Lunch With Jeffrey Brooks, Author of Shattered Nation

I just returned home from having lunch with author Jeffrey Brooks, the very bright and talented young man whose first novel is Shattered Nation, An Alternate History Novel of the Civil War.

My brother recommended Shattered Nation to me a few months ago, prompting me to buy a Kindle download and read it. In large part the book is about the Atlanta campaign in 1864, a part of the war which also consumes a substantial portion of my first novel, Whittled Away. The big difference is that Brook’s book includes a departure point from actual history, a wholly fictional alternative twist from which the Civil War takes a road never actually travelled.  

I enjoyed it immensely, so I checked out Brook’s author page on Amazon to leave him a fan comment. I saw he has a blog page so I hit the link to it and soon discovered that Brooks lives about thirty miles from me in another small town near Austin, Texas. Small world, even in a big country and big state.

Being a gentleman, Mr. Brooks replied to my fan message and we exchanged a few emails, leading to our meeting for lunch at Smitty’s Market in my little town of Lockhart, the self-proclaimed, but unchallenged, BBQ Capital of Texas.

Sitting on folding metal chairs and leaning over a wooden table, we first enjoyed the sight of the pile of meat on a sheet of greasy brown butcher paper. We ate thin slices of smoked brisket, tender inch-thick pork chops, and shared a spicy sausage link. With no utensils but plastic knives, with no vegies or salad, only white bread to sop up the sausage grease, we ate like a couple of Civil War soldiers, happy to stuff ourselves with unhealthy food. And ice tea, can’t forget the ice tea here in Texas in the summertime.

Our conversation started with the obligatory personal background stuff and polite talk about our families. Jeff is about the same age as my oldest son, testing our adeptness in quickly bridging a generation gap, but our shared interest in the Civil War and our shared passion for writing about it soon took charge.

I confess to a selfish hidden agenda in wanting to meet Jeff. His novel has outsold mine on Amazon by a huge margin. It would be indelicate to include numbers here, but believe me when I say huge margin. I’m envious of his book’s success.

I have some ideas why his novel has sold better than mine. Probably, the sales difference boils down to three things: His fine word-smithing of an intriguing plot is of interest to a wider range of readers; a more insightful portrayal of some fascinating historical generals and politicians; and the involvement of a few engaging fictitious characters.  Not rocket science, just writing a compelling book that is selling better. Truth is, I was sort of humbled and excited to meet a young writer who pulled it all together so well in his first novel.

Still, I wanted to see if he would leak some secret formula that caused his first novel to attract so many more buyers than has mine has. Didn’t happen. Instead, we just had the sort of rambling conversation that you overhear in any Texas BBQ joint. Except the ramble wasn’t about who’s hitting on whose wife around town, but who was chasing who on America’s battlefields 150 years ago.

We touched on how both our novels do not portray General John Bell Hood as a shining hero, but do cast General Pat Cleburne as perhaps the best the Confederacy had – and wasted because of southern politics.

We talked about the challenge of creating bad guys, and how tempting it is to make all the main characters for either the north or the south as good men, and allot all the evil ones to the other side, not sharing the dumb butts and meanies. Yes, we writers do let our regional roots and biases leak into our works.

We expressed our mutual surprise at the sales of our novels on Amazon in England, reflecting a surprising interest there in of our Civil War, as if the Brits don’t have more than enough military history of their own to read about. Jeff said he had some sales from Afghanistan, which we both suppose were made to our US soldiers there. That made him proud, as it should.

After ninety minutes, all the bread was eaten and the remaining grease from the sausage link on our shared butcher paper had congealed into white goo.  We agreed to meet again and pick up the conversation where we left it, but not before we dueled with our plastic knives for the last bite of brisket.

Instead of a parting handshake, we traded paperback copies of our novels. I got the better deal because my novel is a mere 300 pages long, but his is 800 pages, a heavier bit of fiction and history.