Cover Girl or Not

Two of my favorite musket-era war movies, Master and Commander and Gettysburg, have no women roles. My first Civil War novel, Whittled Away, has a few female characters with short ancillary appearances in the war story plot.  I have long believed the best war stories stick to telling about the soldier characters and the war, and not drift away into sidebar romances and other hi-jinks.

So, while I wrote the first two-thirds of Whittled Away, I kept the ladies out of the plot, conveniently forgetting that the Patrick Sharpe series of novels about the Napoleonic Wars are also favorites of mine, and Sharpe has an eye for the ladies.

At some point in writing Whittled Away, detailing the ongoing heaviness of the war depressed me, and I decided that at least one character, and me as the writer, needed a little R and R. Hence, Chapter 28 was born.  I loved writing Chapter 28, and Lieutenant Navarro has repeatedly thanked me for putting him in the arms of Rose. 

Knowing my next novel was going to be another Civil War story, and remembering what fun it was to weave a romantic vignette into Whittled Away, I suspected that a woman character was going to be more than an afterthought and more than a temporary distraction for the new book’s main character, John McBee.

As you can see from the cover of the new novel, Tangled Honor, a woman shares the top spot. Not just any woman, but a smart and attractive woman, the dangerous sort of woman who has the capacity to hijack a war plot and turn it into a Harlequin romance. I’ve never actually read a Harlequin romance novel, but with each new chapter in Tangled Honor, I worried that I was writing one. Hell, maybe I did. I hope someone will tell me.

I did keep asking my writers circle companions if I was taking the fast lane to literary purgatory, and they assured me they were enjoying the intrigue brought about by the woman. Of course, that’s three women and a retired pastor talking.

I still worry what my reenactor friends will think about my sliding in a second plot line that is more or less independent of the war story of the Fifth Texas Infantry. These guys hold Hood’s Texas Brigade in especially high regard, bordering on reverence sometimes and may well see a woman as an unwelcome intrusion.

Regardless of those reservations, once the lady’s position in the plot was a done deal, our writers group also looked at four cover options sent to me by the graphic designer, a lady who had read the manuscript. Only one of the draft covers included an image of a woman. I called it the “Harlequin” cover.  Guess which cover garnered the most votes? Yup, she did.

We talked about whether I wanted to appeal to female prospective buyers, and I admitted that I did. I learned from feedback from people who bought Whittled Away that my writing voice seems to connect with women readers, even beyond Chapter 27.  Besides, a book sale is a book sale, and I do want my second novel to sell more copies than did Whittled Away in its first year. I was open to the idea that maybe a woman on the cover would attract more women buyers.

Men like women, and men like reading sexy scenes, I know that much. Women buy romance novels, so with those thoughts as justification, the face of dark haired beauty made the cover.

One of the writers circle ladies suggested the woman on the cover is too modern, wears too much eye liner, lip stick, cheek shadowing and has plucked eyebrows. I agreed and followed the suggestion to Google images of Civil War women in search of a more period-appropriate face.

The old photographs I found show a bunch of plain women. Even the younger women with attractive facial features were unappealing. Styles were extremely different in the 1860’s.  Women’s hair was usually parted in the middle and pulled tightly to the sides. The use of make-up was only for “soiled doves,” ladies of the night. Moreover, having one’s portrait made in the 1860’s was serious business, so all the ladies are solemn, not a smile in the bunch. There were certainly no challenging, come-hither looks on those faces. So I bypassed those images, thinking in for a penny, in for a pound. I’m not putting a homely woman on the cover of my novel.

To you, my blog reading friends, what do you think? By all means, leave a comment or shoot me an email as to whether the cover of Tangled Away is better or worse for the sweetheart in the top corner. I’m really curious if I made the right call.

By the way, the plan is for Tangled Honor to be offered on Amazon as a paperback and a Kindle e-book download by the weekend before Thanksgiving, about a month from now.

What I read this week:  Ghostoria, a collection of vintage era short stories of romance and the supernatural by Tam Francis (who is one of the ladies in our Lockhart writers circle)       

Swinging Cannonballs

Think of an iron cannonball with a curved handle welded to it. Think of a row of pairs of them in increasingly bigger sizes from about ten pounds to way over fifty pounds each. They are called “kettle bells” and they are old-fashioned weight training devices that are said to have started in Russia.

For seventeen years I would end half my sweaty workouts at The Old Texas Barbell Company by holding a kettlebell in each hand as I bent my knees and thrust forward with my butt, swinging the kettlebells up and back, to repeat ten times before going to a heavier pair of the cannonballs with handles.

I wrapped up my other workouts by pumping the long anchor-sized ropes up and down for sixty seconds, making waves up and down the long rope, rest a minute, then pump the ropes again, for three or four times.

In between it was the traditional barbells and dumbbells, curls and presses, and such. Nothing fancy.

Who but a guy named Mike would own The Old Texas Barbell Company, a  gym with no air-conditioning, no music, no treadmills, and certainly no TV’s. 

Last month, on Mike’s 72nd birthday he shut’r down. He sold the place, complete to the pressed tin roof, bare brick walls and plywood floor. He sold the building back to the BBQ joint next door, having bought it from them back in 1996 when he moved from booming bustling Austin to little lazy Lockhart.

The Old Texas Barbell Company was also a fitness museum. The laminated covers of dozens of old fitness magazine decorated the walls, along with old rowing machines. Odd shaped dumbbells and a couple of anvils were on display.  Most of the free weights came from the old Gregory Gym on the University of Texas campus, where the weight room was under the stage until the place was renovated. Dull burnt orange paint still clings to some of the bigger round weights.

Two huge painted canvas clothes illustrated an early strong man, and Carol Finsrud, Mike’s wonderful wife, who is a world-class senior pentathlon athlete. Wooden display cases housed Carol’s ever growing collection of gold and silver medals, and shelves held Mike’s body building trophies from his younger days.

The paper that tells of Milo, the Greek wrestler,  is my favorite piece on display.  In ancient Greece, Milo the young boy asked his teacher how to grow stronger than the other wrestlers. He was told to select a new-born bull calf, throw it over his shoulders and carry it once around the arena every day for a year. Seems to have worked.

I don’t do change really well, and I was stressed out that Mike’s gym would soon not be there for me to scratch my two-or-three times a week weight-lifting itch.  I’m no gym rat, in fact I’m a bit of a fat rat who cherishes his recliner. But for nearly two decades,  Mike’s has been part of my lifestyle, the place I traded gossip with other retirees and some youngsters, and the place where I went to exert some effort that made me sore in a good way.

After all, Mike’s gym was the place where one Saturday morning a phone call came wanting to know who was the lady in town who made the fancy decorated birthday cakes. Two people knew, but they named two different bakers. I’ve never figured out why that cake call came to Mike’s gym, except that Lockhart is a little town, where roots run deep, and people sometimes do things differently.

In the end, my depression about leaving the austerity of the Old Texas Barbell Company for the new modern 24-hour Snap Fitness facility was easily solved.  As Mike closed his gym, he built his own personal workout building in his backyard, and he invited some of his longtime clients to continue working out there.  He moved about half his collection of iron weights and kettlebells, even the ropes making the shift.  I bike to Mike's backyard gym two or three times a week now and see some of the same folks I’ve grown used to over the years, and I still sweat.

The new added extra is gigging Mike about the bathroom in the new gym having a marble countertop around the sink. I expect his wife Carol had a hand in that.

Where’s the connection between Mike’s gym and McBride’s Civil War novels? Besides, the cannonball shaped kettlebells, I dunno if there is one. The gym is one place where writing ideas percolate as I work through my list of exercises, but then, so is my bed, after my full bladder awakens me in the predawn hours.

I actually think I wanted to write about The Old Texas Barbell Company because it was an old-fashioned, no shortcuts, no frills, sort of place, run by a gruff, but welcoming guy, and I view me and my novels that way.

The Devil in Texas

I was on the Texas Civil War Heritage Trail Facebook page when I found the envelope pictured here. The envelope was labelled as having come from New York during the war, an example of patriotic stationery that was fairly common on both sides during the Civil War as a way for civilians to show their support to the war effort.

I laughed when I looked at the cartoon devil, thinking the winged and forked-tail rascal was great imagery. I also reflected on why the New York artist chose Texas for the Rebel state "honored" in his wartime logo.

In researching my books, I’ve been reading quite a bit of the history of the three Texas infantry regiments of Hood’s Texas Brigade in the Army of Northern Virginia. In battle, they were aggressive and fought fiercely, no doubt. In fact, General Lee himself referred to the Texans as his “Grenadier Guards,” quite a compliment coming from the commanding general.

The Texans also certainly had a reputation for a lack of discipline when not actually fighting a battle, and that was most of the time. The mystique of the Texas Rebs was surely enhanced by the fact that Texas was a true frontier that shared a bloody border with Mexico and rubbed up against vast lands controlled by the Comanche Indians.

So, I’m not too surprised, and admit to a bit of pride, that this Civil War envelope devil chose Texas for his banner.

Jumping to the present day, this past week I also surfed onto the Facebook page of a relative who is deep into far-right national politics, and is an outspoken critic of our sitting national president. That Facebook page is filled with venomous graphic images about the president, painting him as evil and anti-American in every possible way. There seems to be an endless number of these hateful images that are posted every week, as my relative exercises our First Amendment right of free speech.

It’s a Facebook page that troubles me greatly, as it reflects a person who seems so angry about national events that the normal Facebook subjects of family and vacations are mostly by-passed, in favor of turning the page into a place for ongoing and very negative political salvos.

The Civil War envelope of the devil would fit nicely on that Facebook page, unchanged except to replace the word “Texas” with the name of our president. Without doubt, the devil is an image easily and often used by political cartoonists to paint one side or the other as evil. The ploy was popular 150 years ago during our Civil War and is still so today.

I am disturbed by the vitriolic nature of many of the voices I hear ranting about political matters. I just wish they wouldn’t do that. I wish that politicians, TV, radio and internet pundits would stick to rational discussions and debates of the issues. I wish Congress would allow the art of compromise to reclaim its position of honor in Washington and our state capitals. I wish a lot of things, but these are truly important wishes, which I believe are shared by the majority of America's good people.

Meanwhile, I’ve dumped the title “McBee’s Bloody Boots” for the first book, now completed but not yet published, of the three that I’m writing about Captain McBee of the Fifth Texas Infantry during the Civil War. It’s now, and finally, (yes, finally, again) titled, “Tangled Honor.”

Birthday, Book, and In Loco Parentis

Today, October 6th, is my birthday. Hooray for me and for still hanging out on the green side of the grass.

Last Saturday night we attended the local “Evening With the Authors” event hosted by The Friends of the Lockhart Library.  The event is much anticipated each year and is very well attended. It takes place in a beautiful garden and includes eight or ten published authors who each have their own table and a host or hostess. The folks who attend grab a plate of tasty rations and a glass of Texas-made wine and visit as many of the authors’ tables as they care to, getting copies of their books signed and visiting with the authors.

Nita and I played host to Elizabeth Crook, a fine author who lives in Austin and has written several novels of historical fiction, my favorite being The Promised Lands, a real epic about the Texas Revolution.

Her newest novel is about the lives of several fictitious characters who were wounded or otherwise affected by the mass murder episode in Austin on the University of Texas campus during the summer of 1966.

That was the day a deranged man named Charles Whitman, dragged a footlocker of weapons into the elevator of UT’s Main Building and rode up to the observation deck atop the tall landmark UT Tower. He killed the guard and then proceeded to the open observation area that circles the tower. In the next few hours he shot randomly selected people on sidewalks from his secure sniper’s nest. He killed sixteen innocent people, and wounded thirty-two more. It ended when police finally stormed the observation deck and killed him.

Mrs. Crook’s work is not a retelling of the tragic day, but a novel that probes how being caught up in such insanity affects people long after the event. It’s not a war novel, but it sprung from an act of war-like violence, unimaginable in 1966 in the dog days of summer in a quiet college town in Texas.

Sadly, the past two decades have seen other school tragedies that have eclipsed even Mr. Whitman’s afternoon of horror. Columbine High School, Sandy Hook Elementary School, and many other murders of  students, who never questioned their safety at school, have changed our the culture of our nation’s schools.

 On the upside of this train of thought, Nita and I thoroughly enjoyed listening to and engaging in conversation with such a talented author. On top of that enjoyment, early in the evening, I was delighted and flattered to be asked to take part in next year’s “Evening With the Authors” as a local author.  That offer may have come on October 4th, not the 6th, but it was an unexpected gift that made my weekend.

As to the downside of spending an evening visiting with a writer about the first tragic mass murder on a school campus, I’m reminded for the term, “In loco parentis.”

It’s a Latin legal term that means, “in the place of parents.”  School teachers and school principals perform their daily duties “in loco parentis.” Teachers and principals are legally entrusted with the responsibility to act in the parents’ place in matters that affect the parents’ children.  It’s a core concept of education and normally it means making routine decisions in the daily supervision and care of the precious children who spend half their days at school each year.

I was once a school principal, and it was the most rewarding job of my career in education.  Thinking back, I’m confident that none of us who have served as school principals were ever asked in a job interview, “Which way would you go if some morning an insane killer entered your school and  started shooting your students?” 

Bear in mind principals don’t take classes in how to disarm intruders. Principals do not carry firearms on the job. More middle-aged women are principals than are burly men. Principals are educators, not soldiers or cops.

Nonetheless, in the spirit of “in loco parentis”, if I had been asked, I hope I would have said that I’d instinctively run towards the sounds of the shooting, without hesitation, without second thought, without waiting for police support. 

In such a rare nightmare, it should not matter whether a principal is “prepared,” or accompanied by an armed police officer. What should matter is that the principal, acting “in loco parentis, in the extreme, immediately does what a parent would do when their child is being threatened with by a gun wielding crazy man: Confront the gunman and try to stop him, even if that is confrontation is a suicidal act.

“In loco parentis,” even unto death. That sounds melodramatic, but it is exactly what the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School did one Friday morning a couple of years ago. That middle-age lady is my hero.  I hope that Dawn Hochsprung, the heroic principal of Sandy Hook Elementary School, will continue to be remembered  and honored all across America.

Because, acting “in loco parentis” in the extreme, she went into harm’s way and died a violent death trying to protect the children who had been entrusted to her care.  Mrs. Hochsprung was a parent, a principal, and in my mind, a citizen-soldier. God Bless Her Memory.

 

 

Finding the High Road To A Vexing Topic

Towards the end of Whittled Away, the main characters find themselves behind a line of earthworks under attack by a regiment of US Colored Troops – the USCT.

For the first two years of the Civil War, the US Army was extremely reluctant to put black soldiers into battle for political and racist reasons. Nonetheless, by 1864, when the casualty lists had reached unimaginable lengths, Grant and Lincoln allowed the men in black regiments to join the bleeding and dying.

The reaction of Confederate soldiers fighting black soldiers is usually portrayed as blatantly racist. I suspect that is accurate given the overt racism of the 1860’s, but I think that perspective is also superficial. I think by 1864, after three long years of combat, the worn-down Confederate veterans mainly just saw the dark faces as more damyankees, part of the endless blue waves that kept crashing down on them.

In that context, I’m reflecting on a personal reenacting experience I had last Saturday afternoon. I was part of a group of modern Texans who traveled to Richmond, Virginia to portray Confederate Texans who were manning earthworks protecting Richmond, the capital city of the Confederacy.

In mid-September,1864, Grant attacked and two regiments of US Colored Troops assaulted the section the trench line held by the Texans.

The hobby of Civil War reenacting does not attract a large number of African-American participants. That is especially the case in the southern states where most reenacting outfits primarily portray Confederate soldiers. Go figure.

The point is that in my seventeen years and nearly 100 reenactments, I’ve never seen even a twenty-man company of African-American reenactors together portraying US Colored Troops. I couldn’t even imagine several USCT reenactor companies forming a battalion.

That was part of the lure for us to travel 3,000 miles to Richmond and back. We wanted to take part in a reenactment where enough black reenactors were coming together to portray a small USCT regiment in combat. Coupled with the offer for our outfit to portray the real Confederate Texans who fought the USCT regiments on the earthworks, about 90 of us were easily persuaded to make the long trip.

There were four battles scenarios “fought” for the public during the weekend. The second one, done on Saturday afternoon before a large crowd of spectators was the one we came for.

In mid-afternoon, we knelt on the backside of a long pile of yellow dirt excavated with modern machinery from a ditch dug for the reenactment. Early Saturday morning we had “improved the works” by laying tree trunks all along the top of the dirt pile to make protective “head-logs.” Under the logs we had scooped out holes in the dirt to serve as “shooting ports.”

We first saw the Union reenactors marching towards us while they were still several hundred yards distant, way too far to see if the faces under the blue kepis were pale or dark. When they worked past our “abatis” (tree branches littered across their path to disrupt their formation and slow them down), the USCT battalion broke into a trot and then a run to reach the ditch and climb the eight-foot dirt wall.

I had volunteered to be captured (these things are somewhat scripted, you know).  Seeing that the main effort to scale the wall was twenty yards to my right, I moved that way until I was right over the edge of the area where dozens of Yankees with dark faces were climbing upward and crossing over the head-logs. I was too close to safely fire my musket downward towards the main cluster of Yanks, so I just held it up until a young slender African-American fellow swung my way and pointed his musket at me. I quickly surrendered to him.

The next half-hour was a highlight for me. I was pushed along to join another small group of captured Texas Rebs. We sat under guard while most of the USCT men formed a line to defend themselves from a counter-attack by the rest of our guys, whose role had been to run away and then try unsuccessful to regain the earthworks.

When that played out, and the scenario was officially declared a done-deal, we Reb prisoners stood up and began shaking hands with the USCT reenactors. Everyone was ebullient about the success of the scenario. I can’t really express the joy and pride I personally felt, and the joy and pride that was clearly seen on the faces of all the reenactors involved. I shook hand after hand with other smiling men, all of whom were gracious and obviously feeling we had just done something special, something not normally done in our hobby.

If this was not the largest sham-combat ever done by the USCT in a reenactment, it was close. I was told by one of the white officers (historically correct, remember) in the USCT regiment that sixty-six black enlisted men answered roll call that morning. That’s enough for three good-sized reenacting companies and was enough to form a battalion.

Face it, race is still a slippery slope in our culture in 2014, and the hobby of Civil War reenacting is centered around a terribly racist time in the American story.  So much so, in our reenactments we normally just ignore race and the roles of African-Americans in the war.

But not last Saturday afternoon. On that bright afternoon, over a hundred black and white reenactors acknowledged our uncomfortable past in a proper manner, while we embraced the difficult, but not-insignificant progress of the 150 years since 1864.  We found the common ground like reasonable men should.