McBride At Rest

McBride At Rest

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

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.

 

 

Monday, July 28, 2014

Lessons Learned From Writing Novel #1


My second weekly post is about how writing Novel #1 (Whittled Away) impacted writing Novel #2. First, a few commonalities of Novels #1 and #2:

  • They are both books of Civil War historical fiction centered on single companies of Confederate soldiers from Texas.
  • Both companies were real: In the first book it’s The Alamo Rifles – Company K of the 6th Texas Infantry, recruited in San Antonio; and in the second novel it’s The Leon Hunters-Company C of the 5th Texas Infantry, recruited in Leon Country.
  • Both books trace the historical combat and campaigns of the two companies. Only one time did the paths of the two regiments lead them to participate in the same battle, and that crossing of the vector lines will be part of Novel #3, as it took place in 1863 at the Battle of Chickamauga.
  • To keep my facts right, I relied on several history books of the regiments and the respective brigades to which the two companies belonged.
  • Beyond that, I found and used primary source memoirs and diaries written by common soldiers in the units to support my fictional main characters’ actions, and ensure a realistic view of our terrible, and endlessly fascinating, Civil War.

Like any fledgling novelist, I learned a great deal while writing my first book. Here are six lessons I learned from #1 that impacted writing #2:

First, I questioned if history or the characters should drive the plot. In other words, were my fictional characters primarily a means to tell the combat history of the Alamo Rifles? Or, were the historical battles a vehicle to tell a gripping personal tale of being a soldier in the Civil War. Naively, I started with the first perspective, but found by the half-way mark that the second perspective had taken over. I learned that characters ARE the plot, so do them well.  Hence, in writing Novel #2, I never questioned that characters trump plot when making the countless decisions that drive the story.

Second, I discovered that even as the author, I could stomach only so much of the heavy side of war- the horrors of the killing, the human goo, and so on- without becoming too weary to turn the next page. Weren’t you ready for the first half hour of the movie Saving Private Ryan to finish? I was hypnotized by the depiction of the D-Day carnage on Omaha Beach, but was relieved when it was over.  The upshot is that Novel #2 has fewer pages describing the intense days of combat.

Third, I very much enjoyed writing the cameo romantic interlude enjoyed by one of the minor characters in Novel #1, and I think that single chapter added some welcomed spice and poignancy that made the book better. Therefore, I decided before I started Novel #2 that one of the main characters would be a woman, and there would be romance, not just as a recess from the war, but as a key facet of the story.

Fourth, writing Novel #1 took several years of sputtering, repeatedly making stutter-starts and stops. Time and again, I grew frustrated in the difficulties of developing believable and likable characters, and often felt overwhelmed by the scope of the story I was telling.  Finally, I reached the point where I was half through the historical war, and I seemed to be gaining a grip on the characters. I was growing confident of my writing skill, and within the next six months I finished the second half of the book.  The simple lesson learned was that experience matters, at least it did for me. Novel #2 took only a year to write from start to completion of the manuscript in draft form, a huge improvement from the several years the first book consumed.

Fifth, I learned while writing Novel #1 that I have a hard time creating bad guys. I kept trying to bring the dark ones into the light, to save them, to show that none of us are bad to the bone. In Novel #2, I was determined not to fall in that trap again, so I focused on making the bad men real stinkers, not two dimensional, but really foul fellows. Hopefully, some of you will let me know later if I succeeded.

Finally, the years of the Civil War were a very sexist and racist time in American culture. I knew from the beginning that I could not write a credible novel set in the early 1860’s and avoid those issues. Moreover, how I addressed them would impact the reception of my novel and define the audience. Think about Mark Twain’s great American novel, Huckleberry Finn.  His inclusion of the derogatory “n” word in the dialogue among his characters has marred today’s acceptance of his masterpiece, even though the term was commonly spoken at the time he wrote the book.  To a lesser extent the inclusion of profanity and sex presented similar interesting challenges. Would I choose to write a book that would be similar to a G, PG, or R rated film? In 2013, I knew an author could easily slide in much more profanity and sex without criticism than did Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn in 1885, but not the racial slur Twain repeatedly included.

I found this problem to be a tightrope over dangerous waters. I tried one approach then another while writing Novel #1. Eventually, I reached a place where I felt I was reasonably honest to the language, attitudes, and customs of the 1860’s, and comfortable as a writer in 2013. Hopefully my readers would not be accusing me of writing erotic, sexist or racist literature, but would still catch the hints harking to the things I could not write.

Having not been raked over the coals for the final choices made in Novel #1, I kept the same compromises between how we think things were then, to what mainstream readers will accept now, in Novel #2.

My next post will focus on fishing for a title for Novel #2.

Saturday, July 26, 2014

About Me




I’m now retired, but call myself a writer since I’ve written a novel, Whittled Away, that some people I don’t even know have bought off Amazon. I’ve mostly completed the manuscript for a second novel, which my writers’ circle companions say is better than my first effort. I hope so, because surely I learned something from writing the first one. Don’t take me wrong: I love my first novel and people say they like the characters and the story. Please do buy it and read it if you haven’t yet. But it’s a first novel and I know I fell into several of the traps that confront fledgling novelists.

I’ve lived my whole life in Texas and have lived the past 32 years in the small farming town of Lockhart. My career as an educator included years spent as an English teacher, assistant principal, high school principal, curriculum director, and assistant superintendent. Before becoming a teacher, I was a night janitor, mail room clerk, flunky in the Texas State Senate during one session of the state legislature, tree trimmer, public playground leader, game warden’s helper on a lake, and shoe salesman. Before those college-era jobs were the teenage summer jobs: restaurant busboy, dish washer, steel factory slave, deliverer of office supplies, and mower of lawns.

Of all the jobs I’ve had, two stand out as the hardest: Working in a steel factory one summer in high school, and teaching seventh grade language arts.  Of all the work I’ve done, two activities stand out as the most fun: Being the game warden’s helper, which mainly entailed  driving a boat around a lake all summer doing odd jobs like retrieving drifting logs that ski boats might hit unseen, and writing my second novel.

Besides being a writer, I am also a husband and father. My wife Nita is truly the love of my life and we have been married for 42 years, having married at age eight, or maybe it was age 22. We have two sons, one a math teacher married to a history teacher, and one who does something involving other people’s money for an investment firm.  Nita is a retired English teacher, choir director, and school librarian, and is now my primary copy editor and booster.

In my career in education I did “write for money” in that I authored grant applications and program evaluations for several years. I also wrote school related articles for the local newspaper about things that we wanted our community to know about.

For the past thirteen years I’ve written some eighty articles for a niche hobby magazine, the Camp Chase Gazette, which focuses on Civil War reenacting.

The American Civil War has become a passion in the second half of my life. It’s different from the passion I have for Nita and our grown kids, but it permeates my free time. It started twenty years ago as I became a Civil War tabletop wargamer, painting thousands of blue and gray tin soldiers and studying thick rule books.  That led to never-ending reading about uniforms, tactics and battles, and every Civil War novel that came along. 

Then I saw the movie Gettysburg and discovered the hobby of Civil War reenacting, which seems to be a compulsive pastime for many men like me whose mental development partly stopped at age twelve. The hobby involves camping, dirt, burning bacon on campfires, shooting guns, dressing up like real Civil War soldiers on weekends, and marching.  After sixteen years I’m still an addict to the hobby and leave home several times a year to get my hobby “fix.”

That’s my introduction. My next post will be about writing Whittled Away and how Novel 1 impacted Novel 2.