As of this Weekend…

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I am a business owner. My partner and founder of Watercress Press has always intended that I should take over the business eventually … and as of this weekend, the papers have been signed. Oh, there are a couple of more things to be sorted out, and essentially I have been the active partner for more than a year … but here I start on the next big part of my life, as a business owner and raving capitalist. Although I do promise not to starve and flog the employees while chuckling manically and swan-diving into my pool of gold coins.

Too much. The blood spatters get everywhere after a good flogging, and the stains never come out.

This is by way of apologizing for no History Friday post from me. There was just too much going on, I didn’t have the time to sit down and focus on the post I was thinking about – Billy the Kid, a definite contrast to the last Wild West frontier character that I posted about on History Friday. I did manage to finish a chapter in the next book, and start another adventure in my reworking of a certain popular Wild West character, so the week hasn’t all been given up to real life in this present world.

24 thoughts on “As of this Weekend…”

  6. Congratulations – you are in an endeavor few Americans really understand – you must be rich ;-)

    BTW I am enjoying your book – am amazed at the research you have done from a Patterson revolver to Nimitz’s ancestors

  7. Thanks, all – I might not understand all the ins and outs quite yet – but I do have help!
    Bill, glad you are enjoying. There was actually quite a lot out there about the Hill Country German settlements; so the research was pretty much a matter of plowing through it all. The Paterson revolver was fun – got a lesson on it from a collector who had a replica model.

  8. Be careful about the swan dives into your treasure of gold coins. That would be like jumping into a bed of heavy gravel.

    Sure, Scrooge McDuck enjoyed it but he had a hard bill.

  9. I hate the word “capitalist” because the word was invented by Karl Marx. He invested the word with the SEVEN DEADLY SINS and Hollywood, the press, and every college faculty describe each Capitalist as the epitome of greed, anger, envy, pride, lust, gluttony, and lazyness.

    Marx, Hollywood et alia describe Socialists as driven by Faith, Hope and Charity. (e.g. Obama = Hope.) The media make excuses for events like socialist oppression in the Ukraine, Venezuela or Mexico.

    People who succeed in Free Markets (there is no word for these people in Socialist literature) are driven by the 7 cardinal virtues: humility, kindness, patience, fairness, hope, honesty and faithfulness. One cannot succeed in business without these virtues. And people driven by these virtues fail in Hollywood, the Drive By Media, Washington DC and big city politics.

  11. About a 100 years ago we didn’t call our economic style ‘capitalism’ – we called it Free Enterprise and what we did was called ‘business’.

  13. Good for you and welcome to the club!

    I too am reading the Adelsverein trilogy in hardback but I have several complaints and one compliment:

    First the complaints: 1. I can’t pronounce the name. People ask me how it’s pronounced and I am forced to just mumble something incomprehensible. 2. It’s very heavy. I think I’m getting carpal tunnel from holding it. 3. I’m losing sleep over the book. I look up and it’s about 2 hours later than I thought so it’s eating into my required beauty sleep.

    Now the complement: The books are excellent and very well written, thus complaints 2 & 3. I have read about 900 pages in about 2 weeks and have enjoyed them immensely. Can’t seem to put it down.

    Keep up the good work!

  14. Thanks, Jeff – sorry about the weight of the thing! We did an all-in-one hardback for the benefit of libraries, mostly.

    Try pronouncing it like this – Aydels-verr-ine. Emphasis on first syllable.

    (And ahem… here is a sequel to the Trilogy; The Quivera Trail. And two books that form a prelude: Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart. They are also much, much lighter in weight.)

  16. Totally true story (skip over it if you’ve read it before.)

    As we were leaving the theater after seeing The Fellowship of the Ring at its first release, there’s a couple a bit ahead of us in the aisle, close enough to overhear their conversation. The woman is saying to the man, “Well…. that was sure a weird ending!”

  17. Hah! When my daughter and I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring, in the theater – as we were standing up to leave, there was a guy a couple of rows ahead of us, stretching out the kinks and groaning, “Six more hours!”

  18. “The very thing Tolkein’s publisher refused to do.”

    I have a single volume of the Lord of the Ring trilogy. The Hobbit was another volume. Probably a reprint. I originally read them in the early 70s borrowing a nurse’s copy while waiting for a surgery to get started.

  19. Michael,

    This was the original publisher in England. Before that time, Tolkein had not conceptualized his work as being a trilogy at all.

  20. It’s odd that he wouldn’t since the characters are all the same. I’ve read a good amount about him.

    Great writers are able to create a universe of imagination. Tom Clancy could do this.

  21. Michael,

    Sorry, you’re getting colder, not warmer: Tolkein never intended to write three separate volumes, it was all one huge single narrative. So he brought it to his prospective publisher, who said more or less, The Public will never buy a 1,200 page novel*; can’t you make it a trilogy? Tolkein said Fine, and went and found 2 suitably-position spots to cut it between chapters, but never rewrote more than a paragraph or two to accommodate the surgery.

    ——————————————-
    *This current hard-cover trilogy set weighs in at 1,215 pages.

  23. So far, so good, Gringo. The first client I’ve handled independently is pleased as punch, and is coming back with a series of three more books for Watercress to publish.

  24. “Sorry, you’re getting colder, not warmer”

    If this is directed at me, I was responding to the earlier question. It’s obviously one novel.

    “The very thing Tolkein’s publisher refused to do.”

    That was my response to this comment.

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