Book People, Skylines, and the 17th

Last week I received a wonderful delayed Christmas present.

The photo is me and our next-door neighbor Mary Lou at Book People in Austin. Mary Lou and her husband Wayne have been close friends for over thirty years.  My delayed gift came from them—paying the fee and contacting the fellow at Book People to put copies of three of my books on the shelves and tables in the store.

If you are a lover of books, an hour in Book People is like an hour in heaven. The store sits on the same corner as Whole Foods and Waterloo Records, two of Austin’s commercial icons. Book People is also in the shadow of a dozen glass condo towers that have taken over Austin’s skyline. Those incredibly slender, sometimes curvy, sometimes boxy, sky-high glass fingers are surely striking, but also somewhat sad to us old geezers who liked being able to see the state capitol dome and the UT tower from anywhere in central Austin.

Regardless of the urban landscape, for the next several months, among the hundreds of titles written to appeal to a demographic that is half a century younger and dresses oh so differently, A Different Dragon Entirely, A Different Country Entirely, and Texans at Antietam will share the shelf space in the Book People store.

Hopefully the book covers will invite book shoppers to visit Texas’ pre-skyscraper, pre-flying drones, pre-hipster history—a historical past, and a more fanciful past with a flying horny-toad dragon who understands Latin.

I’ve begun a new manuscript, back to Texans in the Civil War, this time in our neighboring state of Louisiana.  My home team is Company K of the 17^th Texas Infantry, who historically were from my hometown of Lockhart, near Austin.  The novel is without a catchy title so far, but something will pop up before it’s a finished work. 

Here are photos of the 17^th’s regimental flag, which still exists, and a 17th soldier’s tin Lone Star pin that many Texans wore on their jackets or hats.

The first half of the story takes place among the dozens of cotton plantations along the west bank of the Mississippi River, across the Big Muddy from where Vicksburg is under siege by General Grant’s Union army. 

The 17^th fights in the vicious little battle of Milliken’s Bend in June, 1863, just a month before the starving Confederates surrender Vicksburg, and just before Lee’s army battles at Gettysburg.

The battle at Milliken’s Bend was small, about 1,500 soldiers on each side, but it was the very first clash between black Union soldiers recruited among the recently freed slaves from the nearby plantations, and Confederate soldiers. The fact that those Confederates were Texans who were fighting in their first battle of the war, and most of the freedmen Union soldiers had never fired their muskets before the battle, makes it even more interesting.

The whole historical story is complicated by the overt racism of the time. As I read primary sources and come across incident after incident, I understand why few modern historical novelists are willing to tackle the ugliness of that season in that place. Then there is the ugliness of the political-military issues surrounding the plantations and the valuable cotton that both sides wanted, but which both sides were willing to destroy to keep from the other side.

I’m finding the overlapping issues are complex and challenging to work into a novel that creates likable characters on all sides in a dark time where violence routinely trumped reason.

The second half of the 17^th’s story happens the following spring when the Texans fight in two big battles—Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. This time the setting is further west in The Howling Wilderness, as a Union soldier termed the dense pine forests where General Taylor’s Confederate army dueled with General Bank’s Union army in 1864.

More in future blog posts about the 17^th.

Canteens and discuses

Welcome to 2019, even if I’m two weeks late.

My first goal this year is pretty common: Lose enough belly fat so I can tighten my belts by at least two notches, by April 17^th.  The date is when I’m doing a program about my Civil War novel Tangled Honor at the Rosenburg Library Noon Reading Club in Galveston. (Thanks to my Galvestonian friend Dick Gray.) Besides that vanity-centered motivation for losing blubber, Mike the gym guy posted a new article on his bulletin board next to the gym sign-in sheet. The article draws a link between surplus belly fat and increased odds of dementia. I was a high school principal for a decade and do remember the old saw that “Principals never die, they just lose their faculties.”  That was funny way back when, now not so much. 

The last time I dropped a lot of weight was in 2012 and I kept a daily journal as self-motivation not to stray. It worked, as evidenced in this photo of me at a Civil War reenactment at Shiloh, Tennessee in April of 2012.

I still wasn’t a flat bellied Yank, but that was as good as I get. Those are my son’s blue trousers, and there’s no way I’d get them buttoned up today. I intend to wear them again at a reenactment in Alabama in April of 2019.  

No daily eating journal this time, but don’t be surprised if updates appear in blog posts, since now you are my witnesses, and I’d rather brag about progress than confess to a failure of determination to stay the course.

Speaking of Mike the gym guy, his wife Carol Finsrud, is co-owner of the gym and also is literally a world-class track and field athlete. She throws stuff. She’s been doing it since she arrived at UT in Austin from Minnesota. Now over sixty years old, she still flies around the world competing in the Masters’ Senior Division and keeps bringing home big ole gold medals. On the wall of their gym is this mural size painting on canvas of Carol throwing a discus.

I’ve gazed up at that painting dozens of times as I push barbells and grunt. Eventually, I think the image of Carol throwing the discus simply seeped deep inside me.

Why else during the climatic fight would my teenage blonde heroine in A Different Dragon Entirely spin and hurl a disc-shaped wooden canteen packed with gunpowder?

So, imagine Carol with longer hair, and instead of gym-shorts and tank-top, wearing her father’s long-sleeve spare shirt and his over-sized black Sunday trousers held up by suspenders. Picture the discus as a platter-shaped wooden canteen with a sparking fuse coming out of the spout, and you are there. You’ll have to read the novel to learn if the makeshift bomb did its job.

A Different Dragon Entirely is historical fantasy, and while the term may be an oxymoron (two opposites in a single term), historical fantasy is also a recognized sub-genre of popular literature.  Not alternative history where a single turning point in a battle or politics is changed, creating a different outcome, but rather introducing a fantasy element--like a dragon--into real events—like the great Texas Comanche Raid in 1840 that resulted in the burning of the bustling new port of Linnville on the Gulf Coast and the Battle of Plum Creek.

That’s enough from me to start 2019. Keep reading whatever you enjoy and remember that words do indeed matter.