{"id":8311,"date":"2013-11-14T11:23:51","date_gmt":"2013-11-14T17:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ncobrief.com\/?p=8311"},"modified":"2013-11-14T11:35:20","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T17:35:20","slug":"renewing-the-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/archives\/renewing-the-well\/","title":{"rendered":"Renewing the Well"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Travels<\/a>It was said to me so long ago that I really can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember who or when they said it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that being a writer is like drawing words from a cistern; you have to keep replenishing the store in the cistern by reading \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and reading even more than you write. Was it Mr. Terranova, the whirlwind 6th grade teacher, or maybe the elderly gentleman who came to speak to a school assembly at Vineland Elementary when I was in about the 2nd or 3rd grade? He was blind, with a seeing-eye dog named Rosie whom he let off duty long enough for her to run down the center aisle in the auditorium for a good petting. Our teachers told us that he was an Enormously Famous Published Author \u00e2\u20ac\u201c for some reason I thought for years that he was William Prescott, the author of The Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of Peru<\/em>, never mind that William Prescott would have been dead for a little over a hundred years by then. Yes \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Mr. Terranova had us read excerpts of The Conquest of Mexico and Peru<\/em>, which should give an idea of how eccentric and bloody brilliant he was as a teacher. The Enormously Famous Published Author with the seeing-eye dog named Rosie did give us one bit of authorly good advice, using \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcJack and Jill went up the hill\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 as his example; telling us to show them going up the hill, describe the hill, and why Jack and Jill did so, and what they saw and felt. Show, not tell, in other words. But enough of my early influences in writing, such as they were.<\/p>\n

I have to limit myself when working on a book project; nothing by other fiction-scribblers working in the same area or time-period. This is because there is a danger for me of inadvertently taking an idea for a character, or an incident or accident of plot from someone else\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s visualization, so at this time, all fictional accounts of Gold Rush-era California or the various trails and journeys towards the Ophir of the far west are strictly off the table. I have this totally bird-witted habit of seizing on certain things as I read about them, as if they were bright and shiny objects, and thinking, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Ah-ha! This has to be in The Book!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Other things just grab at me, and I come back to them again and again. In Adelsverein<\/a><\/em> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c to give just two small examples \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it was the concept of the children, taken by Comanche Indians, who were returned, but never returned in spirit, and the massacre of the Texians at Goliad.<\/p>\n

So, now I am faced with doing the episodic and picaresque Gold Rush adventure that I have always wanted to write. I grew up with this, because it was the event that I think made California what it was, for better or worse \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and in the brief blink of an eye, as far as time goes. It was a sleepy agrarian backwater with a wonderful climate and spectacular scenery, a paradise to those who lived there at that time, a lost Eden to which they looked back on later with considerable nostalgia. And in the space of two or three years \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the whole world piled in. The sleepy port of Yerba Buena became the muddy, lawless, brawling town of San Francisco, from hundreds of residents to thousands in mere months. The empty bay was suddenly forested with the masts of hundreds of abandoned ships. The properties of entrepreneur John Sutter were swamped with squatters, rogues and gold-seekers, the pristine rivers and streams in the foothills all alive with more men, looking for gold. Gold from the mines of California \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and from just over the border in Nevada \u00e2\u20ac\u201c kept the Union from going under entirely, so say some \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and I have always wanted to write about it.<\/p>\n

The next book, (after the bagatelle of Jim Reade and Toby Shaw, in the days of the Republic of Texas) will follow the adventures of Fredi Steinmetz, the younger brother of Magda Steinmetz-Becker, from the Trilogy<\/em>. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve noted in other books that he went out to California as a cattle drover in the 1850s \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and he returned, thinking not very much of the place, for a variety of reasons.<\/p>\n

So, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I am reading, and not writing and posting quite so much. I know the main character, one or two of the secondaries, and the rest will suggest themselves in time. The overall and relatively episodic plot will come out of what I am reading now; Maryat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Mountains and Molehills<\/em>, Dame Shirley Clappe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Letters, Captain Gunnison\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history of the Mormons in Salt Lake City, Randolph Marcy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 1859 advice to transcontinental travelers, William Manly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s account of his journey through Death Valley \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 and at least a score or more of others as they take my butterfly interest. Some of them are on my own bookshelves, some as eBooks or PDFs stashed away in my computer file \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 but shusssh \u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 I am reading now. <\/p>\n

Did you know that William Tecumseh Sherman and Edwin Booth were in California at the very time of the window for Fredi Steinmetz\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 adventures there?<\/em> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was said to me so long ago that I really can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t remember who or when they said it \u00e2\u20ac\u201c that being a writer is like drawing words from a cistern; you have to keep replenishing the store in the cistern by reading \u00e2\u20ac\u201c and reading even more than you write. Was it Mr. Terranova, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4,30,75,74],"tags":[325,442,440,160,159,441],"class_list":["post-8311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aint-that-america","category-domestic","category-history","category-literary-good-stuff","category-old-west","tag-adelsverein-trilogy","tag-death-valley","tag-edwin-booth","tag-gold-rush","tag-san-francisco","tag-william-t-sherman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ncobrief.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}