Texas Ranger Captains or Navy Captains

I've just finished reading the hardback book I bought at our Lockhart Evening With the Authors fund-raising event. It's the first in a series of 1800's US Navy adventure novels, The Shores of Tripoli.

Just for fun, I'm throwing out some comparisons of the The Shores of Tripoli to my about-to-be self-published novel about the Texas Rangers in 1855--A Different Country Entirely.

I paid $28 plus tax for the Tripoli novel I bought from the Barnes and Noble table at the event, and it was published by Putnam Co. His book is going through a gatekeeper publishing house, and mine is going directly from my house to Amazon. No gatekeeper, no national distribution.

I'll charge $15 on Amazon for A Different Country Entirely. His Kindle edition is $14, and I'll charge $4 or $5. We'll both be on Amazon, but I'll only be on Amazon, and he'll be in Barnes and Nobles stores and libraries nationwide   He'll sell thousands of copies, maybe tens of thousands. I'll sell dozens, maybe hundreds.

I sat with James Haley, the author of the Tripoli book for over an hour as his table host, so I heard him say quite a  few things. Among them that he was contacted and contracted by Putnam to write the six-book series--one book a year, which is the pace I've been writing, editing, and publishing my 'craft' novels while I enjoy retired life.

I hope you might read both books with an eye for how they are similar and different.

Here's my own take: I think A Different Country Entirely compares darned well with his Tripoli book. Little modest unbiased me. 

While my main character is a young early Texas Ranger off on a politically complicated, ill-advised mission into a forbidden land, his main character is a young US Navy officer off on a politically complicated, ill-advised mission into forbidden waters--and land.
We both sent our main character to rescue maidens fair taken by the indigenous people of the desert. And surprise, both succeed, his with benefits, mine not so much.

I think my characters, historical and fictional, are as robust as his, and I think my dialogue is better. His characters speak as authors wrote in the early 1800's--more formally and sometimes stilted. My characters speak as I've heard Texans speak since the 1950's.

He covers more macro-history context, but almost lectures it from time to time.

I think I do better at painting a feel for the details of the main character's environment while on the military missions, but maybe not.

We both only included only one sex scene, and both scenes are to provide a sympathetic character an introduction to the joy of sex by a willing young women in an odd situation, and both scenes somewhat stretch things.

We both get mileage from anecdotes about farting. (Some men never grow up. Instead we write adventure novels.)

Both stories have a likable character who is a military officer son of a wealthy North Carolina plantation owner who defends the practicality of slavery to his main character friend.

Both have military captains--mine of Texas Rangers, his of warships--who are flawed and aggressive and self-promoting as they blunder along more or less doing what their political bosses want.

Both have slave characters who are smart and likable. Mine has a larger role.

Both novels are definitely from a white American male perspective of the world and don't wash out the racism that permeated our culture in the 1800's. His is quite critical of the Arab world through the lens of the American navy officers, with a shot or two at the British. Mine reflects the Texas Rangers' casual violence towards Mexicans, Blacks, and Native Americans, with a gig or two at the French and German settlers in Texas as well.

Both use subterfuge to lure the enemy close. He uses flags flown by warships. I use a badly made dummy of a woman.

Both have battles in which American firepower prevails, but in the end the Americans captains confront that they are far from home and short of men and supplies.

He works released caged lions into a battle. I don't, but wish I could have.

Both use letters written by the main character to others to review the reader of what he just read.  I think I do that less obviously than he.

Both have an Afterword to tell readers which characters and events are fictional and which are historical.

My thanks to author Haley for the use of his novel as a serendipitous foil for mine.

I'm finishing the final editing and Kindle formatting of A Different Country Entirely and will post in large letters when its available on Amazon sometime very soon. A week or two from now, I hope.

Have a fun Halloween!

Another Chalk Mark

It’s my birthday, a day I’ve always enjoyed. Can’t remember a bad one. Here's a few random reflections, likely stemming from putting another chalk mark on the wall of my life span.

My most recent blog post, the one about standing for the national anthem, garnered more page-views than any of the other 120 posts I’ve written over the past three years.  Nearly 400 people took a look at it, a number that was no doubt boosted by a couple of friendly Facebook shares. Thank you all for reading it.

To a writer, that sort of response is a better birthday gift than almost anything. And to me, it reflects that issues like patriotism are on all our minds in these troubled days. Then the historian in me asks what days have not been troubled?  Still, how we fit concepts like patriotism into our worldview, especially as Christians, must be important to a lot of us.

It’s been a year and a few weeks since my mother passed away and I’ve thought about her more this past year than I did when she was living. That’s not a realization I’m proud of, but it is a fact.

My dad just turned 97 and his memory is slipping, along with his eyesight. I love Pop, a man who still volunteers at the local hospital once a week, and until his eyesight got too bad just last year, he and my stepmother were still delivering Meals on Wheels to the ‘old people.’

I admit I still chafe sometimes over my father's lack of involvement in my life when I was a kid. But he was a man of his generation, a guy who spent a career literally working six long days a week, and often went ‘back to the plant’ for a while on Sundays.

I’m glad that later in life, Pop and I made three trips together, just he and me traveling. First, the two of us went backpacking at Big Bend National Park when I was nearly 30 and he was nearly 60.  We trekked to the South Rim of the Chisos Mountains, carrying everything, including water. That was tiring, but  the days together with no one else to carry the conversation, put the two of us on the path of a father-son friendship that I wish we’d been able to start on 20 years earlier. I suppose it's just easier for fathers and sons to do that once the son grows up and mellows for a decade or two or three.

I say that because thirty more years passed by, three busy decades when I was a working father myself. Only when our nest was empty of our grown sons, and I was in my late 50's, and Pop was in his 80’s, did he and I travel alone again. We drove from Texas to Lexington, Virginia to seek out clues to our ancestors who lived there in there in the 1800’s.

I expected long periods of silence in the car, but Pop chatted through every mile of it—four days of chatting. I swear he just decided to make up for those years of having to put his job before his kids, by telling me everything he still remembered about his own youth.

Lastly, just a year ago, with me in my 60’s and Pop at 96, we went together to New Orleans. Not for the jazz, but with a bunch of other WW II veterans and their ‘guides,’ to the WW II National Museum, on a trip pampering and recognizing the old vets.  That was cool.  Pop felt honored, and I felt honored to be with him.

BTW, Pop was a ground crew technician for the secret Norton bombsight, and served in Europe. He shipped out three days after he and my mother married in the living room of the base chaplain's house, and he was overseas for 2 ½ years before he saw his new bride again. Today, we are clueless about that sort of personal commitment to a national war effort.

I’m going to the gym now, another compulsion my dad has modeled for me throughout the second half of his life. Crazy old men. I wonder if I talk the ears off whoever is lifting weights when I’m there.

3 Peas in a Pod of Patriotism

The flag. I want to talk about the flag. This time NOT the Confederate battle flag, and where/when should it be flown. But, the other one. The one that matters a lot more than as a historical relic: Old Glory-the tattered one shown here in at a Civil War reenactment at Port Hudson, Louisiana.

The NFL has brought us a new opportunity to reflect on when to stand, or rather, when is it grudgingly okay NOT to stand, during our national anthem, a patriotic tune aptly named The Star Spangled Banner.  Old Glory and the national anthem are really two peas in the same pod of patriotism, so when I say flag, I mean the song too, and I suppose the Pledge of Allegiance is the third pea in that pod of national patriotism.

First and last, I believe patriotism to one’s nation is good, and is absolutely necessary for the health of a nation. But absolute, blind patriotism is a two-edged sword that will grievously wound the wielder. Think Japan and Germany during WW II.

When I was a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout, I attended the National Jamboree at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, a place that rivals any other historic bit of geography as the birthplace of American patriotism. Valley Forge is not a battleground. It’s not a Yorktown or a Gettysburg or a Belleau Woods or a Pearl Harbor. Nor is it a hallowed hall where our Constitution or Declaration of Independence were hammered out.

Valley Forge is where George Washington’s pathetic little Continental Army first wintered and survived while it learned to be an army, to be something more than “a rabble in arms.”  Valley Forge was a school of tough love, and without Valley Forge, we quite literally would still be flying the British flag outside our courthouses.

As President Trump did this past summer, new President Lyndon Johnson spoke at the Boy Scout National Jamboree in 1964 at Valley Forge, and I sat.  I didn’t stand. I didn’t stand because even though LBJ was a fellow Texan, he was also a Democrat, and I grew up in a family of very right-wing Republicans. I hadn’t yet cut loose on my own. I wasn’t yet thinking for myself politically. So, being a teenage jerk whose brain was still clicked off, I sat in protest while those all around me stood and clapped.

I don’t know if my scoutmaster saw me sitting while all others stood when the President of the United States was introduced. But if he did see me, he should have kicked my ass and jerked me up. He should have pulled me up, not because of his personal politics or my parents’ politics, rather because I was an American kid, and because the person who was serving as the President of the United States was being introduced.

We should, we must, honor the president, any president, because the Oval Office defines us a nation. Our national identity comes not so much from the person sitting behind the desk for a short span of years, but the ongoing fact that as a single national voice, we over and over and over elect just one, only one, person to serve as our national leader for four years.

Who we elect is secondary to the fact we continue to elect our president, time after time. We damned well better honor the Oval Office, and teach our children the importance of honoring that office, regardless whose butt is behind the desk.

I’m not through: Six years later, in 1970, I was no longer a young Republican, and I one day found myself among 20,000 other college students marching down Congress Avenue in Austin in protest of the Vietnam War.  I was sort of grown then, yet I honestly don’t know if Walter Cronkite’s news coverage of Vietnam had penetrated my noggin. I was a busy college guy, but I figured it was okay to protest with thousands of others one pretty spring day.

Moreover, I had lost the draft lottery. I had recently sat by myself at a breakfast table in the Student Union and opened the Daily Texan newspaper to find where my birthday had been drawn among the 365 possibilities. Let me assure you, that is one unforgettable way to confront your level of patriotism. I was still enjoying a college deferment from the draft, but looking at my #88 draft number, I knew that when my deferment ended, I would be drafted, and I was NOT about to go to Canada to join those who had fled their own draft notices.

Anyway, was it a sensible contradiction for me to take part in a non-violent protest against the war? The war which I might soon enter wearing a soldier’s uniform?

The answer really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the protest march by thousands in Austin was protected free speech and I suffered no punishment for it--not like so many of the civil rights protesters during the 1960’s, whose cause was indisputable in hindsight.

Flash forward 14 more years from 1970 to 1984. I was the still-green principal of Lockhart High School, and we had weekly pep-rallies for the football team. Almost every week I would notice one or two jerks, usually 14 year-old freshmen, on the top row of the bleachers who were sitting during the national anthem. Then and now, I wished I could have pinged them with a BB gun pellet.

You see where this is going: When it is right and when it is wrong to participate in a symbolic protest towards things that greatly worry us?

We Americans can be cantankerous and contrary in our attitudes about almost anything. In spite of our deep commitment to the First Amendment that protects our right of free speech, we have a national history of sometimes shutting down that right for the greater good--at least the greater good is the reason used.

An early example is the tens of thousands of Americans who remained loyal to England during our Revolution, and were soon afterwards forcibly deported to Canada. Their land, homes, and businesses were lost and their wealth redistributed.

Another: after the Civil War, all Confederate veterans lost their right to serve in public office during the decade of Reconstruction.

A third example: during WW II, thousands of Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to live in detention camps, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

And there were the indignities condoned towards African-Americans during the 100 years after the Civil War ended, under Jim Crow laws and segregation. I won’t even mention the thousands of black men being lynched during those decades.

My point is that for all its importance in holding us together as a nation, patriotism can get out of hand, and when that happens the First Amendment, the right of free speech, is an early casualty.

The current hubbub about NFL players kneeling during the national anthem is complex. Unlike me as a 14 year-old dumbass at Valley Forge, those guys are way too big to pull to their feet, and unlike those ninth grade jerks at pep rallies, the NFL guys wouldn’t feel a BB pellet through their uniform pads and their own muscles.  And they’re not kids like I was.

I confess to a knee jerk reaction to criticize them for disrespecting Old Glory, before I even have a thought about the issue they are trying to address through their kneeling.

On the other hand, assuming the NFL players understand they are perhaps putting their livelihoods at risk, why shouldn’t they take advantage of their own particular mutual bully pulpit to draw attention to an issue?  Especially if it is an issue that much of white America does not view as a societal problem. 

I can’t forget that my parents and grandparents despised the non-violent, non-rioting civil rights protests of the 1960’s. Yet, those marches, sit-ins, speeches, and court-forced school desegregations--a few infamously under the protection of armed National Guardsmen, were necessary. They were sometimes ugly, but they served their purpose of not allowing us to continue turning away from the truth that racial integration was the only right path for America.

Back to today: If our police officers across the nation are indeed prone to using firearms too quickly against blacks when enforcing our laws, that is certainly a proper issue to study and to pro-actively address.

As to sitting or kneeling during the national anthem as a means of symbolic protest about anything, I’ll stand for the right of each American to make his own choice about that, without fear of legal repercussions. I hate the sight of anyone kneeling during our national anthem, but to me, that is free speech. And, that’s how rationally patriotic Americans are framing the discussion. The fringes are shouting nonsense as they usually are, but the vast majority of us are now thinking about why the NFL players are kneeling so conspicuously.

How should the owners of the NFL teams should respond? Well, the teams are their enterprises. They own the logos, the stadiums, the uniforms. They make their own rules, and the players are their employees. In the end, the owners will weigh their own best interests.  We’ll see how it plays out, so to speak.

Arrowhead or cutesy Christmas Tree?

Even though I’m a graybeard, and have lived long enough to know better, sometimes I take ‘cute’ too far.  Have I done so again with this artsy-fartsy text design? It’s for the back cover of my new novel, A Different Country Entirely. 

My hope is that the shape resembles a spear point or an arrowhead (but NOT a Christmas tree), since both are relevant to my story, and the blurb is to entice a shopper to buy the paperback, of course.

In

a dusty

corner of

Texas Ranger history-

The Callahan Expedition.

The year 1855 - the edge of Texas.

Indian savagery vs. the Rangers’ Colt pistols

Apache flight to sanctuary across the Rio Grande

Pursuit by Callahan’s Rangers into Mexico.

Battle between Texas Rangers

and Mexican lancers

at Rio Escondido.

Torching

the town

of

Piedras

Negras

So, what do you think? Is the spear point/arrowhead okay, or too cute? If it stays, I've no doubt the shape will be refined by Karen Phillips, the talented graphic designer who does the cover art for my novels.

As to the text, would it tempt you to buy the book? Back cover blurbs are hard to write because of their brevity, but every shopper looks at the back cover to see what the book is about. So, wise authors don’t take the back cover content or its appearance lightly.

Here, I worry that this bare-bones description doesn’t include a word about the characters, only the historical action. The novel certainly includes complex relationships and romance among the characters, but I'm intending to market A Different Country Entirely much more from the the historical angle than I have my Captain McBee Civil War series. 

Again, what do you think?

Please do email me your opinion at ptmcbride49@gmail.com or leave a comment on the blog for all to see.

Otherwise, the draft manuscript of my first Texas Ranger novel is done except for a bit of clean-up. I anticipate that my next blog post in a couple of weeks will be to announce that A Different Country Entirely is available on Amazon as a paperback or a Kindle ebook.

My Interview in Heaven

When I get to Heaven, should my beliefs of grace and forgiveness actually allow me to reach the Pearly Gates, I’m going to look up my old Uncle JJ McBride, the Civil War soldier-ancestor whose life inspired my Honor Trilogy of novels. Uncle JJ endured three years of arduous, and in the end, futile and tragic warring--150 years later, my wife endured three years of my writing about his three years of soldiering.

I want to ask Uncle JJ straight-up if he read the books I wrote with him in mind. If his heavenly presence tells me he has read them, he’ll likely be laughing. Here’s a possible transcript of that conversation in Heaven, starting with JJ adapting one of the best repeated lines from HBO’s Game of Thrones series.

Uncle JJ:  You seem like a pleasant enough fellow, and I do surely appreciate your remembering your old uncle. But the fact is about your books, You know nothing, Phil McBride. Things back then weren’t at all like what you wrote. All that stuff with me and Levi? He was slave. And me going to bed with a married Jewish woman? Really? Not to mention my making friends with the most famous Jew in the Confederacy. And that soldier who dressed like a man, but was really a girl. Come on, man.

Me: Well, Uncle, I was writing for an audience 150 years later in time. Things are different now. Readers expect different things from the good guy characters in the novels they read. People like a main character who has a good heart and is brave, but who also has a mischievous streak running through him. 

Uncle JJ: Well, at least you made me a good guy. Not like that Samuelson fellow. I admit you created one bad hombre there.

Me: Uncle, I’m glad you appreciate the villain. What about the battles? And camp life? Did I do better there than I did with Levi and Faith?

Uncle JJ: Not so hasty, young fellow. I didn’t say I don’t like Faith. Hell, boy, I’m flattered you put me next to such a fine woman. Too bad she’s only a character living on the pages of your books. If she were a real angel, I’d look her up. As to Levi, well, we all wish not a single African had ever been brought in chains to the New World. And it was best not to think about who begat who back in my day. Anyway, I had more pressing matters to worry over than my body servant.

Me: Like the Yankees?

Uncle JJ: “Yeah, like them. You did right well with the battles, for a guy who wasn’t there, that is.”

Me: And camp life as a Civil War soldier?

Uncle JJ: Wasn’t so bad. Of course I was an officer and had Levi taking care of my needs.

Me: What about your two battle wounds?

Uncle JJ: Hmph. I wouldn’t recommend getting shot to anybody.

Me: If you could change anything I wrote about your character in my books, what would it be?

Uncle JJ: Well, in your books you left me in the fight until the end. I’m glad you did that. I hated not to finish the thing. I owed it to the boys to have been there with them that last long year.

Me: Thank you. But what do you wish I’d written differently about you?

Uncle JJ: Well, it would have been good if we’d won after all that killing and dying.

Me: I couldn’t change the outcome of the war in my books, Uncle. That’s not historical fiction. I could only fill in gaps where there’s no record of what happened. That’s why I could create Faith and have you befriend Judah Benjamin, but I couldn’t let Lee win the war. Now, is there anything you wish I’d written differently about you?

Uncle JJ: I wish you’d made me younger. You pegged the real live me pretty good with all that bleeding blister and bloody boot stuff. I was just too danged old to be marching all those miles month after month for three years.

Me: Thanks, Uncle. Let’s talk again.

Uncle JJ: I’m sure we will since we’re both on duty here for the duration.

Me: Duration?

Uncle JJ: The duration of eternity, Nephew.

Me: So there’s time for me to write another novel?

Roses Are Red, Icebergs Are Blue

Roses are red, icebergs are blue…I think that was what my wife Nita is pointing out to me. We’re in a stretch of days which are hotter than blue blazes, every day passing the 100 degree mark. So I figure why not post a photo of a frosty Alaskan blue iceberg. It is probably making your screen cold to the touch. Enjoy. Maybe it will bring on a delightful shiver.

Extreme weather, be it hot, wet, or dry is a real deal here in Central Texas. I admit our only blizzards are at Dairy Queen, but floods are a recurring theme around these parts.  

In October of 1998, crazy heavy rains brought on record-setting floods where I live near Austin. Even the flood control dams failed to hold all that water. The normally mild Guadalupe River became a raging beast. The same thing happened to the nearby Blanco River in 2015. Vacation homes on the river became death traps in the middle of the night.

How do raging rivers connect to my new in-progress novel, A Different Country Entirely, a story about the Texas Rangers in the semi-arid regions of South Texas and Northern Mexico?

In October of 1855, 162 years ago, when there were no flood-control dams, rains along the Rio Grande River caused the river to run 15 feet higher than normal. The normally thin thread of placid water that is our border with Mexico became fast, wide, and wild.

That’s how the Rio Grande looked to Captain Callahan’s Texas Rangers. Raging. Formidable. Dangerous. And no bridge. 

The owners of the few small row boats the Rangers located refused to put their skiffs in the river for pay, and had to be forced at gunpoint to ferry the Rangers across to Mexico. Horses had to swim next to the boats. At least one man drowned and horses were lost in the swift current.

All that effort was just to get onto the forbidden Mexican side of the border. A week later when the Rangers had to re-cross the Rio Grande in a big hurry, things were even harder and hotter.

Harder because the river was still in flood stage and this time hundreds of armed Mexican soldiers were on their heels.

Hotter because the Rangers torched the town of Piedras Negras to cover their escape from Mexico. It was not a diplomatic visit.

Weather befuddles man’s best efforts. In one night, the hurricane of 1900 wiped away the city of Galveston and killed 10,000 people. The tsunami in Japan just a few years ago did the same.

In World War II, D-Day and the Battle of Bulge were greatly influenced by stormy weather.  During the American Revolution the ongoing heat-related deaths of soldiers wearing wool uniforms were a plague to the British generals. And flooding rivers have long played havoc with determined leaders like Captain Callahan.

I’d say weather probably changes history more than man does. Reckon? So when Texans or anyone talks about how bad the weather is, please don’t poo-poo them. Because we never know what tomorrow's weather will bring.