Adrienne and Conan

Last Saturday I visited for an hour with a young lady named Adrienne who has written a pretty darned good manuscript for a Civil War novel.  A couple of months ago a reenacting friend asked if I’d read the manuscript, since he knew I’d written two Civil War novels.  Adrienne was looking for a Civil War reenactor to read at least part of her work to see if she got the drill commands and military stuff right.  I read it and made a bunch of comments in the margins and we exchanged some e-mails about my observations.

On Saturday, during a break at a reenacting public program in Austin to commemorate Memorial Day, we sat in the shade to talk about her manuscript. As we chatted about points in the book that she or I had marked, I started mentally comparing Adrienne to me some forty years ago. She’s an attractive young single woman with a new college degree from the University of Texas, and she has a compulsion to write.

Forty years ago I was a plain young married man with a new college degree from UT who felt no compelling drive to be a published author, but still dabbled in writing. That’s why I sat at a typewriter one week and cranked out about twenty single-spaced pages of manuscript for my first novel.

Back then I was reading a lot of detective paperbacks, science fiction, and fantasy, including the Conan series. This was before Arnold the Body-Builder made his film debut as Conan the Barbarian; a time when Texan Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery stories of his fantasy warrior Conan were still stuff written by a lonely nerd, for other lonely nerds. (I was happily married to Nita by then, but I still displayed some elements of ‘lonely nerd’)

If the Big Bang Theory TV show had come out in the 1970’s, the scriptwriters would have included Conan along with Star Wars and Super Hero comic books in Leonard's, Sheldon's, and Howard’s litany of nerdy fascinations.  

My copycat Conan was a pair of twins, one black, one white. I didn’t know if such a biological oddity was possible when I wrote it, but recently I read of exactly such a set of twins. Anyway, my little boys grew up into tough badasses known as the Twins of Arl.  Of course they had good hearts and so on, just like Conan and Robin Hood and Matt Helm. 

I regret now that I quit writing the manuscript after the first couple of chapters and it languished in my box of school papers and letters. I did reread the twenty pages a few years ago, and wasn’t too embarrassed by my fantasy heroes, thinking that for a kid I had made a good start. Nonetheless, the yellow papers remained in the box of detritus from the old days.

Back to Adrienne, she’s at about the same place in life that I was when I started the Twins of Arl manuscript. But, unlike me, she stayed the course and finished her manuscript and is now about to begin the search for an agent, and the eventual publication of her book. I’ve no idea if her work will attract the eye of an agent who can persuade a publishing house to offer her a contract. Even if an agent accepts her book, it will be a long shot because there are a whole lot of wannabe authors in America. I hope Adrienne is successful, because she created some compelling characters, has a fine writing voice, and told a good story.

After we finished talking about her manuscript, I asked Adrienne what she thought of my blog posts, and she diplomatically hemmed and hawed, until she admitted she liked some, but didn’t connect with many of them. What? A woman younger than my sons doesn’t like all of my old-man weekly musings about my writing, my family, and the Civil War? Really? Even a young woman who writes military fiction and shares my fascination with the Civil War? Dang.

As people, we want other people to like us, and as writers, we certainly want other people to like what we write. Hearing Adrienne say directly to me that sometimes my posts entertain her, but often they don’t, was worth the hour with her. We may have met for me to give her feedback about her manuscript, but I sure took away a worthwhile reminder: Even people who know me and open my blog posts won’t necessarily connect with my words each week. There’s nothing like a good old reality check.

So, to you good folks who have read this far down the page, thank you. I hope I’m entertaining you, at least some weeks, and you’ll stick with me as I carry on being a blogger in a landscape with innumerable bloggers.

This week I’m rereading an old novel from the 1970’s: Lucifer’s Hammer. It’s an end-of-civilization tale about a comet hitting earth and how the few survivors coped, or didn’t. Good reading, and still a scary basis for a story, the happy ending of the movie Armageddon notwithstanding.