divine – I insist that if anything, I was guided by the San Antonio Public Library, which provided me on loan with about every book I needed for research purposes.

And we spent that night at a wonderful local bed and breakfast, thanks to the hospitality of the owners. It’s out in the country a little away from Fredericksburg – and that evening we looked out at a little scrub-wood covered valley while sitting on the porch, enjoying a tasty adult beverage. The B & B was actually a little self-contained cottage, with a bedroom, and well-stocked little kitchen and full bath.

And then we were off for a full day of sightseeing. We checked out a parish rummage sale, where my daughter rejoiced that she was finally able to afford to buy antiques in Fredericksburg. (She spent a whole $2.00 at the rummage sale in the parish hall of St. Mary’s Catholic Church) and I regretted that I couldn’t afford to go much higher than $30 on a silent auction for an antique low-post bed. But we did talk up it’s many fine details to another woman – hand-made, the footboard and headboard were elaborately curved and out of a single wide plank, and it really wouldn’t cost all that much for slats to rest a mattress on, and to have a futon-mattress made in 3/4 size. I think we talked her into it, for it was a very nice bed, and she would give it a good home.

Then we went off for a tour of a local cemetery, and the old and new St. Mary’s church buildings. The old St. Mary’s was finished during the Civil War – a sort of agreeable, unadorned neo-Gothic building. No one can put a name to the architect, or even if there was one. Apparently, the parishioners just picked up their tools and built it. The new St.Mary’s is right next door. The newer building is still 100 years old, and beautifully painted – IIRC the inscription over center arch, with Christ enthroned, means “I am the bread of life”. The windows are all stained glass, and very ornate. Strictly speaking, the windows are not really stained glass, with every separate color cut out of a pice of colored glass and pieced together with lead canes – this is glass which is painted in small panels and then assembled together. My mother informs me that this is nearly as difficult as true stained glass. This is the kind of church glass that I knew from growing up. Very nice to look at, during very long and dull sermons.

We were treated to lunch at the Peach Tree… and by late afternoon, the dreaded author’s table for the book event at Berkman Books was calling. But the signing worked out very well, for there were other authors there to talk to, and a constant stream of shoppers in and out of Berkman Books. (They’re having a sale, BTW.) One of my nicest conversations was with a nice gentleman who read the Trilogy on loan from the Harper Library, on the recommendation of the librarian – and he liked it so much, he wanted his own copies. Yes!

And, as expected, my daughter made friends with Emily the Berkman Books cat… all in all, a nice experience. About the only thing they didn’t do for me was a key to the city!

Road Trip!

23. July 2009 · Comments Off on Road Trip! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Working In A Salt Mine...

Off to Fredericksburg, in another two hours, as soon as I finish packing, water the plants, put out food for the dogs, put out food for the cats, post one last book review, make the bed, clean up the cat-puke, draft a Tea Party mass-email and print up some more marketing material for the Adelsverein Trilogy…

Event at the Pioneer Museum this afternoon – book signing. Tonight, speaking at the Museum Volunteer’s dinner. Tomorrow, a joint IAG author event at Berkman Books, all the way down at the other end of Main.

(Must remember camera….)

Things Happening Too Fast to Count

05. June 2009 · Comments Off on Things Happening Too Fast to Count · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, that’s me – life in the fast lane, as it is, what with fifteen hours a week of soul-numbing drudgery at the call center, or as I refer to it “the Hellhole” (all apologies to anyone who now has the earworm from This Is Spinal Tap now firmly stuck in their consciousness for the rest of the day. No really, I live to serve.)

BTW, I can’t see my way to quitting, just yet. As horrendous as working there is – it’s reliable. Unless and until the monthly royalty checks for the Adelsverein Trilogy and Truckee about double and do so on a reliable, month to month basis. I can’t afford to slice up my nasty plastic employee badge and walk away – as tempting as the thought might be. With the economy apparently circling the drain and certain large corporations getting ready to tank worse than the Titanic … well, a regular job, however unpleasant, is not to be sneezed at. And as I keep reminding myself – it’s only fifteen hours a week.

But it’s fifteen hours away from time I can work on Watercress Press stuff – I have a horrendously complicated memoir, two huge binders full of not-very-well-organized pages (typewritten, mercifully) to work on … and now and again I have a mad wish to squeeze out another couple of hours to continue on the next book, or to market the current lot a little more vigorously. I have a book-club meeting in Beeville on Monday, and a pair of events in July in Fredericksburg … but I can’t even begin to think about that because of the most horrendously looming project…

Tea Party Hearty.

The San Antonio 4th of July Tea Party is going to be at the Rio Cibolo Ranch, a little east of town on IH-10 … and all of us who worked on the Tea Party on Tax Day, have been looking around in the last couple of weeks to try and figure out – well, not how could we top it, but at least equal it. Or come close to equaling it, and yes, we have spent hours and evenings in meetings working on this; how to re-organize the website, how to re-do our media efforts, how to reach out to the local media (and grab them by the short-n-curlies), and how to even begin to keep level of events and the proposed legislation that looks to be fair raining down upon us. It looks to be, sometimes, as if there is a sort of legislative hailstorm of laws approaching us – laws considered at every level, laws now in committee, under consideration, or proposed, each one more potentially damaging than the other, each one seemingly carefully crafted to favor someone involved, to the detriment of someone else, each of them with an apparently harmless intent, but with a vicious sting buried within it’s heart. Like that ghastly CPSIA law… where to start? I had the feeling three or four years ago that there was something malign lurking, some deadly danger, but I didn’t think it would be our republic being nibbled to death by ducks, or at least, some ghastly, self-serving political class of elected aristocrats, out to better themselves at the expense of the nation.

Oh, yeah – and the US is not a Muslim nation. Just thought I’d throw that in. Jeese, who is writing and fact-checking the Obaminator’s speeches these days? What desperately awful institute of learning did they pass through – and I use the word in the sense of fecal matter passing through an intestine. Like I am going to sit by and watch my country turned into something like Argentina under Juan Peron, while the old-line media establishment ooohs and ahhhs. Have a nice weekend – think of the musical that will be made of this in a couple of decades.

Monday Morning Doldrums

01. June 2009 · Comments Off on Monday Morning Doldrums · Categories: General, Home Front, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine...

Still recovering from a bad allergy cough that sounded as if I were bringing up a lung – the very sound of which made people edge nervously out of range and ask, with deep concern, if I was all right. I had to beg off working the usual Saturday evening at the hell-hole telephone bank, taking reservations because – it sounds bad to the prospective guests when the reservations agent is hacking away like Camille dying of tuberculosis, and besides, I could barely talk above a whisper. So home and to bed very early, loaded up with over-the-counter stuff which is supposed to help … and this morning was the first time in a week I opened my eyes and felt something close to normal.

Which is all to the good, because I have a book club meeting in Beeville next Monday – this sort of thing is meat and drink to writers, a room full of people who have actually read the book and have serious questions. I got some lovely ideas for the next round of writing about early Texas from the last book-club meeting – so, we’ll see how it goes. Also putting together an IAG-All-Texas writers event for a bookstore in Fredericksburg late in July, the very day after another event for me at the Pioneer Museum. The owners at Berkman Books were all very keen on the idea, so here’s hoping for the best. Hard to tell, how it will all go town, with the economy apparently on the verge of tanking like the Titanic. I’m kind of worried about the other independent bookstore that carries my book, the Twig in Alamo Heights. I managed to scrape far enough ahead of the bills that I could use my royalties to buy copies of the Trilogy for consignment sales, but the Twig management only wanted one of each. When we stopped by to drop them off last week, Blondie noticed that – although there were no gaps in the shelves, they didn’t have much in the way of the other knick-knacks and little non-book items that they usually had in stock before.

I put some more work into on-line marketing, though – Amazon.com has set aside Author pages for a wider array of scribblers than formerly, so I’ve been spending some time this morning uploading the necessary files to expedite the “search inside” feature. Yea on many moons ago, I had uploaded “To Truckee’s Trail” as a Kindle book, and had such an awful time doing it and no appreciable uptick in sales, that I had written off doing so as wasted effort. This was just after Amazon had launched the Kindle Reader Mark One, so I guess the bugs in their system were to be expected. I didn’t upload the Trilogy as a Kindle book until January, when some of the other IAG authors began discussing it; lo-and-behold! Uploading them, and adding the necessary links to the paperback version suddenly was a lot less fraught. I’ve actually had a good few sales of all four books, ever since. Don’t know how or why someone suddenly added Tabasco sauce to Amazon.com’s wheaties, but I’ll play, as long as they’re in a helpful mood.

Ordinarily, my vision of Amazon is that of a huge, cavernous underground warehouse, piled highe with books and other goods, sort of like that in the final scene of the first Indiana Jones movie. Up in the dim ceiling overhead, there is some kind of vast, clanking machine, with tracks and pulleys and long arms which reach down and pick up something, and carry it away. I visualize those items being dropped into a huge hopper, and eventually they emerge on the other end – which is an anonymous UPS drop-box on an anonymous street in a featureless urban warehouse development. The point is, there don’t ever seem to be any humans involved, save for someone in a long gray cloak that slips around the corner and runs away, immediately you catch sight of them … or the whole place may be run by rubbery-tentacled aliens, like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest. In any case, interaction with a real human at Amazon is just about impossible.

Oh, and you’ll never know it, if you get your news from major media outlets, but the San Antonio Tea Party is perking along, planning our big 4th of July bash. It’ll be at the Rio Cibolo Ranch, just east of town, with live music, and speakers and singers, and games, and consciousness-raising, and hay-rides and a herd of long-horns … everything but the kitchen sink. Think of it as a conservative Woodstock. But that’s a month away, and ever so much more to do for it… sigh, back to work.

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Wanderings

09. May 2009 · Comments Off on Miscellaneous Thoughts and Wanderings · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Military, sarcasm, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine...

The SA Tea Party made the final decision on a venue for our 4th of July bash – the lovely destination ranch, the Rio Cibolo Ranch, which a group of us went to visit last Saturday. I just hope the fields are still as green and lovely in July as they are right now. Well, the property is bounded on two sides by a fairly deep waterway, so I don’t suppose the water bill is as much of a challenge. There is a huge pavilion with a stage, a small arena with stadium seats, and we will probably have a larger stage put up out in the open for our main events. We’ll have live music, games, hayrides… the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and fireworks and all.

At this point, the SA Tea Party is sort of catching their collective breath, still; everything was so focused on the Tax Day event, then with sorting things out for the long hard long-distance pull. And there will be a long, hard pull: there are just too many people that are unhappy with the current administration. We make sick jokes about who the FBI infiltrator is among all the people who come to the open meetings, and wonder how many of us are now on the Homeland Security watchlist … although our security specialist (a retired LAPD officer, with his own consulting firm) has pointed out, with some humor that mostly, the working agents tend to be rather straight-laced conservatives, whose natural sympathies are with us anyway. And a lot of us are military veterans also – so it kind of boggles the mind, thinking of us all being painted as dangerous political activists and radicals. Seriously, if worse came to worse – who would come and arrest us all? Ourselves?

Note to the alphabet networks – I am looking at you, CNN – not many people outside a certain milieu were familiar with the term “tea-bagging” three weeks ago. Look, if you are going to insult and denigrate a wide swath of your public, it would help to use a term of abuse that people didn’t have to go look up a definition for. Oh, and I found this little gem courtesy of a google-search at Huffington Post

Oh, my – what delicate little flowers they are, at the Huff-Po – was that truly the worst they could find? When I think of some of the signs referencing GWB that were featured here and there at Huff-Po approved protests, I can’t help shaking my head. Poor babies – it must have been a considerable shock, finding out that so very many of the unwashed are somewhat less than totally enamored of the One. Who was the blogger who used the tag line “Did I hurt your feewings? Good!” – I can’t remember if it was Acidman or Kim du Toit.

Speaking of the One – who else besides me is pretty tired of seeing his face, or Michelle’s face all over every damned magazine on the supermarket check-out stand news-racks? It’s been three months now – are they just doing an Oprah on us? The same face on the cover of every issue. It’s worse than Tiger Beat in the days of the British invasion – it’s like Pravda, with the bright’n’shiny happy face of the Leader and his coterie on the front page and on all the covers, and in the newsreels, while the kulaks are being ground down and starved into submission, the workers are taking over the factories and running them into the ground, and the professional middle class are threatened with being gutted and reduced to camping out in a few rooms of their McMansion, cooking over a fire of sticks in the middle of the room. And I am sitting here, in front of my computer, saying “Well, gosh-darn it, you knew he was a product of Chicago machine politics for chrissakes – what the frack else did you expect?”

Oh, and I still hate my call-center job, by the way. Still can’t count on the income stream from the books to the point where I can quit it, though.

Adventures In Public Relations

12. April 2009 · Comments Off on Adventures In Public Relations · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Nothing serious, just a long schlep from the north-east side, over to KENS-5, over in San Antonio’s Medical Center area, for a quick morning show interview about the upcoming Tea Party… in the pouring rain, in the dark. We cut it close, having to be there by 6:45 – and of course, we had to slow down because of the rain. Heck, I don’t think there was anyone out, but a couple of police cars on 1604 who had someone pulled over, the Easter Bunny… and the skeleton holiday-weekend staff at KENS, who were charmingly relaxed and laid back. So, a quick stint in the female’s dressing room, using the hair dryer on my top, and there we were, casually waved into the studio… which was THE KENS-5 studio. I spent a good half of my adult life in TV and radio studios, so I really wasn’t all that intimidated.

In fact, it all seemed very comfortable and familiar… if slightly more plush and substantial than the usual military TV studio, what with having a whole series of sets for various special purpose shows arrayed around the walls; a cityscape from a roof terrace, the living room sofa set, the two leather chairs and bookshelf set, the kitchen show set, plus the weather set and the main news desk. Blondie remarked how they seem somehow much less impressive, smaller and even a little grubbier in real life. Hook up the wireless mike and transmitter, sit up straight on the leather chair, a few minutes casual off-mike chat with the anchor (this intended to put the guest at ease – he seemed quite relieved that I was actually, quite at ease, or at least not a jittering bundle of nerves.) A few quick general questions, about where, when and why… and there you go. Blondie and I picked up breakfast tacos on the way home.

Tomorrow, it’s a call-in to a morning show, an interview at Texas Public Radio in the morning, and in the afternoon, an update for PJ Media… sort of a media trifecta, as it were. Blondie has to go downtown for a safety walk-through, and then we have a social get-together, which will probably turn into one final executive planning meeting.

Two more whole days to plan this, and then we will see a 9,000 person Tea Party on Alamo Plaza – come for the Party, y’all, and stay for Fiesta!

All Righty, Then…

02. April 2009 · Comments Off on All Righty, Then… · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Working In A Salt Mine...

Guess it’s on, for April 15th…

Strictly speaking, my video compadre was slightly exaggerating; we don’t have the Alamo – just the Plaza in front of it. The Alamo is above such partisan matters. It’s a memorial, and even though it was once a church, people can’t even get married in it. The Tea Party will be in the Plaza in front of it.

Me, I am to work, sending out about a kajillion e-mail and printed news releases. Yeah, I volunteered. Must try to recall what Dad said, about doing that.

Swear to the Almighty, about a week ago, when one of the other planning committee members told me that Glenn Beck was getting all interested in this Tea Party thing, I thought they meant Jeff Beck, and thought – “Cool – a rock guitarist who is also a conservative!” Did wonder why he was so keen on showing up at the Alamo, though. I mean, Ozzy Osborne has never lived down his big visit there….

OK, so I never watched Fox, I really was an NPR sort of person, and I’ve spent much of the last three years in the 19th century, anyway. Interesting times, people, interesting times. If, on occasion, somewhat baffling.

(OMG, an Instalanche – just as a reminder, the San Antonio Tea Party’s website is here!)

Putting By

27. March 2009 · Comments Off on Putting By · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

I’m having one of those intermittent impulses to start stockpiling shelf-stable, dried and canned foods again. Not sure where it comes from, only that some of the generalized dark-gray cloud of gloom and doom that is lurking in the atmosphere may have just finished drizzling a mist of vague paranoia down onto Blondie and me. Or maybe it’s the ancestral memories of my grandmothers, no mean slouches in the food-prep and stash-away in case of a spectacularly bad winter or some unspecified disaster. They both of them lived through the Depression; when Grannie Dodie passed on, there was a couple of years worth of canned goods stashed in the garage, some of them so old the tops of the cans had gone dull-colored under a decade of dust. Grannie Jessie was raised on a Pennsylvania farm where they butchered a pig every fall, filled the root-cellar with potatoes, beets and carrots, and canned the results of their summer garden, in shelf after shelf groaning under the weight of mason jars, filled to the top with jewel-toned tomatoes, green beans, piccalilli and Concord grape jelly.

Save for the two years and some spent living in Utah, my own packing-the-larder-with-massive-stocks of food was pretty much modeled after Mom’s… which is to say, we didn’t, much. We generally had just enough on the shelves and in the fridge to last until the next go-round of grocery-shopping. Why not? The grocery store was always there, Dad’s paychecks were at least marginally generous, and regular; and Mom really didn’t care for canned foods, preferring the fresh and/or made from scratch variety. And we lived in California, for pete’s sake, the year-round fair weather and agricultural champion of the west. Generally the emergency food stash in Mom’s larder consisted of a couple of cans of tomato sauce, some canned Vienna sausages and an extra-large can of tuna. Maybe some dried pasta, and something exotic in a tiny can with foreign lettering on it, which someone gave to Mom and Dad as a Christmas present a couple of years previous which Mom was saving for a special occasion and which no one ever quite had the nerve to open, because if it was really vile, no one would want to eat it and then it would all go to waste. And if it turned out to be really, really good, then we wouldn’t be able to find or afford another can, so best just leave it safely on the back of the shelf.

Besides, at the Redwood House, we did have a vegetable garden, and a range of olive trees, and Hilltop House was planted all around with orange and lemon trees, so in the case of a grand economic meltdown, as a last resort, we would have had olives and oranges and lemons, by the bag… anyway, the long and short of it is, that I never felt the least interest or impulse to stash away mass quantities of relatively imperishable food until that period when I was assigned to Hill AFB, Utah—where, for a variety of reasons, this was a cultural and religious imperative, to the point where most old-style suburban houses came ready-stocked with a couple of fruit-bearing trees and a vegetable plot, along with the seasonal water-system to irrigate same. My own rental house in South Ogden came equipped with a root-cellar, lots of larder-space, a bearing cherry tree and a hedge of insanely prolific apricot trees… some of the best of them were intensely succulent; it was as if someone, thirty years before had walked the fence-line planting apricot trees, and so ever since the lawn along that side of the yard was mined with moldering fruit and mounds of apricot stones. There were so damned many apricots, and I did my best, I really did, but I haven’t been able to bear the smell of a dried apricot ever since. All the ordinary grocery stores stocked lavish quantities and varieties of canning supplies, and restaurant-sized bags of flour and sugar, and other staples… so it was as if there was something in the water. I eventually bought a deep-freezer, and an electric dehydrator, for reasons that I cannot very well articulate. It just seemed like a very good idea, at the time.

And so, now it seems like a good idea again. Maybe the various experts in disaster preparedness, dinning advice into my ears over the last couple of years – after Katrina, after floods, fires, riots and diverse other disasters – have finally achieved a degree of success with me … or there is something about these times, and reading about all those people who- through forethought, were comfortably equipped to ride out disasters. I just have the feeling that I ought to start doing this. Have enough food on hand at all times, stocks of things that I just cannot live without, like tea and jam for bread, and the means to cook food, if there should there be a power interruption that lasts for weeks. I ought not to be depending on a local grocery store, if we run short in a day or so. I ought to have sufficient a stash – for days, weeks and even months. I ought to have a garden again, for more than just ornament, and something in the larder- more than just the usual couple of cans of tomatoes, the half-used packet of Japanese-panko dried bread-crumbs, and the various bug-proof glass jars with about half a cup of dried beans in the bottom, lentils ditto.

So, this Friday, Blondie and I were checking out Sam’s Club and making a list. I can’t, with all my other financial obligations, say that I spent a bomb, on everything that we looked at… but I invested in a 8-pack case of canned tomatoes, a quart each of olive oil and honey, a brick of cheddar cheese – which, alas, tastes nothing as good as the Department of Ag surplus cheddar, which used to be sold at the military commissaries at like, about 50 cents a pound and made the most totally awesome mac-and-cheese imaginable. We made notes about the costs of 25 and 50-pound bags of rice, and beans… and the costs of another propane bottle… I just can’t get away from the feeling that I ought to be doing something more. I bought a bunch of 2-inch pots of tomatoes and pepper plants a couple of weeks ago; they were on sale, at a very good price at the Humongous Big-Ass Grocery chain, a week ago. We planted them, last weekend, the tomatoes in pots, and the peppers in the ground… but I can’t escape the feeling that I ought to be doing more, that I can squeeze some more edible plants into the sun-warmed spots in the garden…

I have read that letting potatoes sprout, and then cutting them up, with a sprout in each piece, that they grow very well… and that fava beans will grow in a heap of gravel.

Spring is here, and with the usual promise of a new season. Its just that those promises are all of vague and threatening things. Thus to work, this weekend. In the garden, and on other projects.

I Hate My Job

19. March 2009 · Comments Off on I Hate My Job · Categories: General, Rant, Working In A Salt Mine...

No, not the writing one – that is as liberating and as enjoyable today as it was when first I sat down to scribble the first couple of chapters of what would become “To Truckee’s Trail”, and even earlier, when I first began to write for this blog, back in the high middle ages of the blogosphere, some seven years ago. (My, how time flies when having fun, et cetera…)

I don’t hate the various freelance author-wrangling/editing gigs that I have, through the good offices of one part-time source of employment, the tiny boutique subsidy publisher, or learning the various ins and outs of the small-book-subsidy press. Neither do I hate wrangling the world’s tallest ADHD child – the real estate agent who specializes in Texas ranch properties, who must simply adore tap-dancing on the edge of economic ruin, since he finds himself out there doing it so frequently. No, I view these jobs with considerable affection. The only thing the least little bit wrong with them is that they are not a reliable, steady source of income.

Which brings me to the one job which does indeed provide reliably constant hours and a resulting and reliably steady income stream – and which I hate with a passion, the phone-bank job with a certain large corporation which shall remain nameless, doing hotel-resort reservations for a large nation-wide chain which shall also remain nameless.

That is the job that I hate with such a desperate passion that in future not only will I try to avoid driving past the building where the phone bank is located – but I have taken a vow to never even darken the doors of the hotel-resort chain involved, or set a toe in the city where the properties that I specialize in is situated. I find everything to do with it is loathsome, from the little half-cubicles in the large glass-walled room where a fifty to a hundred of us sit, to the constant racket of voices saying basically the same thing, over and over. “How may I assist you with that? Can you verify…I have requested for you a deluxe room with a king-sized bed… your confirmation number is… thank you for choosing…”

I hate the sound of the beep in my headset when a call comes through, the automated male voice telling me which property the caller wants to make a reservation for. I hate the antiquated, insanely complicated DOS-based system that was so cutting-edge twenty-five years ago, with it’s million quirks, peculiarities, obscure abbreviations and having to manually enter just about every necessary bit of information when a more up-to-date revision would have that data auto-populate. I hate having every single call listened to and recorded, and timed to the second. I hate being dinged for taking too long with a caller – and dinged again for not cross-selling another property or service or gourmet restaurant, when doing so would increase the call-time.

I hate the dress-code – casual office attire, but no jeans permitted – even though we are doing phone work, and not direct, face to face sales. I hate the fact that we can no longer bring a book to the floor and read between calls when it slows. I hate the fact that the only two computers that we might use for personal business on our rigidly scheduled breaks are the slowest and nastiest in the whole building and one of them doesn’t connect on-line any more. I hate having to wear an employee badge on a stupid lanyard around my neck whenever I am in the building. I hate the callers who mumble, who hold a cell-phone away from their mouth, or are calling from an area with rotten connections – who then berate me because I can’t hear half of what they are saying.

I don’t hate the supervisors – who, to give them credit – do their best to ameliorate the rotten conditions and circumstances of the job as much as possible. I’ve been working there now since July, and many of them now know me by name. Most employees only last a maximum of six months – of the lot I trained with, I only see one other working in the cubicles. The rest are gone. And I am pretty sure that I will be gone also, at some point in the near future. The only questions remaining, are how soon can I afford to quit – in these shaky economic times a regular paying job is not something you abandon. I have no wish to napalm that bridge until I get to it. Secondly, will I plan a graceful and professional exit and leave with two weeks notice, or will I suddenly just be pushed too far one day? There are days when I can see myself melting down, tossing my badge at the floor supervisor and leaving abruptly in the middle of the shift, perhaps after a set-to with a particularly unreasonable caller. I don’t usually do nuclear meltdowns – but in the case of this job I might be pushed into making an exception.

Yes, I hate this job – but now I do feel better.

Oh, and every sale of a copy of the Trilogy moves me just a little bit closer to the graceful and professional exit. Thanks.

They Always Do These Things on Friday

31. January 2009 · Comments Off on They Always Do These Things on Friday · Categories: General, Site News, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

Received the following yesterday afternoon, while working away on a poetry book for Watercress Press:

“As you know, last September Pajamas Media began a new initiative in Internet television called Pajamas TV. When we started with our RNC coverage from Minneapolis, we noted that we would be in a Beta Phase through the first quarter of 2009. In the last few months we have strengthened the PJTV lineup with shows covering Media Bias, Education Bias, Middle East Update, Sharia and Jihad, Powerline Report, Ask Dr. Helen, Hugh News, Poliwood, Conservatism 2.0, Economy and Finance, National Security, and others.

As the end of the first quarter approaches and we near the production phase of Pajamas TV, we will continue to build our emphasis in this area. As a result we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is.

You may continue to display the Pajamas Media ads through March 31. We will be sending you information in mid-March on removing the ads.

We thank you very much for participating during the formative years of Pajamas Media and we look forward to working with you in other ways. One of those is, of course, Pajamas TV. If you have any ideas in that regard, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Our best wishes in the new year and again our deepest gratitude for your participation in Pajamas Media.

Sincerely,

Roger L. Simon
CEO, Pajamas Media”

It seems that quite a lot of other blogs which were initially a part of PJ Media are also being kicked to the curb, as regards the advertising revenue. When PJ was first put together and the Daily Brief invited to join, it seemed like one of those ideas whose time had come; there would be an enormous range of linked blogs with all kinds of interests and specialties, and in a position to negotiate for serious advertising opportunities and the income arising from it. At least, there would be enough coming in to cover the hosting fees, and a little over. This didn’t last at the Brief for more than a couple of years: about three years ago, I was informed that the Brief didn’t get enough page views to justify any revenue for running the ads – but if page views went up, then the Brief would have that revenue stream restored. So, I went back to paying the hosting out of my own pocket, and kept the PJ ads in place, partly in hopes of eventually getting some revenue out of it and partly for the association. Because of sticking with the PJ ads, I couldn’t place ads from another agency, since PJ had the top place: so, nothing out of having them there – and nothing from anywhere else, either.

I will remove the PJ ads with the greatest pleasure, possibly even before the drop-dead date. I haven’t gotten much out of the association at all, save for PJ including my books on their “Christmas Gift” page throughout December. Frankly, it looks to me that PJ Media has become what they professed to counter – Big Media, in all it’s glory. A handful of the top blogs, all linking to each other, and the rest of us pretty well shut out. All things change, and often not much for the better.

I might as well have a bigger ad for my own darned books. I’m a little tired of looking at that Joe the Plumber picture, too.

More Lifestyles of the Struggling Writer

30. January 2009 · Comments Off on More Lifestyles of the Struggling Writer · Categories: General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Still here, finally over the massive, incapacitating head cold/allergy I came down with in the middle of last month. I missed a week of work at the telephone center, and cut short a couple of shifts when volunteers were asked for, mostly because the cough lingers on. I don’t think it sounds at all good when a hotel reservations agent sounds like she is hacking up lung tissue whilst entering guest data into the hotel reservations data base, but that’s just me. I had originally planned to quit after Christmas, but since Blondie lost her job, and my other employers have work for me on such an erratic basis, a regular check has certain charms. Even if I loathe everything about the call center – the break room is a pit, the two computers there which employees can use for personal stuff like checking emails barely function, and the restrooms smell like ass, I’ll have to stick it out a couple of months longer. I also confess to such a deep dislike for the client, a certain hotel-resort-casino chain, that I will never, ever set foot in any of their properties, because I now hate it so much. Eh, I’ve had jobs that I hated even more. The last one took me a year of plotting my escape, and that was a full time, 40-hour a week hellhole. This is only mini-hellhole.

The income from books is still a trickle: one very nice check straight from the publisher for books bought outright immediately upon release by several different shops. Alas, I won’t get much from royalty payments in February, mostly because sales made through Ingram (the book distributor) and through Amazon and other Humongous Sales Outlets are only reported and paid quarterly. So, the results of sales of the Trilogy made in December will show up at Booklocker in March, and in my bank account maybe in April. This kind of delay in registering results of sales efforts makes it damned hard to figure out what works, let me tell you! It’s also the after-Christmas sales slump, also – things won’t pick up again in the Hill Country until spring break time, so I am making plans to gear up again then, and in late spring, when the tourist season, such as it is, kicks into high gear, with the wildflowers and all. I do have a talk in March, at the German –Texan Heritage Society, in Austin, and the Trilogy is now available to readers with vision impairments at www.bookshare.org. In March, The Gathering will be the book for an on-line book club of Bookshare members, thanks to the interest of another IAG member who posted a very nice review of “The Harvesting” on her own website.

I also had a lovely interview on another Western enthusiasts blog – The Tainted Archive which may have bumped up the Amazon rank a notch or two with a couple of sales

In the meantime, my campaign to have the Trilogy stocked at various Texas historical museum bookstores continues apace: the George Ranch management sent me a very nice reply, and the buyer who manages stock for the store at the Alamo asked for two copies of The Gathering for review. Talk about the Ground Zero of museum bookstores – the Alamo would be it. I have to sit on my hands and wait patiently for their response, at this point. I don’t think I’ll pursue too many more signings in the big-box stores, though. There’s a brand-spanking new Books a Million over on the other side of town, but all signing events for it apparently have to be requested/approved/coordinated through either their regional manager, or god help us, their corporate HQ. It’s the same thing with Barnes & Noble; local managers are exceedingly cold to independent writers, and the signing experiences I have had at Big Box places have been so miserable, I’d rather put my efforts into museum stores, independents and on-line.

And I started on the next book, this week. The prelude, and most of Chapter One already done, finished, backed up onto disc. Am I a glutton for punishment or what?

Lawmaking in Haste

23. January 2009 · Comments Off on Lawmaking in Haste · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, My Head Hurts, Technology, Working In A Salt Mine...

…and repenting at leisure, or so it would appear with a new consumer product safety law, which will go into effect in about twenty days. Yes, indeedy, Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, or HR 4040 which is supposed to take effect February 10th, was supposed to strike a mighty blow against the forces of evilness and icky lead contamination in children’s toys, but instead looks fair to bankrupting all sorts of micro-and home businesses in the US, instead – and to plunge a dagger into the hearts of all kinds of well-meaning handicrafters, thrift-stores and various enterprising individuals scrounging a living by selling stuff on e-Bay. Not to mention any parent on a budget, hoping to save some of their diminishing funds by purchasing second-hand clothing, books, toys and accessories for their children.

And I am not about to be frivolous about the problem of lead contaminates in children’s toys, although the temptation is there.

(Hey, did you hear the one about the shipment of lead from China that was turned back at the port of entry because it was contaminated with children’s toys?)

Yes, lead is not healthy for children or other growing things, and frankly, those manufacturers knowingly or unknowingly contaminating their export crap with lead, arsenic or any other dangerous substance ought to be taken out and have their pee-pees whacked with iron bars. Repeatedly – so yes, there ought to be a law. But oh, what a lesson in unintended consequences there is in the hurried and apparently careless formulation of this one! No lobbyists around who speak for the thrift shop industry, I guess, or the little workshops making this or that specialized product, or all the little church ladies across the US, piecing quilts or knitting baby-clothes. The law as written flatly mandates a level and degree of safety-testing which – it may might be argued and probably already has – is appropriate to a large manufacturing industry. Say, something that churns out product by the box-car load daily, weekly, or even hourly.

What got overlooked until the last few months, what with all the good intentions about ‘protecting the cheeeeldren’ was that all those mandated testing of all the elements of every product meant for the use of those under the age of 12 also applied to just about every body who makes stuff for kids, either for sale or charity. Everyone from the guy with a small woodshop making high-end traditional wooden toys, to the lady with the small business making ornamented hair scrunchies, those little businesses making doll-clothes or children’s clothes will fall under this law. Even the POD publisher who designed and printed my own books – they do children’s books; Or they will, up until February 10th. Heck – this law might even apply to me; I made clothes for my daughter, and now for my niece. Once upon a time, I also made bespoke doll-clothes and stuffed toys for sale at church bazaars and craft shows; I still have several boxes of finished outfits in the den closet, which is where they will remain, now. I’m not out all that much, for this was a hobby for me a good few years ago, but serious crafters who depend on small retail sales of their output are stuck with an inventory that they can’t sell legally, or even give away, after having invested in their raw materials and done the work. According to the scattering of news stories (linked here, here and here) second-hand and consignment stores are already feeling a pinch; how can they possibly test every garment or toy, according to the letter of the law? They are either refusing donations or consignments of those items, and very likely making plans to dump those stocks already on hand into landfills or into the market in the next couple of weeks. The fines are insupportable for an individual or a small business; practically no one wants to risk being charged with a violation of the act. Assurances that ‘oh, no – boutique handicrafters and second-hand stores will not be prosecuted under this act, everyone knows it’s really meant for the big mass-producers’ are falling flat among those most concerned. And rightfully so – for what is a law that is on the books, but enforced by bureaucratic or prosecutorial whim? It is a suspended weapon, to be used selectively against people who have drawn the unfavorable attention of the state upon themselves.

And it is purely ironic, that just as the economy is in dire straits, with businesses large and small going through tough times, and individual entrepreneurs doing their best to stay above water, and people who are desperately trying to economize – a consumer safety law is about to wallop those very same small businesses and entrepreneurs whose hold on economic security is least secure. It’s almost as if the captain of the Titanic called for another iceberg to crash into the other side of the ship – just to make sure the whole thing sinks on the level.

SITREP

15. January 2009 · Comments Off on SITREP · Categories: General, Home Front, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

All righty then – the Daily Brief site is safely transferred over to a new host – all but some posts from the first part of the month, and for putting weird little marks in all of my own posts where the quote-marks and m-dashes go. I assume this is because of my penchant for composing in MS Word and then copying and pasting… my bad. I’ll fix such of my posts as I can.

I have already applied to cut back my hours at the Hellhole Telephone Bank to a more manageable 15 hours a week, since the work for Watercress Press is ramping up. Frankly, I have gotten better at the whole ‘taking reservations’ thing, but entering uncomplicated data into an insanely complicated and antiquated DOS-based program while simultaneously pitching a whole range of add-on services and amusements while trying my darndest to keep the whole transaction under 4 minutes flat… well, lets just say I have had jobs that I hated more. Not many of them, but I did hate them more. I don’t want to napalm my bridges entirely, by quitting outright an employer which – say what you will – does at least pay on a reliable basis. At 15 hours a week (three five-hour stints a week) I can keep my loathing of the place down to a bearable level. At this point, I have taken an oath in blood that I will never, ever set foot on any of the property premises owned by the chain for which I am taking reservations. Seriously, I have begun to dislike them that much.

It’s kind of a moot point this week, as I have caught the most horrendous cold-flu-allergic reaction to mold and dust – or whatever. Sinuses running like Niagara Falls, eyes likewise, sore throat, coughing like Camille, and I can’t talk above a painful croak. Which will pretty much put the kibosh on eight hours of phone work, and honestly, I think they might very well pay me just to go home and take my germs with me. I have an editing job to work on, and when the cold misery gets too much for me, I can turn off the computer and crawl into bed.

Have to be better by Sunday, though – another signing event for “Adelsverein” – this one at a Hastings in New Braunfels. Practically the only bookstore in New Braunfels, I think. If there is an independently owned one in town, I haven’t been able to find it through Googlemaps. I was well enough to send out another mailing, targeting various history museums, or as in some cases, re-targeting them for another round. Eventually, I may get a response from some of them. Already did get an email from the bookstore at the Alamo… yes, that Alamo, the ground-zero of touristic-type attractions in Texas, and I would purely love to have the Trilogy for sale in the bookstore there. Apparently, as part of the process, I do have to send them two review copies, so they may verify that no, my writing does not suck. And at least I was considering this kind of thing far enough in advance as I was writing, that I did set two scenes at the Alamo itself. Not during the immortal siege, of course – that has been done to a turn. No, the old church and the yard in front of it serve as the background for two scenes in Adelsverein set years later, when it was an Army warehouse and marshaling yard.

My grand plan is to have the Trilogy for sale as a local interest item in every town that the plot encompasses. Except for Indianola, of course – that town is no longer there, in a meaningful commercial sense. A trickle of regular royalty payments would suit me right down to the ground, but I do have to carry on with marketing the books here, and there – follow up with letters, with phone calls and postings on various websites and forums.

It’s been said over and over, that the writing of a book is the relatively easier part – getting out and marketing it, that’s the hard work.

Life and Times of a Bowerbird

27. December 2008 · Comments Off on Life and Times of a Bowerbird · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Memoir, Working In A Salt Mine...

A bowerbird, or so I read years ago in National Geographic, or Smithsonian, or one of those other popular magazines with a bent towards science and nature, was a native bird species peculiar to Australia and the farther reaches of New Guinea, which had the curious habit of decorating its nest with all sorts of colorful bits of this and that – glass, shells, colored leaves, pieces of glass and plastic, berries – anything and everything which caught it’s eye and which it liked enough to pick up and take home, arranging it with all those other finds in pleasing patterns. This apparently makes sense to the bird doing the arranging, because they seem to be quite set on those patterns. They will, according to researchers, also restore bits that are deliberately disarranged back to the pattern which they chose. It also seems, according to the internet (which I turned to in confirming this tiny and almost useless bit of knowledge – hey, it’s on the internet, so it must be true!) it is the male birds who do this, so this is where this simile falls apart. I am, and have always been of the female persuasion and pretty happy overall with that designation, although in a truly just universe, I would have preferred looking a hell of a lot more like Audrey Hepburn, as well as having her mad dancing skilz.

But I do have somewhat of a similarity to the bowerbird (of whatever sex) because I collect stuff, random stuff that is attractive and catches my eye, and which I can arrange in attractive patterns. I do this when I write, or more specifically when I am reading and researching for what I am preparing to write. I never know what particular bit will engage my interest – and some items are very odd bits indeed. I keep coming back to them, and by this I know that they must be an element in the story. For “Adelsverein” I kept returning to the Goliad Massacre of 1836, to the kidnapping of children from the Hill Country by raiding Indians, to a throw-away comment in an old memoir – a then-senior citizen recalling that his youngest sister actually wasn’t of his blood, she was an tiny orphan found and rescued from the Verein camp on the Texas Gulf Coast, never able to recall her real name. I also kept circling back to the recorded memory of an elderly woman, recalling proudly that she was 90-something and didn’t need glasses to thread a needle – and also recalling that the husband she loved, and had been married to for only 13 years, being taken away by the Hanging Band during the Civil War and hung, for the crime of being a Unionist in a Confederate state – all this, in spite of her attempting to sneak his revolver to him. Reading about these tiny events was like getting a small electrical shock, or perhaps recognizing something that I had known in another lifetime. These combined with any number of other bits and pieces of frontier lore, with small and humble items seen in museums, with paintings and sketches of scenery, daguerreotypes and memoirs, even a 1850’s travelogue by a famously observant political writer who did a horseback journey through antebellum Texas and the south. Thrown into this mix are my own visits to various places in the Hill Country, my own first-hand observations of clear green rivers, their beds paved with round marble-white gravel, sessions with subject matter experts in frontier arcane, the memory of certain people and conversations — and then arrange it all in a somewhat-logical pattern. Just like a bowerbird, although my own bower is a famously complex excel spreadsheet of a dozen and more categories, organized by month and year. All those pretty, shiny bits are plugged into the place where they seem to me to belong.

In a year or two, there is a book come out of it, all; a ripping good adventure yarn with the added benefit of having the very best bits of it based on historical fact; not bad for a bowerbird.

Launched!

12. December 2008 · Comments Off on Launched! · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Local, Old West, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, there was a nice crowd at The Twig last night at my launch event for the Adelsverein Trilogy – even though all but one copy of Book One had sold, even before we walked in last night! Sort of embarrassing, since I then had to fall back on doing autographed book-plates for people to stick into the front of copies they ordered… And my daughter forgot her camera, as we wanted to have pictorial evidence.

Nice Q & A session from almost a dozen people; a nice elderly couple of ‘freethinkers’ from up Comfort way, who were familiar enough with the history to know what I was talking about and to be interested, two very knowledgeable and dedicated local fans, another couple- the wife of whom is the Queen of the Red Hat chapter I belong to, one of my current semi-employers… and a shaggy young man who had been hanging around on the back porch of Cappyccino’s – the little cafe next door, who followed us in. I think he started off being more interested in my daughter, but he seemed to become quite fascinated by trials of the German settlers in Gillespie County. I kept getting very happy vibes of approval and interest, especially when they asked questions about obscure local historical matters – like, about the massacre of Unionists at the Nueces during the Civil War, and I knew all the detailed ins and outs. One of the dedicated fans said he had read the sample chapters at my website and asked about the first chapter of “The Gathering” – had there really been German-American or German immigrants present among the Texians massacred at the Goliad? And yes, of course there were – half a dozen, according to records. I gave chapter and verse, practically page references. The fan looked enormously pleased – I had the feeling I had sailed easily over a pre-set challenge.

I read a bit from Book One, a couple of pages detailing what happens to the steerage passengers on a wooden sailing-ship, during a violent storm in mid-Atlantic. Nothing good, you may be assured – violent sea-sickness, hysteria and bodily fluids sloshing around on the deck are the least of it. Blondie says I read too much and too fast. Still and all, a much better signing than last time.

All three books are too available, here, here and here, from Booklocker.com. Amazon has them all up now, but most discouragingly shows them as being out of stock. Really, sometimes I wonder if they really want to sell my books at all. Apparently, there was a bit about the Trilogy in the Kerrville newspaper yesterday; so had an email query from a local bookstore there. They do mostly used and antique books, but they carry Texiana, and would like to carry the Trilogy. Bit by bit, sportsfans, bit by bit.

I topped off the evening with an interview on an internet radio station show run by another IAG member , even thought I was so tired I practically dropped in my tracks. Something revivifying about being ‘on air’ so to speak. In the theatrical world they call this “Doctor Footlights” – the adrenalin kicks in and you feel better almost at once. (For the interview, enter the site, go to archives, then the list of hosts, pick host Lillian Cauldwell – my interview is there already – Dec. 11)

Ready to Launch

09. December 2008 · Comments Off on Ready to Launch · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Media Matters Not, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Timing is everything, they say – and if I knew six months ago that the economy was on the verge of tanking, I don’t think I would have tried to do anything different with my scheduled release of the Adelsverein Trilogy – the saga that I have been working on for two years and a bit. This will make my third-through-fifth book out there. The third time is supposed to be the charm. Thanks to the accumulated book-writing, book-marketing and book-selling experience at the Independent Authors’ Guild, I think I will come closer to getting it right, this time – like delaying the release so as to allow six months to get some seriously earnest reviews, from publications like “True West” and others. ( Reviews posted here. I’ll be pounding away on the “True West” review for years – decades, maybe.) Such was the wise counsel of writers who had done it before.

Taking their advice also, I worked a lot harder at getting local signings and attempting to interest local museums. It was a lot easier this time around, honestly. The only places that I could interest in “Truckee’s Trail” were a couple of outlets in Nevada and Truckee City – there’s only so much one can do at a thousand-mile-plus remove, especially if you can’t claim to be a local author. But having a book-three books – with several Texas settings, and fifty years worth of interesting and famous or obscure Texas characters contained therein – that something much more appealing to work with in generating local interest. My dance-card, otherwise known as my signing schedule is beginning to fill up, and praise be, I might actually have some local media interested. As in the old-fashioned, print-on-dead-tree kind, which people do still read around here. And let’s face, it Texans are passionately interested in history. They remember more than just the Alamo.

The kick-off is Thursday, at the Twig Bookstore in Alamo Heights. 5 PM. I don’t know which is my worst fear about this event: that I’ll sit there for two hours and sell maybe one book…. Or that Blondie and I and some friends of ours who have promised to come along for moral support will walk up to the place and the line to get into the Twig will be down to the next block, and they’ll run out of books before the first twenty minutes. I’d prefer the second, of course.

Wish me luck. I couldn’t have done it without you all.

PS: All pre-sold sets are in the mail. The final volume should be up at Amazon any time now. All three – The Gathering, The Sowing and The Harvesting are already at Booklocker.

Orbiting Speed In the Writers Life Waltz

06. December 2008 · Comments Off on Orbiting Speed In the Writers Life Waltz · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Light posting this week, for which I apologize lavishly once again – but this is the last week that I have to prepare for the launch of the heralded “Adelsverein Trilogy” – about which I have banged on about here for much of the last two years. Anyone who came to this blog looking for insights into late 20th century military culture must have been disappointed beyond belief by my excessive interest and scribblings about 19th century Texas history. Sorry about that, but people move on. I wrote a book based on entries in this blog, then another, and then I decided I liked writing novels so much that I took on a trilogy about the German settlements in 19th century Texas, the last volume of which achieved 500 print pages and was so thick that when I unwrapped my final print proof, I could only look at it and think in disbelief ‘I wrote all of that?!’ (for which my current editor would ding me for double usage; either a question mark or an exclamation point. Including both are superfluous.)

So, I took my publishers’ advice, and finished polishing and editing all three, to be available this month… next week, as a matter of fact. The first two books have been on, and then off, and then on again, as regards the behemoth internet book retailing All three were just set up this day on Booklocker (here, here and here) – although it is one of those funny turns of the modern publishing game that I actually have two publishers. The ISBN, the editing and the marketing is through Strider Nolan, and it says ‘Strider Nolan’ on the books, but the cover design, interior formatting, and the actual mechanics of supplying copies will be handled by Booklocker. All clear? Yeah, I know — it’s an odd situation, but then the current way of getting books published and out there seems to be melting down and reforming. It’s pretty well acknowledged now that unless you are one of the mega-biggie authors, you’re pretty well got to market your book yourself, scrounge the reviews, set up the signings, generate the postcards, flyers, book-markers yourself. Having the aegis of Strider Nolan on the Adelsverein Trilogy might have made it a little easier to get reviews in publications which otherwise might have shied off from the Booklocker Brand. Like the local newspaper – the San Antonio Express News, so I was informed loftily a couple of years ago – does not review publish-on-demand books. The implication that all such were low-quality, unprofessional offerings of limited appeal. Eh… we’ll see. Lately it seems that the best independently published books are getting better and better, just as the traditional publishers are going moribund, and their books more formulaic. Insisting on sticking to the same-old same-old strikes me as someone insisting absolutely on first-class tickets for the Titanic… even as the ship slowly sinks.

On Friday I began mailing all those copies of autographed copies of the trilogy to all of those who had pre-ordered over the last couple of months. After hitting the post office, I had a box, full of five copies of each volume to take to the Twig Bookstore in Alamo Heights; extras to have on consignment, in case the copies they had ordered for the launch signing on Thursday didn’t arrive. The management was glad to see them – everyone is getting pretty excited over the Trilogy, what with the local tie-in and all. There were some customers in the Twig, and they got excited, too. One of said customers immediately bought an autographed set as a Christmas present, saying that she hoped she had time to read all three before she had to wrap them up and give them to the person they were inscribed for. Not bad – the signing isn’t for another six days, and already the copies are flying out the door. I have another signing the following week at Berkman’s in Fredericksburg, still another at a large Borders bookstore here in San Antonio over the weekend before Christmas, a small bookstore in Fredericksburg which specializes in Texiana wants to stock them, the Pioneer Museum is also planning an event the first weekend after New Years… and I sent a copy of the first book to the manager of the Sophienburg Museum in New Braunfels – they might be interested in another event in January. No bites from the manager of the museum at the Goliad, though. Pity – the whole saga starts just there, and I drew a lot of information for that first chapter out of their website.

Unfortunately, I won’t see any royalty income from these various events, and from Booklocker until next month… and I have a couple of bills coming due. None of the places that Blondie applied for are hiring temporary help for this Christmas season, and my hours at the corporate call center have been cut as well. Not as many people making holiday reservations, apparently. If anyone else would like to order autographed copies, or make a donation through paypal, I would be ever so grateful. The next few weeks are going to be horribly busy, terrifically gratifying to me as a writer, and enormously promising … but a little tight on actual disposable income, otherwise.

Another Day, Another Dollar

26. November 2008 · Comments Off on Another Day, Another Dollar · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Home Front, Iraq, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

And another dirty shirt, so to speak. Blogging has been sporadic here; what with doing reviews, working two jobs, the odd bit of housekeeping here and there, and other stuff. Frankly, all my focus is split between setting up events in support of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” (last chance here to purchase copies for delivery by Christmas! Getcher copies of the greatest epic about the Civil War and its aftermath since Gone With The Wind! Gripping drama, true love, savage murder and bitter revenge… and cows! Be the first member of your book club to say that you have read it!)

Not much energy left over, at the end of all that. Matters military? I’ve been retired from the Air Force for ten years now. It was a blast, and a learned a lot, got to travel to the far ends of the earth, meet unusual and interesting people… but I’m in another part of my life now. I don’t want to go pounding on about being a veteran for the rest of my life, as if I had never been or done anything else.

Iraq? Looks like it’s all over, and the good guys won. What a turn-up, eh? I kind of thought it would take a couple of years longer, a slow process of institutions and infrastructure being rebuilt or constructed new. We’d keep a couple of bases there, out in the country and American forces would rotate in and out, in another short while it will be an accompanied tour, and they’d be tourist busses parked in shoals in front of archeological sites like the Hanging Gardens, and Ur of the Chaldees. Tourists would eat ice-cream from street vendors, and little bits of barbequed something on skewers, and walk up and down the promenade by the river, as it turned silver and gold, from a spectacular sunset. Bagdad would be prosperous, full of tall buildings and profitable businesses – like Seoul today. Veterans of the war would return, and look around and say ‘what-the-%#@!?’. Essentially, it’s in the hands of the Iraqis. We’ll lurk around in the background for a bit, or a couple of decades, but the heavy lifting is just about done.

Does look as if we ourselves are headed for another long, economic wobble. Been there. Seen that. I’ve already lost three jobs on that account in this year alone, and Blondie has lost one, and no one is hiring temporary sales help for Christmas this year, so it’s hard to say how much more ghastly it can get for us. Much as I dislike the whole concept and the whole soul-killing processes of the place, it looks like I will be staying on at the Hellish Corporate Phone Banks for more than the six months that I originally planned, or until book sales pick up. As it is, it looks like I am stuck there for only about fifteen hours a week as it is. I put up my hand and volunteer when the call volume falls off, and four whole roomfuls of people are sitting in their cubicles, twiddling their thumbs and chattering to each other. This afternoon, the two college-age girls in the cubicles next to me had a box of new crayons and were coloring in the pictures of My Little Pony in a coloring book.

Yeah, that’s a disturbing image. Slightly more disturbing was a talk with William, the Gentleman With Whom I Keep Company last weekend. He retired from a heroically long stint as a public school teacher, and has a pension paid by the state of California… which for the month of November was one-quarter what it was the month before. One-time-only glitch with his check? An attempt by the state comptroller to fiddle around with things at the end of the fiscal year? Or a harbinger of something more serious … like the budget of the state of California at the top of a long, slippery slope. William hasn’t gotten any credible explanation out of anyone for this… but if the December pension check is down by the same amount, he foresees having to go back to work, too.

Interesting times, for sure.

(I have just ordered copies of all three books of the Adelsverein Trilogy, so the first two or three fans to order them will be in luck, otherwise, I won’t be able to get autographed copies to you by Christmas. Books One and Two are already there at Amazon, here and here, and at Barnes and Noble, here and here

The End of One Road

20. November 2008 · Comments Off on The End of One Road · Categories: Domestic, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

… And with luck, the beginning of another – Wednesday afternoon I went to get the mail, after having put in a short day at the loathsome telephone bank job— which however much I detest, and however much I fear that I have no aptitude for, even though I am getting passingly skilled at their legacy data entry system, and can answer most stupid guest questions now from off the top of my head without looking at their fact-book website… oh, where was I? Oh, yes, the horrid part-time day job, where I am about the first to raise my hand and volunteer to leave, when the incoming calls begin to lag after I have put in a couple of hours. Of the class of ten that I trained with early in July, there is only another person and myself remaining, still putting on a headset and grimly tackling the intricacies of setting up for a shift, logging in to a computer database system that was cutting edge, the very latest word … about three decades ago.

At the time I took the job, having bills to pay, and knowing that I wouldn’t see any income from my books until December, I knew very well that the average tenure was about six months max. This is not the subtle way of saying that yes, Sgt. Mom has been fired again—no, this time I plan to leave on my terms and if I can endure—to leave only after scooping up enough of the time-and-a-half boodle earned through working on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, New Years Eve and New Years…

Or maybe not. Life is short, too short to put up with working at a corporate call center. It is not the way I want to spend a minute of my life any longer than I have to, and at this point I might even boycott the casino/resort chain involved for the rest of my natural life. I have come to despise their insanely complicated guest services software program, their once-size-fits-all sales protocol, their demands that we treat their guests with every consideration yet not spend more than 340 seconds or so doing so… a whole long set of contradictory demands placed on phone agents. I’d walk in the door and begin to shake with suppressed resentment about every aspect of the place – the restaurants, the room facilities, all of it. I would hate it that much, for reminding me of the phone bank hell. Nope, the only good thing about this job is that it is a regular paycheck. Something to consider in this time of economic stress… but as they ruthlessly cut back all the part-timers hours at the end of October, there is absolutely no guarantee of that not happening again after the year-end holidays. With luck, they will be done with me at about the same time that I am done with them. Work for the tiny local micro-press is already picking up, almost sufficiently to replace those hours. Capitalism, what a concept, hey?

In the mail yesterday was the final hard copy proof of the final volume of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” – a satisfactorily fat paperback with a gorgeous color cover – I looked at it and thought ‘Oh my, did I really write all that?‘

Yes, of course I did – a long and complicated family saga, full of dreams, drama and ambitions, set in a place that I have come to know and love (even though I came to it quite late in my life) an epic chock-full of historic detail, fascinating people, interesting events… a sort of Texas version of Gone With the Wind. I have great hopes for it, and have posted many sample chapters here, as I wrote them. Being that much of the Trilogy is set in the Hill Country, San Antonio and South Texas generally, perhaps many of these hopes will be realized. The story of the Adelsverein colonists and their descendants has much wider appeal, across a couple of genres – so there you go. I will be ordering quantities of each of the books of the trilogy over the next few days, in order to fulfill pre-sold orders, and to have enough for upcoming signing events. If anyone wants a set, to be delivered by the release date (and in time to have autographed copies in time for Christmas!) please order them as soon as you can. I get a break for ordering 50 books at a time – and I probably won’t put in a massive order again until after Christmas.

End of one road, and the beginning of another. After Christmas, I will start on the next project, tentatively called the Cibola Trails Trilogy. I’m a writer, it’s what I do.

Adelsverein Passing In Review

16. November 2008 · Comments Off on Adelsverein Passing In Review · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Just a quick update – it’s about three weeks until the official launch of the Adelsverein Trilogy. I should get the final approval print copy of Book 3 – The Harvesting this week from the publisher. The reviews are starting to come in – first, the all-important but short and slightly puzzling one from True West, on their website here. (I really don’t recall writing anything about tornadoes, though. But the important part – a review in True West!!)

Another slightly longer and appreciative review here, at Western Fiction Review. Fun fact; Steve M. the mad fan of Western fiction is actually located in the UK. Must be some sort of cosmic payback for all those American ladies writing breathless Regency romances, or tales of the doings of the Tudors.

Another workmanlike and short review at Midwestern Reviews… mystifyingly parked not at the genre fiction page, but at the American History page. A compliment… I think.

Not a compliment, about the dialogue in this review… sorry, Victorians really talked that way. Just crack a copy of Charles Dickens or Mark Twain. (Consider a grumble about the dumbing down of the American reading public to be inserted here… what, they didn’t talk like the characters in an episode of Friends?! No, sorry. Ah, never mind – although I am beginning to grasp the essence of the eternal writer grumble about remembering a critical comment longer than all the complimentary ones.

Also, amusingly enough – although this blog is a member of PJ Media and on Da Blogfaddah’s blog-roll, I can’t say that I have been particularly overwhelmed lately with helpful links and materiel interest in my attempts to reclaim certain essential American stories, and to publish interesting works of genre fiction outside the mainstream of the American Big-Ass Publishing Combine. So it goes, I expect. To them who have, more shall be given. To those who don’t… suck it up, hard-charger!.

Magic, Continued

15. November 2008 · Comments Off on Magic, Continued · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Literary Good Stuff, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

The creation of characters is another one of those miracle things. That happens in a couple of different ways. The ones who are historical characters are easiest of course; people like Sam Houston, or Jack Hayes, or John O. Meusebach, all of whom make appearances in the various volumes of the trilogy. There are biographies, and historical accounts of these characters, so it is simplicity itself for me to get an idea of what they were about, how they looked and spoke and what background they came from. This does have its distractions; I was waylaid for a whole week reading biographies and letters of Sam Houston, who makes a brief appearance in “The Sowing”, on the eve of the Civil War.

Then there are the ones which I made up: I start with a requirement for a character, a sort of mental casting call for a certain sort of person, usually to do something. It can be, to continue the movie imagery, anything between a starring role, down to just a short walk-on, bearing a message or providing some kind of service to the plot. I usually don’t get caught up in describing everything about them – which is a tiresome tendency I will leave to romance writers and authors who have fallen in love with their own characters. Just basic age, general coloring, tall or short; a quick sketch rather than a full-length oil painting. I also don’t bother with describing in great detail what they are wearing – that’s another waste of time. Just the basics please – work clothes, or dirty, or ragged, or in the latest fashion, whatever is relevant. And it’s really more artistic to have other characters describe them, or mention key information in casual conversation. That way allows readers to pull up their own visualizations of my characters, which seems to work pretty well and keeps the story moving briskly along.

On certain occasions, that character has instantly popped up in my imagination, fully formed. One moment, I have only a vague sort of notion, and the next second, there they are, appearing out of nowhere, fully fleshed, named and every characteristic vivid and… well, real. “Vati”, the patriarch of the Steinmetz-Richter clan appeared like that: I knew instantly that he would be absentminded, clever, loving books and his family, a short little man who looked like a kobold. His family would in turn, return that affection and on occasion be exasperated by him – but he would be the glue that held his family together. Another middle-aged male character also appeared out of nowhere, “Daddy” Hurst – technically a slave in pre-Civil War Texas, but working as a coachman for another family. His character emerged from the situation of slavery as practiced in Texas, where there were comparatively fewer slaves than there were in other Confederate states. Many of those so held worked for hire at various skilled trades, and also seem to have been allowed considerable latitude, especially if they were working as freight-haulers, ranch hands and skilled craftsmen. Daddy Hurst is one of them; I like to think he adds a little nuance to the ‘peculiar institution’. The only trouble with that kind of character is that if they are supposed to me a minor one – they have a way of taking over, as I am tempted to write too much about them. This was becoming a bit of a challenge with the final part of the trilogy “The Harvesting” since if I had explored all the various characters and the dramatic scenes they wanted – in fact, all but begged for – it would have easily been twice the 500 pages that it has turned out to be. In the name of all the trees that might have been logged to print it – I had so say no, not now. But I have taken note, and will try to work as many of them into the next trilogy. (Yes there will be another trilogy, focusing on some of those interesting side-characters and their own adventures; independent of the Adelsverein story arc. Look, if there are still stories to tell, why shouldn’t I tell them, as long as I can keep it dramatic, interesting, and involving enough to inspire the interested reader to plunk down upwards of $15 for the privilege of reading all about them? But the second-hand editions may go for a bit less…)

Where was I? Oh, characters, the third sort, evolution of… got it. That’s the other sort of character – the ones that I have started out with a certain idea of them, winging it a bit as I sketch out a scene for a chapter. Right there, they evolve, in defiance of my proposed plans for them. In my original visualization of their characters, as the romantic couple in the first book of Adelsverein, Magda Vogel Steinmetz and Carl Becker were supposed to be one of those sparkling and amusing Beatrice and Benedict couples, striking romantic and witty sparks off each other in every encounter, like one of those 1930’s romances of equals. Didn’t work out that way – he turned out to be very reserved, and she to be almost completely humorless. Beatrice and Benedict was so not happening! Within a couple of chapters of having them ‘meet cute’ when he rescues her niece from almost drowning— I tossed that concept entirely. I did recycle it for the romantic couple in the final volume; Peter Vining and Anna Richter. He was a Civil War veteran, an amputee and covering up his apprehensions and self-doubts with a show of desperate humor. She was the clever woman who saw though all those defenses, calmly sized him up as the man she thought she could live with and come to love… and asked him to marry her, never mind the exact particulars. It makes amusing reading, just as I had planned.

The pivotal character of Hansi Richter is the most notable of those evolving characters. He started off as a stock character, the dull and conventional brother-in-law, a sort of foil to the hero. A rejected suitor, but who had married the heroine’s sister as a sort of second-best. That was another one of those initial plans that didn’t quite turn out as originally projected. A supporting character in the first two books, by the third he moved front and center; had developed into a stubborn, ambitious and capable person, quite likeable in his own right – and carrying a good deal of the story forward as he becomes a cattle baron, in the years following the Civil War.

So there it is – as good an explanation that I will ever be able to come up with. All three books of the Trilogy will be available by the end of the month, from Booklocker, of course and also at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I am setting up a number of signings – complete schedule will be posted here.

Magic

12. November 2008 · Comments Off on Magic · Categories: Domestic, General, Literary Good Stuff, Working In A Salt Mine...

I suppose it does seem a little like magic, this storytelling thing. Explaining it, even to yourself, much less to other people usually results in bafflement. Like the old joke about dissecting humor being like dissecting a frog – by the time you are done, there is nothing but a bit of a mess and confusion and the frog is dead anyway. Mom and Dad are as puzzled by this aptitude in me as anyone else – they can’t for the life of them figure out how I came by the gift of spinning an enthralling story, of creating people on a page and making them so interesting and endearing that they care very deeply about them. Made-up people… and these are my parents, who have known me all my life. They can’t figure out how I do it, especially Dad, the logical and analytical scientist.

“Are you picturing it in your head, as if it was a movie?” he asked me once, and I suppose that comes as close as anything – although it is as much like to a movie as real life is, or maybe a hyper-life. I can see what the characters are seeing from all angles, know what they are feeling, the little things they do which betray that feeling, I can sense what the weather is like, how where they are smells… a couple of readers have pointed out that I do take a lot of notice of smells. Can’t account for that, either; just another aspect of the gift, I expect. The semi-employer who has also volunteered to edit much of Book 3 (which will be available after the first of the month- thank god and what a panic that has been!) also notes that I do pay particular attention to the weather, what the sky looks like, if it is hot or cold, rainy or clear. She noted this in particular as regards “To Truckee’s Trail”, which I didn’t think surprising, because living in a covered wagon, and in tents, walking ten or fifteen miles every day, of course one would have taken note of the weather. The weather would have governed every aspect of their existence for six long months, all along the Platte River trail, to Fort Hall, and into the wilderness of the Great Basin – never mind the Sierra Nevada, where weather would kill half of the Donner Party, not two years after the pioneers of the Stephens-Townsend Party dragged their wagons over the summit.

Don’t know where I got this sensitivity from – unless it was as a teenaged Girl Scout, being dragged along on all sorts of back-packing expeditions into the mountains; miserable experiences which usually resulted in making me sick from exhaustion and sun-exposure for a couple of days after returning from the worst of them… but I still hold in memory, the taste of sweet water, from a rivulet, high in the mountains above Lake Tahoe, and drinking it from my cupped hands. And also the experience of trying to sleep in a wet sleeping bag in March, high in the Angeles National Forest, after melting snow had trickled through our campsite all the day. After that one, I had a whole new appreciation of weather, even though I was never at any hazard for frostbite.

Places – I construct them in my imagination as carefully as I used to build miniature interiors; what is in the room, what are the walls made of, how sound is the roof, what do you see when you look out of the windows. What is growing in the ground outside? People live in these interiors – what would the imprint of their lives have left on that space. I saw a vignette at a miniature show once; an elaborate scene of a WWII fighter plane and a cross-section of the maintenance shed close-by, in 1-12 scale. The craftsman who had built the vignette had made the shed a show-piece of squalid disarray, including a thread of cigarette smoke rising from an ash-tray on the workbench. It was as if someone had just stepped outside for a moment… and that is such art, to make it so real that you can see the cigarette ash crumbling into the tray and a bit of smoke rising from it. In 1-12th scale, it was a real place, as real as any of those places I have built in my imagination.

People – that is one of the other weird aspects of this gift. I can read people, after a time. I have always been able to do this, not instantly – that is supposed to be one of those really, really useful talents, extraordinary valuable for a personnel manager, or someone doing job interviews, reading people as accurately as one of those instant-read cooking thermometers… but it is not mine. I’ve been fooled as well as anyone else, on short acquaintance. There have been people that I thought initially were major-league assholes who turned out to be quite the reverse, and people whom I had a good first impression of, who turned out to be so useless or malevolent that they should have been marked off with day-glo tape and tall plastic cones as a hazard to human navigation… but after six months of work-day association, I would know someone. I would know someone so thoroughly, be able to assess them down to the sub-atomic particle, with a fair degree of accuracy. This used to astound my fellow NCOs. They would not have realized some essential truth about Airman So-and-so, until I pointed it out to them. Then, with a shock, they would realize that I was right, and everything about Airman So-and-So would be understandable, out in the open, and perfectly transparent … and why hadn’t they have seen it?

I think that being able to create convincing characters might be somehow linked to this ability. Always, when I had to do a performance rating on a subordinate, my crutch in constructing this official bit of documentation was “What is the thing about this person which instantly comes to mind when you think about them?” And there would be the first sentence in their required yearly Airman Performance Report, and all the rest of it would flow after that. What is the key bit of their character, what is the essential bit that you have to know? Everything flows naturally from that… and so it is with creating characters. In my “Adelsverein Trilogy” I had to get a grip on what is their essential core characteristic. Everything flows from that: I couldn’t get a read on Magda and Carl’s children until I was writing a scene of their sons and Magda, digging up potatoes, before Christmas, 1862, during a year when they were living in poverty in Fredericksburg. Everything about the two boys became clear – the older was grieving and traumatized, the younger was taking emotional refuge in books, and would emerge as being elastic and undamaged by the experience. Everything about them was established – they would go in different directions, their reactions to various experiences would be complete as this sudden insight would take me – and everything would be coherent and sympathetic.

But of course, that is the other aspect – kind of an uncomfortable one, as far as I can see; seeing people at the best and worst, to know them down to their core – especially when it comes to people who are not all that admirable. That is actually the most challenging bit of writing a story – that is, writing about characters who are psychopaths. The major villain in Adelsverein is one if those – so cruel, so brutal – I actually don’t want to go there. I don’t like or sympathize with that character and I don’t want to go any farther into the story of him. No farther than it would take to outline the effect that he has upon the other characters, or how my main characters feel about how he meets his eventual doom. Which is as just as it is unexpected – or so I hope has appeared to anyone who reads all three books of the Adelsverein Trilogy.

(to be continued)

Touching History

31. October 2008 · Comments Off on Touching History · Categories: Air Force, Domestic, General, History, Military, Old West, Wild Blue Yonder, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

My… is it Friday already? The end of October, with tomorrow being the Dia de los Muertos… or as we plain Anglos call it, the eve of All Saint’s Day. Time does have when you’re having fun. And I am having fun this week. My hours at the Corporate Call Center just up the road were slashed to the bone this week, allegedly to accommodate their slow time of the year. Perhaps I’ll get them back in November, perhaps not. It’s a job that I am privately most unenthusiastic about, although you’d never know it to hear me answer the incoming calls with brisk and chipper enthusiasm. I would not mind very much actually – I’d miss the money but not much else, as I the local publisher that I am doing work for has actually begun to pay me on a regular basis and shoot interesting little jobs my way.

The two most recent are transcribing old documents – one not all that old, since there is a Star Wars reference in it, but the other might have some actual historical interest, being a pocket year-diary from 1887, bound in crumbling red leather. The owner of it plans to sell, and wants an accurate transcription – or at least, as accurate a transcription of the contents as is humanly possible. The reason he is willing to pay someone to do it – is because the diary-keeper wrote in occasionally illegible ink, couldn’t spell for s**t, had an uncertain grasp of the principals governing the use of capital letters and appears to have been completely uninterested in using punctuation. On the plus side, each entry is only about one run-on sentence long, and three-quarters of those entries are variants on ‘spent the four Noon at Ranch/town …. No news … fair and cloudy to day’

It’s the other entries that are mildly fascinating, for the diary-keeper seems to have been a manager for a cattle ranch in the Pleasant Valley of Arizona, and on the periphery of the murderous Graham-Tewksbury feud. His apparent employer was one of the owners of the “Hashknife Outfit” – famed in West Texas lore and in the books of Zane Grey, so perhaps this is why the current owner thinks the diary is worth something to a collector. I don’t see any evidence so far that the diary-keeper did anything more than pop around like a squirrel on crack all through that year, from town to the ranch and up to various line camps, to Flagstaff for the 4th of July celebrations, seeing to his various duties, which must have ranged from the office-managerial to overseeing round-ups and short drives of cattle from the back-country to the railway (which paralleled Route 66 through Arizona.) There were a few interesting slips of paper tucked into a pocket in the back of the diary, like a bank receipt from a bank in Weatherford, Texas, long strings of figures which appear to be a tally of cattle and a scribbled recipe for some kind of remedy, featuring a lot of ingredients that today are controlled substances (belladonna? Sulphate of zinc and sugar of lead, one drachm) Still and all, as Blondie said – he was dedicated enough to actually sit down and make an entry, every day, in a whole year of days in which one day was mostly like any other, full of work and responsibility, and very little in the way of amusement, or at least amusement worth mentioning specifically. Still, an interesting peep-hole into the past, and another life, distant and yet close.

The other document is a rollicking memoir written by a WWII veteran, who spent nearly 18 months in the China-Burma-India theater, flying cargo over the notorious “Hump” – the Himalayas. At that time, there were large chunks of the land below their air route that was simply white on their maps; never explored by land or by air. This writer lost some friends to the perils of high-altitude flight among mountains that were sometimes even higher, but his exuberance and energy come through in his memoir, quite unquenched. His personality is a little more accessible than the ranch manager of 1887, and he spent a little more time noticing marvelous things like a spectacular show of St. Elmo’s fire lighting up his aircraft during a flight through a high-altitude blizzard, or the white-washed towers of a mountain monastery, perched at the top of a 6,000 foot sheer drop. He wondered about the faint lights seen at night, from tiny villages far below the aluminum wings of his aircraft, wondered if the people living in those simple houses even knew that young men had come from so very far away, to fly a perilous re-supply route over the dark land below. Did it make any difference to their lives? Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. The flier went home, married his girl, lived a long and successful life. Among the little things to be included in the transcription of his memoir was an envelope of papers – receipts from a grand hotel in Calcutta… and a BX ration card, in which Blondie and I were amused to note that he had maxed out his beer ration for the month of September, 1943—but only purchased one bar of soap.

The history, the past, near and a little distant, in bits of yellowed paper, a year of entries bound in faded red leather or eighteen eventful and frequently nerve-wracking months racking up 800 flying hours. It’s all there, our history. We must remember where we came from, who we are – who our ancestors were, and how they built their lives and did their work. It’s not far distant, it’s more than a few tedious chapters in a history textbook written by an academic with an ideological ax to grind. Our history is real people, meeting challenges and accepting responsibility with courage, grace and humor. It’s why I write books, to try and get people in touch with that history again, to connect with our ancestors. To remember who we are, and where we came from.

(Still taking pre-orders for the Adelsverein Trilogy, here The official release is December 10, and I have lined up some signings locally – schedule is here. Also a review of Book One – The Gathering just appeared in the Nov/Dec issue of True West (dead tree version) ! It’s on page 91, for those that are interested, but alas, no links – the True West website only goes as far as… September)

A Literary Interview

20. October 2008 · Comments Off on A Literary Interview · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, History, Literary Good Stuff, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

This is the game that some of us ‘real arthurs’ are playing over at the IAG Blog; each author so inclined is doing an interview with his or her own characters. Some of us have done this already for our own sites, with most amusing results. I thought I should cross-post my own effort here. The corporate entity/sweatshop that I work at, of late for a steadily diminishing number of hours, just slashed my work hours again. Any income for readers wishing to buy “To Truckee’s Trail” , order a set of the “Adelsverein Trilogy” or even the little memoir cobbled together from my early entries (when this site was still called Sgt. Stryker’s Daily Brief – which entries are now, alas, almost impossible to find due to an inability on our part to work out where the hell they were hosted, but if you really would like to read again any of them that you are most fond of, let me know and I will pull them out of my archive and re-post… oh, hell where was I?) Interview with my book characters… got it.

Elisha Stephens (ES) and Isaac Hitchcock (IH) from “To Truckee’s Trail”

Sgt. Mom: So, gentlemen – thank you for taking a little time from your duties as wagon master and… er… assistant trail guide to answer questions from The Independent Authors’ Guild about your experiences in taking a wagon train all the way to California.

ES: (inaudible mumble)
IH: (chuckling richly) Oh, missy, that ain’t no trouble at all, seein’ as I ain’t really no guide, no-how. I’m just along for the ride, with my fuss-budget daughter Izzy an’ her passel o’ young ones. Heading to Californy, they were, after m’ son-in-law. He been gone two year, now. Went to get hisself a homestead there, sent a letter sayin’ they were to come after. Me, I think he went to get some peace an’ quiet… Izzy, she’s the nagging sort…

Sgt. Mom: Yes, Mr. Hitchcock… but if I may ask you both – why California? There was no trail to follow once past Ft. Hall in 1844. Neither of you, or your chief guide, Mr. Greenwood had even traveled that overland trail, before Why not Oregon, like all the other travelers that year?

ES: Nicer weather.
IH: Waaalll, as I said, Samuel Patterson, Izzy’s man, he was already there, had hisself a nice little rancho, an’ o’ course Izzy wouldn’t hear no different about taking a wagon and the passel o’ young-uns and going to join him. (Winking broadly) And it ain’t exackly true that I never had been there, no sirreebob. I been there years before, came over with some fur-trapping friends o’mine. But it was unofficial-like. We wasn’t supposed to be there, but the alcalde and the governor an them, they all looked the other way, like. Beautiful country it were then – golden mustard on all them hills, and the hills and valleys so green and rich with critters – you’d believe they walk up and almost beg to be made your dinner! (chuckles and slaps his knee) Missy, the stories I could tell you, folk wouldn’t believe!

ES: (inaudible mumble)
Sgt. Mom: Captain Stephens, I didn’t quite hear that – did you have something to add?

ES: (slightly louder) Most don’t. Believe him.

Sgt. Mom: And why would that be, Mr. Stephens?
ES: Tells too many yarns. Exaggerates something turrible.

Sgt. Mom: But surely Mr. Hitchcock’s experience was of value…
ES: Some entertaining, I’ll give him that.

Sgt. Mom: Would you care to explain?
ES: No.

IH: (Still chuckling) The Capn’ is a man of few words, missy, an’ them he values as if each one were worth six bits. The miracle is he was ever elected captain, back at the start in Council Bluffs.
ES: Doc Townsend’s idea.
IH: And the Doc’s doing, missy! Everyone thought he’d be the captain of the party, for sure, but he let out that he had enough to do with doctorin’, and didn’t want no truck with organizing the train and leading all us fine folk out into the wilderness.

ES: Sensible man.

Sgt. Mom: I take that you are referring to your party co-leader, Doctor Townsend. Why do you say that, Captain Stephens?

ES: Knows his limits.
IH: Ah, but the Doctor, he’s a proper caution! He’s an eddicated man, no doubt. Took a whole box of books, all the way over the mountains. I tell you, missy – everyone looked to the Doctor. Everyone’s good friend, trust in a pinch and in a hard place without a second thought. Did have a temper, though – member, ‘Lisha, with old Derby and his campfire out on the plains, when you gave order for no fires to be lit after dark, for fear of the Sioux? Old Man Derby, he just kept lighting that fire, daring you an’ the Doc to put it out. Onliest time I saw the Doc near to losing his temper…

Sgt. Mom: (waiting a moment and looking toward ES) Do you want to elaborate on that, Captain Stephens?

ES: No.

Sgt. Mom: Very well then – if you each could tell me, in your opinion, what was the absolute, very worst part of the journey and the greatest challenge. Mr. Hitchcock?

IH: Oh, that would be the desert, missy. They call it the Forty-Mile Desert, but truth to tell, I think it’s something longer than that. All the way from the last water at the Sink… Me, I’d place it at sixty miles an’more. We left at sundown, with everything that would hold water full to the brim, an’ the boys cut green rushes for the oxen. Everyone walked that could, all during the night, following the Cap’n an’ Ol’ Greenwood’s boy, riding ahead with lanterns, following the tracks that Cap’n Stephens an’ the Doc and Joe Foster made, when they went on long scout to find that river that the o’l Injun tol’ us of. A night and a day and another night, missy – can you imagine that? No water, no speck of green, no shade. Jes’ putting one foot in front of the other. Old Murphy, he told them old Irish stories to his children, just to keep them moving. The oxen – I dunno how they kept on, bawlin’ for water all that time, and nothing but what we had brung. We had to cut them loose when they smelled that water in the old Injun’s river, though. Otherwise they’d have wrecked the wagons, and then where would we have been, hey?

Sgt. Mom: In a bit of a pickle, I should imagine. Captain Stephens, what did you see as the most challenging moment?
ES: Getting the wagons up the pass.
IH: Hah! Had to unload them, every last scrap – and haul them wagons straight up a cliff. Give me a surefooted mule anytime, missy – those critters can find a way you’d swear wasn’t fit fer anything but a cat…

Sgt Mom: (waiting a moment for more from Captain Stephens.) Did you want to elaborate, Captain Stephens.

ES: No.

Sgt. Mom: Well… thank the both of you for being so frank and forthcoming about your incredible journey – I think we’ve managed to use up all the time that we have…

Getting to the Starting Gate

17. October 2008 · Comments Off on Getting to the Starting Gate · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, History, Home Front, Old West, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

I’m almost there, with the Adelsverein Trilogy, or as Andrew B. called it so many months ago, “Barsetshire with cypress trees and lots of sidearms”. I began doing work for a local small publisher here in San Antonio; most of it has been spec work, but I did earn something for re-vamping their website, and have a prospect of earning more, doing writing, editing, general admin work, customer hand-holding and building or maintaining websites. The final volume is being edited, the cover is designed and approved – I even put up all three on my literary website, here. (Don’t they look georgous? I am still taking pre-orders, for delivery just before the official release date of December 10. I have a signing at the Twig Bookshop in Alamo Heights December 11, another at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg on December 19th… and the first Saturday in January I will have a discussion of the books and a signing at the Pioneer Museum in Fredericksburg. A certain number of reviews are scheduled to come out in November – links to be provided when available. I would so like the Trilogy to hit big; tell all your friends, pre-order from me or from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Not just the Trilogy, too – Truckee’s Trail is still selling, and every once in a while someone buys “Our Grandpa was an Alien”.

I am taking a break from writing, from starting on the next project until after getting Adelsverein fairly launched. Just the odd bit of book and movie reviews, blogging and tooting my own horn, market-wise, and reading a tall stack of books to get ready for the first installment of a new trilogy; this one set in the last days of Spanish and Mexican Texas, when there were all sorts of odd characters wandering around… oh, and working for reliable (mostly reliable) pay at the corporate phone bank enterprise up the road, three and a half days a week, in an attempt to at least pay some of the bills regularly, while waiting for the publishing work, and the royalties for my own books to roll in.

It’s a corporate, customer service-type job, not as onerous as some, since it involves booking hotel reservations, so most of the people who call are happy, pleased to be going on a holiday… not furious and spitting nails because their (insert expensive bit of technology here) can’t be made to work and they have been on hold or navigating the phone tree for x amount of time. Alas, it seems that either the economy is beginning to adversely affect them; they were sending people home quite regularly for the last couple of weeks, some of them almost in the first few minutes that they walked in the door. Yesterday I find that all the part-timers’ work schedules have been cut by a day – which essentially reduces my paycheck by almost a third. I can’t say that I am entirely heartbroken about this. I am not entirely enjoying anything much about it; not sitting in a small cubicle having every word recorded, and down-graded because I spend so many more seconds on calls than the person in the next cubicle, or wrestling with entering data into a DOS based system at least twenty years old, (maybe thirty), a pointless dress-code and about thirty things you might do that would justify instant firing. I had reckoned on being able to stick it out for six months, past Christmas, but at the rate they are cutting hours, I think they may be just trying to let us go by slow degrees.

Just to put the icing on the cake, Blondie was let go from her 20-hour a week job, as that little company may be circling the drain. Hardly anyone wants to install permanent shade structures, since they are a fairly big-ticket item. There was barely enough business to keep the office open, so there went that source of income. I have taken her over to my own occasional office job at the ranch real estate firm, and trained her on that she can pick up work there on days when I simply cannot. She starts school again after Christmas.

Aside from all that, nothing much to report. You?

The Other Marketplace

05. October 2008 · Comments Off on The Other Marketplace · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Memoir, Working In A Salt Mine..., World

Blondie and I went out to what may be possibly the most marvelous permanently-revolving street market in a permanent place, this afternoon: Busey’s Flea Market, on 1-35 North, along about the other-wise invisible town of Schertz. It’s about fifteen minutes brisk driving outside the San Antonio city limits. As Blondie describes it, it’s a yard sale on steroids, a range of three long parallel sheds extending uphill from the frontage road. The front of Busey’s is adorned with a gigantic concrete armadillo. It’s been freshly repainted this year, business must be good, although one of the regular stallholders lamented that the rents had been raised, which drove out a certain number of old regulars. Damn if I could tell the difference, though. Actually, it seemed like the pickings were unnaturally good. The stall with the WWII and German aviation memorabilia was as unattended as ever. Will has tried to buy stuff there, and been frustrated because no one can ever locate the person authorized to make sales. The guy with the nice and orderly selection in books was having a going-out-of-business sale, but that was the only harbinger of immanent change.

See, there are a number of different tiers of vendor at Busey’s – the well-established ones with medium-deep pockets and long-term plans have a space in one of the sheds, with a locking door, although what sort of permanence that can mean, when the shed is roofed in un-insulated tin and the walls are made out of something-not-very-permanent-at all… 2 x 4’s and tissue paper, I suspect. Never mind – the permanent vendors have their stalls packed so full, and their premises so well-organized it is obvious they are not going anywhere soon. Not without the aid of a couple of moving-vans and some strong backs, at least. Carpets, hardware, antiques, military surplus, books, kitchenware, Mexican ceramics … and all that. And more. Much, much more. There are a also a good few vendors of fast food – ice cream, hot dogs, BBQ sandwiches, chili-cheese fries (an interesting and artery-clogging combination, sort of the entrée-course variant of a deep-fried Mars-bar) and thank god, cold water. There is also a curendera/palm-reader advertising her ability to tell the past, present and future, a pet store with an array of birds, and today a guy outside the venue, offering Chihuahua puppies – very cute, light-chocolate colored with white feet. Yeah, The Lesser Weevil would have liked them very much. “For me? Thanks very much for the lunch!” The cats, however, would have preferred the birds.

After the permanent, enclosed stalls, there are the tables, under one of three long awnings, rambling up the hill. People back their cars and pick-ups up to their pitch, and unpack what they have – plants, ironwork, DVDs, spurious folk art, tools, garden ornaments, house wares, small and large appliances— practically anything you could imagine. Blondie insists that the pros – who hit all the yard sales, swooping down with lightning fast-speed and scooping up the good stuff — they show up at Busey’s with their gleanings within a day or so. They also hit the various ‘everything marked down-absolutely must go! sales, and thrift stores instantly when the new donations are put out. Their stock must come from somewhere, after all. Some of this still has the original tags still on it. These vendors, although regular, have the chore of packing it all up and taking it away every Sunday afternoon. Be warned – they usually start at this by about 3 PM.

The last tier of vender must be those people who are not regulars, who have a table for a weekend only. Dad always said that those are the vendors whom are most likely to offer really good bargains – they just want to get rid of it for a so-so price. Unlike the regular vendors with a permanent pitch, with doors that can be locked, they are not canny and not particularly knowledgeable about what they have to vend. This is where the stunning coups are made, where people buy something for a couple of dollars, and turn up with it on “Antiques Road-show” a couple of years later. This afternoon, Blondie scored a pressed-glass bowl of deep black glass, nearly half an inch thick. She got it for $12 dollars, and according to one of the permanent dealers, something like that could sell at Busey’s for about thrice that. Deity only knows how much to an expert – but we liked it. It met the criterion of being strong and thick enough to kill someone if you hit them with it.

Me, I would only love to be asked to host a TV show where the challenge would be to entirely fit out a whole house with the gleanings from a place like Busey’s and assorted other local thrift stores. Furniture, linens, curtains, knick-knacks, wall art, kitchen fittings, china and glass – the whole thing, at drop-dead bargain rates .

I don’t have an agent – if the Home and Garden Network is interested, let us know through this website… Oh, and we were only going there to look for drawer pulls for the 1880-1920 dressing table that Blondie picked up for $25 dollars at a yard sale. She beat the pros to it. The backs of the drawers are all dove-tailed… but the front of it was such a wreck, that’s why the pros gave it a miss.

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