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.