Beanbag, Yes. Zombies, No

The photo is not very good. I took it hastily with my phone, but I wanted to catch the moment. That’s granddaughter Violet, who is almost three, and not the shrinking kind of violet. There she is, balanced on a stair step, in grave danger of being swallowed by her beanbag chair. Reminds of the old Pac Man arcade game. She’s engaged in the task of bringing her beanbag chair down the stairs for a movie night. You can imagine how long she stayed still in the beanbag.

The point of the photo is sometimes we all take on projects that are bigger than we are, but we somehow manage, even as we struggle to not to get bowled over by the mass of the thing.

For Violet, that evening, it was the beanbag chair. She could have just pushed it up and over the rail at the top of the stairs to drop down, or she could have kicked it down the stairs from safely behind and above. No, being in back of the action is not her way. She had to control the cushy boulder from the front as it sort of slid down the stairs step by step.

 For her granddad, for the past two and a half years, my beanbag on the stairs has been writing the three McBee novels. It’s come close to swallowing me a few times. A thousand pages, three hundred thousand words divided into a hundred and thirty chapters, slowly rolling step-by-step through three years of the Civil War, and three years of my life. And the value of the project has not been just to finish, but to make the three books historically credible “page turners,” not repetitive or boring, yet still not outlandish. There are no zombies in McBee’s Civil War.

Like Violet’s beanbag, I can’t hurry it along, or gravity and size get the upper hand. The project would simply smother me as it rolled away to crash into a tree in the woods somewhere. I’m getting there. And the sight of little Violet throwing her all into her beanbag is just the sort of visual reminder I need to get on with the last half of the last book.

Civil War Vets, WWII Jets, and Spotsylvania

Yesterday afternoon I spent half an hour with a 96-year-old WWII veteran, a gentleman named Leland Stephenson. He goes to the same Methodist church as we do, and I know his son, who is a teacher. His landlady at the senior apartments where he lives is a friend and she told me he'd read one of my Civil War novels and really liked it. She asked if I might go by his apartment and sign his copy. So I did. I went to Leland’s apartment and signed his copy of my first McBee novel, Tangled Honor, and I took along a copy of Redeeming Honor to give him as a gift.

I figure any guy who served his country in WWII, is still on the green side of the grass, and is reading my Civil War novels, shouldn’t have to pay a dime. He’s honoring me by reading them. We had a pleasant visit. I was flattered Leland enjoyed my book, and he was pleased to have company and a chance to talk about his career as an army officer.

The visit also provided the newest wrinkle in the marketing plan for my novels: All WWII vets get free books from me. Sadly, I’m pretty sure Mr. Stephenson and my dad are the only two living WWII vets I know.

My dad Frank is now 95 and was a sergeant in the Army Air Corps in WWII. He spent nearly three years maintaining the top-secret Norton bombsites on bombers that were pounding the Germans from England, then, after D-Day from France and Belgium.  Among his stories is watching a German jet fighter land on their airfield in France one afternoon. Either the pilot was deserting with his plane or had engine trouble. Whatever the German pilot’s reasons, Pop remembers seeing the funny looking plane with no propellers and the big black Nazi emblem on the fuselage. I bet it did indeed cause quite a stir at the airfield.

As a sixteen-year-old Boy Scout, Pop also spent a weekend as a volunteer worker at the last reunion of Civil War Confederate veterans in Louisiana in 1936 in Shreveport. Those old soldiers would have been in their 80’s and 90’s by then. Pop told me that he was given a badge for volunteering at the reunion, and he kept it a long time, but it’s now gone. So after an easy search, I found an image of the reunion badge on the internet.

I think it’s noteworthy that a Boy Scout of sixteen could guide old Confederate veterans around, bringing them coffee, and then eight years later as a young airman, watched one of the very first military jets land right in front of him. Two wars, eighty years apart. The first one before airplanes were invented. The second one involving hundreds of thousands of airplanes, and the first jet fighters. The same young American was able to reach back and touch still-living soldiers from the first war, then go forward and take part in the other. All in eight years. Wow.

The past two weeks, I’ve been writing the chapters in Defiant Honor about the 5^th Texas Infantry’s trench combat at Spotsylvania, Virginia. What I’ve read seems more like the trench warfare in WWI than the Civil War, but I guess a “good idea” has staying power. And by May 1864, General Lee was quickly running out of men and good ideas. That said, it was ugly fighting, hand-to-hand, with bayonets, a point that is significant to Levi’s plot thread in the new book. I’ll end with that teaser, and more somberly, a period photo of a real fallen Confederate soldier at Spotsylvania.