Wildflowers and Rebellion

March and April are the two months when Texans remember our war for independence from Mexico, 182 years ago. It is also the time of year when wildflowers bust out across Central Texas. So this blog post is a meshing of wildflowers and rebellion.

     The pretty color photo is of the monument built in 1936 (oddly, paid for with Federal dollars, not state or private funds) to commemorate the massacre of over 300 captive Texas militiamen at Goliad on Palm Sunday in 1836. The granite monument sits atop the charred bones of the Texas patriots in a mass grave.

The next image is also from 1936, the year of the Centennial celebration of Texas’s victory over Santa Anna’s army, which established Texas as an independent nation.  This photo is of course the Alamo in San Antonio during a renovation project, putting a new roof on the chapel.

This final photo is once more from 1936 Centennial and is the frame of the giant three-dimensional ‘Lone Star’ that sits atop the tall monument at San Jacinto, the site of Santa Anna’s unlikely defeat.

I like this one because my grandfather—Jackson Robert McBride, Jr.—worked for the pattern shop that designed the star and made it. When all the star skeleton’s fasteners on top of the completed tower did not fit exactly, Granddaddy McBride was the guy who climbed out on the scaffolding and the skeleton on top of the tower and fixed the fasteners. The San Jacinto Monument tower is as tall as the Washington Monument in DC. The star hasn’t fallen off after 82 years, surviving who knows how many hurricane-force winds, so I guess Granddaddy did a good job of it.

     All this relates to my new manuscript, A Different Dragon Entirely, by virtue of the 1840 setting for this Texas adventure with a fantasy twist, and that three of the main characters fought with General Sam Houston at San Jacinto—in my imagined world.

To everyone—Happy Easter. Christ Has Risen! He Has Risen Indeed! Rejoice!

My Stake in the Ground About Assault Rifles

To get right to the point:  It’s time for assault rifles to come off the shelves of America’s sporting goods store and gun shops. It’s time for America to leave military  style weapons to the military, and for the rest of us to get along with rifles developed for hunting four-legged mammals, not rifles specifically designed for waging war against other humans. If I haven’t yet lost you, here’s why I’m putting my personal stake in the ground on this issue.

Point 1: I support the 2^nd Amendment that protects my right to own firearms. And I do own several of them: a deer rifle, two shotguns, a 22 caliber plinker rifle, and several black powder weapons. Only the 22 is semi-automatic and I own two 8-round clips for it.  I got guns.

Point 2: I served as the principal of small town public high school for nine years. I was an assistant principal in a large urban public high school for five years. I was one of those for whom the mass murders at Columbine High School in 1999 was a deeply troubling event that we feared foretold a horrifying new aspect of school management—Dealing with a shooter loose in the building who is intent on murdering our children.

To be clear: When I am the principal of a school, all the students there are MY children, no less so than my sons and my precious grandchildren. In loco parentis—in the place of parents.

Point 3: If, God forbid, a crazed person is roaming the halls of MY school trying to run up a body count of MY students—my children, the very last weapon I want the murdering sonofabitch to use is a military-style automatic or semi-automatic rifle with high-velocity ammunition and large fast-change clips.

Why? Because the AR-AK styles are easy to aim, quick to reload after spewing out a 30-round clip in just seconds. The murdering school terrorists want to fire the most lead possible in the shortest amount of time to reach the highest possible body count.

To be sure, AR’s and AK’s are beautiful firearms, well designed to do their job of inflicting the most possible enemy casualties in the shortest amount of time. That's why they are the last weapon I want a mass-murderer to use.

Point 5: I want the school shooter to carry a 5-foot-tall muzzle-loading Civil War musket. Too long to aim quickly, and very slow to reload after just one shot. But that’s not likely, is it? No, the murdering sonofabitch is going to have a high-velocity, semi-auto or full-auto military-style rifle, like the last three back-to-back mass-murderers have used in the past six months, causing the deaths of over 100 innocents.

Point 6: No serious deer hunter in America uses those weapons. Hunters are marksmen who want a heavy stock and barrel, a steadying sling, and a good scope to fire a single well-placed bullet to take down their prey. Bird hunters do nicely with three shells before the prey flies out of range.

Point 7: Those serious about self-protection at home do not depend on  AR or AK style rifles. A shotgun or pistol is a better choice. The high-velocity rifle bullets zip through wall after wall, maybe even reaching into the house next door. In a car or truck, a rifle is too long to manipulate quickly for defense. 

I know the arguments for open access to AR and AK style rifles. My head is not in the sand on this deal. Still and all, after considering all the arguments for anyone legally owning an AR/AK style rifle, I simply do not see a credible reason for that ownership. There are better hunting alternatives, there are better self-defense alternatives, there are better target shooting alternatives.

Point 8: The AR/AK is not the firearm of choice for any civilian purpose except mass murders. Unless maybe you choose to live in a mountain-top bunker and expect to repel a large number of home invaders launching a banzai charge.

Point 9: We cannot prevent mass murderers from committing their violent acts of terrorism. But we can and should take away their most preferred murder tool, a weapon which serves no valid civilian purpose other than committing mass murders. If we cannot prevent the mass murders, we can at least lower the body count. It ain’t rocket science to figure that one out.

Point 10: Sporting goods stores do not sell machine guns or rocket propelled grenade launchers. It’s time to add assault rifles to that list.

 

 

Vikings & Rangers & A Writer Named Nelson

Is there somebody who you have read about, or even personally met, who makes you mutter to yourself, “I want to be him or her.” Not just because that person may be rich and beautiful/handsome. Maybe he/she is attractive, but more important, he is smart, plus creative, maybe athletic, and is engaged in a career built on his gifts, and must be having a great time every day. Granted, nobody is all that. But every now and then, someone checks a lot more of those boxes than I do, and I sort of yearn to be him or her. The back half of this blog is about a writer who seems to fill that bill for me.

In my life I’ve been a compulsive serial consumer of a progression of pop fiction authors. In junior high school, young adult novelist Jim Kjelgaard was my man. He wrote young adult books like Big Red about an Irish setter and other doggie and outdoor tales.

Then in high school it was Ian Fleming’s James Bond spy books, and John D MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. And of course, Robert Heinlein’s treasure trove of science fiction drew me like a moth to a light bulb.

As an adult, I have overdosed on questionable fictional heroes like Nero Wolf--the obese private eye of the 1930’s in NYC, Horatio Hornblower--the British navy officer of the Napoleonic Wars, Richard Sharpe--the green-coated British rifleman, George Smiley—the modern day English spy, and a bunch of  others.

My newest go-to historical fiction writer is American, not British. His name is James L. Nelson. He lives in Maine with his wife and four kids, and writes a delightful series of novels about Viking raiders in Ireland in the dark ages—the 800’s.

I’m a fan of the series for the normal reasons like pacing and likable characters. Beyond that, I admire Nelson’s Viking saga for an odd reason: The Vikings raided Ireland, murdering, raping, and plundering pretty much just because they could. At least our Native American Indians were doing the same thing to slow the inexorable advance of the white settlers. Whereas with the Vikings, the unprovoked terrible violence was just their way of doing things. The Irish certainly were not threatening to displace the Vikings from their homelands on the other side of the North Sea.

I’ve learned through writing my own novels that it is a big challenge to create and maintain a sympathetic character when he is leading a tiny army of soldiers to wreak havoc in another land. I struggled to keep my most recent novel’s main character a likable and honorable guy, given the context of the real Texas Rangers’ raid into Mexico that was the foundation of my plot.

Nelson builds sympathy for his primary Viking character by making him a father and in his way a compassionate man. He also sidesteps many of the violent particulars of the Vikings’ raids, making the books suitable Young Adult literature. Nelson even manages to make Thorgrim’s pet beserker warrior, Starri, a likable wacko who time and again leaps mindlessly into battle wacking Irishmen with his two axes.

Speaking of axes, here is Mr. Nelson on a replica Viking ship. Notice that he's wearing what is almost a cowboy hat! Maybe he is a closet Texan.

I also admire Mr. Nelson because, according to his website, as a school kid he built a wooden boat and a wooden canoe and both floated. As a young man he crewed for some years on big sailing ships, including the HMS Rose, the centerpiece real sailing ship used as the primary set for Master and Commander, Russell Crowe’s best film. Nelson even wrote his first novel while working as ship’s crewman.

I very much like that James L Nelson learned through personal experience that which he went on to write about. Not that he ran around in chain mail terrorizing the good folks in Maine, but he has climbed the rigging, quite literally, sailing old military ships, and he nicely embeds that background into his stories without overly dwelling on the mechanics of sailing. I tried to do that in my Captain McBee Honor trilogy in regards to Civil War infantrymen, relying on what I learned about being a musket toting citizen-soldier during my twenty years as a reenactor. And like Mr. Nelson, I’ve tried not to overly dwell on the details.

Another plus is that Mr. Nelson self-publishes some of his novels, as I do, and he appears to make a full-time living writing and doing historical programs related to his writing, which I do not. But I would love to be that good.

Find James L Nelson’s books on Amazon and try one of them. They are good stuff.

Pictograph and Long Knife

The photo here is of our son Todd back in the 1980’s somewhere in Arizona, or maybe Utah, on a family summer road trip.  He’s looking at a rock wall decorated with really old Indian pictographs whose meaning is lost to time.

Somewhere I have another road trip photo of a rock wall near Big Bend National Park where in 1902, 116 years ago, a couple of young cowboys scratched their names and date into the stone.

So, the question is: When does graffiti, vandalism in our world, cease being graffiti and morph into being a historical artifact? Is 100 years enough? I dunno.

The link to my writing is that I’ve created a fictitious Indian pictograph on the wall of a cave somewhere in the hill country of Texas.  The crude drawing is to document the Comanche’s fore-knowledge of a mythical giant flying lizard which has been soaring over the Texas prairie, spitting poisonous blood at buffalo, horses, and humans for a long, long time. The mythical giant beast drawn in fading charcoal on the cave wall would be Leine, the mutated horny toad with grafted batwings, one of the main characters in A Different Dragon Entirely.

Yes, it is silly. Yes, I’m have a ball writing it. Yes, conjoining the popular genre of fantasy dragon literature and historical cowboy and Indian fiction of the 19^th century Texas frontier may be a bridge too far. We’ll see.

One of the violent conflicts in my Texas dragon book will be another visit to the 1840 Battle of Plum Creek, the large-scale battle between white Texan settlers and the Comanche nation. I confess I’m drawn to the battle because it happened within sight of my house, at least when our house was on the very edge of our little town of Lockhart. Now I just see more houses between my living room window and the horizon. But thirty years ago I could see the pastures where 600 Comanches tried to fend off over a 100 pissed-off Texas militiamen. The Texans did not have a giant horny toad air force flying cover back in August of 1840, but on my pages in August of 2018, Leine and Mally will be overhead somehow supporting the defenders of white civilization.

I started my Civil War novel, Tangled Honor, with the same fight. This time the running battle along Plum Creek will be the setting for the climactic action of the new book, after Leine is well-established as a character, not to introduce her as a character like I did with John McBee at Plum Creek in Tangled Honor.

That leads to another image, this one of me holding a knife-sword while standing in the midst of a wonderful private collection of Civil War and Texas frontier artifacts owned by a rich fellow in Dallas.

The short sword—or danged long knife—is engraved as having been carried by one of the white Texans at the Battle of Plum Creek. I’ve forgotten the name on the blade, but it checks against the known participants in the battle.

I trust you all had a good first month of 2018, nasty weather here and there notwithstanding.  I could channel the spooky Snow family characters in Game of Thrones—with its delightfully sinister dragons--and drolly warn you that  ‘Winter is coming,” but around here it’s more likely, ‘Our one day of winter is over, get ready for some heat.’ Even in February.

 

The Joy of Friendship, Flying Lizards, & Pop

“Nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico.”

While I am of sound mind, I shall prefer nothing to the joy of friendship. -- Horace, Satires I.v.44

I think that quote from Horace will appear in the front of my new novel. I’m amused that the Latin version is only six words, while the English translation takes fifteen words. We have a wordy danged language, don’t we?

“The Joy of Friendship”: Some 18,000 words into the manuscript of my new novel, the tale has turned into a story of discovery and friendship between two females living in 1840 on the Texas frontier. Never mind that one is a 15-year-old teenager whose mother died giving birth to her, and whose dad spoils her—as much as a teenage girl might be spoiled in a pioneer home with more daily chores than minutes in the day. Never mind that the other friend is a 135-year-old mutated giant flying female horny toad who can only converse through telepathy, projected in Latin, and whose primary activity is finding enough ‘cibum’—that’s Latin for meat.

Also never mind that I’m an old grey-beard man, half a century and a whole gender beyond the two characters, be she pioneer-human or horny toad-dragon. Never mind, I didn’t raise daughters. But I did grow up with a smart-ass saucy sister and I married a sassy gal with an occasional sailor’s vocabulary, so I think I’m muddling along pretty well with the two character’s growing friendship.

I posted a couple of real life horny toad images in a December blog post, and I stare at those photos for inspiration on keeping the giant horny toad likable and credible. Dragons in the stories I’ve read tend to male, and either evil, greedy, and witty, as personified in Tolkein’s Smaug; or male and not evil, but still greedy and witty as personified in Naomi Novik’s Temerarie.

Leine, the name of my horny-toad dragon, is coming along as not male, for sure, but still with a greedy streak in regards to cibum, and an evolving wit. She starts slow on her pithiness—not to be confused with slow-witted—because for 130 years she’s been without anyone who can communicate with her in Latin, her only language. You know about Latin, it’s the dead language of the Romans and giant flying horny-toads.

A Different Dragon Entirely is unfolding scene by scene into something I didn’t quite expect, but which I’m immensely enjoying writing. I confess that I didn’t set out to write a chick-lit sort of story about a weird saucer-shaped lonesome dragon and a smart-ass head-strong teenage girl. I suspect that storyline has been well covered in other fantasy dragon tales. Nonetheless, that’s what is tumbling out of my head onto the computer screen, and I like it. I’m betting that seasoned readers of dragon literature will quickly lose an expected reluctance to accept a winged horny toad in the wilderness of 1840 Texas Hill Country as a bonafide fantasy dragon. We’ll see.

A friend posted an image of a real-life flying lizard from Australia. Here’s another photo of the breed. If it were a Texas horny toad, nature would have stolen my thunder, but as interesting as this little gal is, she is still lizard-size, not croc-size, or like my flying Leine—house size.

Finally, I’ve been away from my blog keyboard for a few weeks, what with the holidays, and this year, helping out my 97-year-old father who has been hospitalized with pneumonia in both lungs. Pop is a tough old coot who beat the odds and the pneumonia and is home now. Even if he is now wearing an oxygen tube full-time, he is at home and not in the damned hospital full of sick people and constant irritations. Here’s a photo I took of him a couple of days ago reading the first chapter in my Texas Ranger novel, A Different Country Entirely.

Pop is not my prime reader, the mythical perfect reader for whom I write, but like any son, his approval still means a lot to me, even if I’m old enough to have my own grown sons and grandchildren. Pop finished the opening chapter, which I worried might not be to his taste. It is a graphic and violent scene of an Indian depredation on the Guadalupe River, the same river by which we vacationed for several summers in the 1960’s when I was a teenager. We swam, fished, and canoed in the crystal clear water, loving it. In my book, things don't go so well for the vacationers.

Anyway, after finishing the chapter, Pop marked his place and closed the book. He looked up, and nodded his approval to me. That was a nod I’ll take to the bank any day. He then commented that he was glad we didn’t have to worry about Apaches when we swam in the river back on those vacation trips. Then he closed his eyes and took another nap.

A 2017 Texas Backwoods Christmas Carol

The location of the ramp-build was typical of the many mobile home lots that dot the landscape along our county roads. Rural poverty is not pretty. The dwellings usually show their age and cheap construction. Yards tend to be cluttered with cast-off appliances, old vehicles and broken toys. Septic systems are often questionable, at best. This time, thankfully, the two yard-dogs were friendly.

All the members of our ramp building crew live in and around the same small Texas town. A gruff old retired guy has led our team for the past decade. He’s 84 now and slowing down a little. Maybe. Most of us are also retirees, having finished careers in air traffic control, public education, law, agriculture and other typical jobs. The younger team members include the owner of an auto paint-and-body shop, a financial investment guy, the owner of an insurance agency, and a wine retailer. Completing yesterday’s work crew were six high school students, a group that included two young ladies.

Most of the team members are churched: Mormon, Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Episcopalian and this time--Muslim. Yesterday, most workers were either members of the local Kiwanis Club, which sponsors the building team, or the high school Key Club. A few were friends or children of the Kiwanians, and the two high school girls were foreign exchange students, one from Egypt, one from Uzbekistan.  Ethnically, the team reflected the diversity of the town, mostly white and Hispanic.

The lean middle-aged man who greeted us at the construction site was missing several teeth. The ramp was for his older brother who lives with him and his wife. Our host said he did whatever work he could get, pointing to a rusting backhoe tractor among the tall weeds. I suspect that work is sometimes elusive and all three of them survive on the brother’s disability check.

Setting aside any qualms about the family, our task for the morning was a project well-practiced by the core members of the ramp-building team, but new to more than half of us. Consequently, there was some hesitation and fumbling for the first hour. But the tentativeness faded away as pairs and trios of crew members took on little bits of the project, old hands demonstrating with tools, new volunteers watching, listening, carrying boards, holding boards, all working together to teach, to learn, and most importantly—to do. Get ‘er done.

With so many willing hands, the ramp quickly grew longer and longer, in a race with the gathering dark clouds. In the end, the last wood screws were driven into the last rails during a sprinkle of rain. But it was done: 36 feet of smooth inclined pathway, from the yard-high porch to the gravel driveway. The ramp is four feet wide, ample for a wheelchair. Guardrails extend high for hands and low to keep wheels from falling off the thick plywood floor.

After three hours of non-stop effort, we invited the gentleman-in-need to roll out of the door of his home onto the porch, his wheelchair pushed by his younger brother. We couldn’t help but look at the legs of the man in the wheelchair. Both legs ended at the knee, the stubs of a double amputee.

His gap-toothed brother guided the chair down the ramp, thanking us. The two siblings both were rough old cobs. The younger one was likely embarrassed that someone else had come in and done the ramp he’d started with scrap lumber and good intentions, but didn’t have the money to complete.

From our perspective, I’ll call the whole morning a nice bit of Christmas gift giving. We each gave some time, just a morning, and none of us had to pull a wad of dollar bills from our pockets.

When I watch my grandkids open Christmas gifts next week, I’ll laugh joyfully and embrace the warmth and love of my family. Thankfully, the little ones don’t usually have to cope with the loss of mobility, having once gained it. Crawling gives way to toddling, then walking and running. The grandpa in me knows that without a doubt, watching wee ones learn to walk is simply one of the great wonders of the world.

Now, regardless of age, imagine a surgeon sawing off those legs at the knee, sawing away that hard-earned freedom of movement. A hundred and seventy years ago, writer English Charles Dickens knew what I’m talking about when he created little Tiny Tim on his crutches in his classic tale, “A Christmas Carol.”

Yesterday, the guy we met on the porch was real, not fictitious, and we didn’t bring him a fat goose for Christmas dinner. His problems aren’t going away. Still, that team of guys and girls, 16 to 84 years old, Christian and Muslim, did something worthwhile for him yesterday.

So, I may well also feel something nibbling at the back of my mind on Christmas morning. It’ll be the memory of that gap-toothed redneck and his legless brother, both proud middle-aged men, both trying to keep their composure, while one helped the other on his first trip down the new ramp. I’m sure their mouths were firmly set, determined to be stoic and manly. Even so, I bet they felt a sparkle behind their eyes, the recognition that the mobility we take for granted, the mobility recently cut away from one brother, was now possible again. Not the same as legs, to be sure, but far better than imprisonment at home for lack of a way down the porch steps.

Those two guys projected a thankfulness that will run much deeper than I expect will my grandkids’ innocent Christmas joy for the gifts we’ll shower on them.

Selfishly, I'll bet a dollar that every one of us felt exceptionally good as we drove away from that hidden home, a place we’ll likely never see again. We'll not forget giving the gift of a Saturday morning's labor and companionship, building yesterday's ramp.

McCoy’s Lumber Company provided the materials and the Texas Ramp Foundation website was the conduit for the referral to us.

Merry Christmas to all of you. Grace and Peace.

A Texas Dragon for Christmas

Ever since I met Tolkien’s Smaug in The Hobbit in the 1960’s, I’ve enjoyed books in which sentient dragons are characters. There was Ann McCaffrey’s Dragons of Pern series. More recently, while George R Martin’s Game of Thrones dragons don’t speak, they are impressive. I’m also a fan of Brit Naomi Novik’s dragons in her Temerarie series set during early 1800’s. I wish I’d thought of adding dragon air forces to the Napoleonic wars. And not to forget John Ringo’s military dragons in his The Council Wars series. All to say, after writing four Civil War novels and one Texas Ranger adventure, I’ve decided to write a novel with a dragon character.

But I don’t want to copy the dragons of others.  Surely, I could think of some way to make a McBride dragon stand out. So I’ve asked myself, “What’s the blueprint for a Texas-centric dragon? How can I create a dragon that is uniquely Texan?” I thought back to my childhood before Tolkien and remembered the little flat lizards we called horny toads.

From Wikipedia:  “Although its coloration generally serves as camouflage against predation, when threatened by a predator, a horned lizard puffs up and appears very fat, which causes its body scales to protrude, making it difficult to swallow. The Texas horned lizard, also has the ability to squirt an aimed stream of blood from the corners of the eyes and sometimes from its mouth for a distance up to 5 ft. This not only confuses would-be predators, but also the blood is mixed with a chemical that is foul-tasting to canine predators such as wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs. This novel behavior is observed to be very effective in defense."

Whoa, hoss. What’s this? A Texas horny toad can squirt blood from its eyes to ward off hungry coyotes? Really? And puff up. And blend in to its surroundings?

So, what if a Texas horny toad grew to house-size and could fly by virtue of bat-type wings. What if it shot its eye blood stream a hundred yards instead of five feet? What if the blood stream was laced with a deadly acidic chemical instead of a smelly chemical? Let other writers’ dragons breathe fire. That’s old school, outdated. Instead, mine will stream really nasty acid-blood from its eyes. What would that horny toad be?

Answer: A Texas Dragon, A Different Dragon Entirely.  I’m calling it historical fantasy dragon lit—Texas style.  

I’m starting with just one horny toad dragon, a female named Leine—which is Gaelic for torch bearer. I’ll feed in more details later, but for now, I’ll say that Leine doesn’t talk. Rather, she projects her thoughts in Latin to a teenager named Mally Gunn—daughter of Jesse Gunn, a main character of my last book, and his beloved wife Caroline, she who was kidnapped by the Apaches in the opening pages of A Different Country Entirely.

I’m having a great time with this one because the writing makes me feel young and rebellious. When one of your main characters is a giant flying horny toad, the strict rules of historical fiction don’t much matter. I keep thinking of MLK’s great words, “Free at last, free at last. Hallelujah, I’m free at last.” At least for one book.

I still have one or two more Texas Confederate tales to write. I’ve not written anything about how back in real life Texas soldiers stopped two Yankee invasions of our home state, once at Sabine Pass and once in Louisiana at a place called Mansfield. But for now, it’s all about a Texas dragon named Leine.

Merry Christmas to all y’all from Little Lockhart, Texas.