My Street's Special Day

I live on San Jacinto Street in Lockhart, Texas, a little place southeast of Austin. Today is San Jacinto Day, and not's about our street.  This is from the Texas Day By Day website:

"On this day in 1836, Texas forces won the battle of San Jacinto, the concluding military event of the Texas Revolution. Facing General Santa Anna's Mexican army of some 1,200 men encamped in what is now southeastern Harris County, General Sam Houston disposed his forces in battle order about 3:30 p.m., during siesta time. The Texans' movements were screened by trees and the rising ground, and evidently Santa Anna had no lookouts posted. The Texan line sprang forward on the run with the cries "Remember the Alamo!" and "Remember Goliad!" The battle lasted but eighteen minutes. According to Houston's official report, the casualties were 630 Mexicans killed and 730 taken prisoner. Against this, only nine of the 910 Texans were killed or mortally wounded and thirty were wounded less seriously."

And here's the connection to my new novel-in-progress: One main character, James Callahan, was a soldier in the Texan army, a sergeant in one of Colonel Fannin's companies. He fought in the losing battle at Coleto Creek a few weeks before the battle at San Jacinto and was taken prisoner along with Fannin's entire force. With great luck, he was one of the 15 or 20 men taken out of the Goliad church being used to imprison the 400 or so captured Texians, and sent to build a bridge several miles away. So, he missed the mass execution of the Goliad prisoners ordered by Santa Anna.
Callahan escaped his Mexican army captors and was still in hiding when the epic battle at San Jacinto took place.

Another minor character in my book, Nathaniel Benton, was in Sam Houston's army, but missed the battle at San Jacinto because he somehow seriously shot himself in the foot in the days before the battle. He was part of the "left-behind" camp guard during the battle.
Both these fellows historically became captains of mounted volunteer "ranging" companies in the thirty years following the Texas Revolution, chasing Apaches, Comanche's, and Mexican bandits.
I'm just finding it odd and a little amusing that two of the Texas soldiers who missed the final act of the revolution, surfaced later to lead a Texas Ranger military expedition into Mexico,  which is the focus of my book.
The action in my new novel, A Different Country Entirely, takes place 19 years after San Jacinto, but the legacy of the afternoon fight near Buffalo Bayou--the Battle of San Jacinto, shaped nearly everything about Texas in those decades between 1836 and 1865, when the end of the Civil War changed things again.
One does wonder, if Santa Anna had been on his game on April 21st, and beaten Sam Houston's ragtag army at San Jacinto, which by all logic, he should have, and asserted his iron-hand control over all of Texas, after executing several hundred more Texian "soldier-traitors", would Texas today be a Mexican state?

The Stinker Challenge

I have a stinker streak in me, without a doubt. Babies can be real stinkers, and I’m not even talking about the obvious. Take a look at this photo of Grandson Rory, who is putting stinker eyes on his dad for reasons only a wee babe can imagine.

As a retired high school principal, over the years I learned a lot about stinkers. But that's for another blog. As a reader and a writer, I've learned something about literary stinkers. Here's Literary Stinker Law #1:

Stinkers make crappy main characters. Novels about stinkers don’t get passed along to a friend. Instead, readers get fed up with stinkers and toss those novels in the trash—unfinished. You and I and every other reader simply must like the main character in a novel, or else.

I know, I know there was Dexter on TV and some other murderous main characters on the screen, Still, Dexter was likable, and his propensities to mayhem was always towards very bad people. 

I’m hard pressed to think of an unlikable stinker who is the main character in a popular novel, especially a novel by a southern author and set in the south. I personally found Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, to be a stinker, and quit reading it towards the end, but the record-breaking sales of GWTW say otherwise. I’m thinking more of Atticus Finch and Huck Finn. Guys like that.

So here I sit in Recliner #7, the morning after Easter, midway through writing A Different Country Entirely, my new novel, which centers on a real adventure led by a true-blue stinker. I’m wondering if the stinker in my new book will cause it to get tossed unfinished into lots of trashcans. Of course, I hope not.

The stinker is Captain James Callahan, who led the 115 Texans who historically undertook the adventure that I’m writing about. The primary sources of the time reflect that Callahan really was a stinker, and I’m determined not to whitewash the history in this historical novel. An accurate portrayal of how things historically were is important to me, and I think important to readers. Otherwise I’d just write and they’d just read fantasy fiction.  

My Stinker-Challenge is not easily resolved. I can’t simply edit my historical stinker out of the story. He’s the catalyst, the core of the historical side of the plot. Nonetheless, I’m striving to keep him out of the main spotlight as much as I can. To that end, I’ve upgraded a fellow who would typically be a supporting character into the main character role.

First Sergeant Milo Macleod, like all first sergeants, is the man who makes sure that what Captain Callahan wants, gets done, He and Stinker Callahan have a backstory together that involves both mutual respect and a growing concern by Macleod that his boss has serious “flaws.” That’s not a new issue in military fiction, for sure. Mutiny On The Bounty and The Caine Mutiny, and so forth.

Be assured that First Sergeant Macleod won’t foment a mutiny, but he will find himself, more than once, between a rock and a hard place, left to feel his way through, where there are no good paths. He'll have to find a way to work around the unacceptable facets of Callahan's orders and still get the job done. A Stinker-Challenge.

I expect we all find ourselves in the dark, feeling our way along, probably more often than we let on. Situations that looked oh, so rosy, one day, look oh, so stinky later on.  You've been there, you get it. 

Back to Sergeant Macleod and Captain Callahan, when A Different Country Entirely rattles the windows all across America as the newest book everyone’s gotta read, you’ll know I won the Stinker Challenge.  J