Miscellaneous

Bookworld

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There was a  lot of discussion earlier this year and in a great  many different writing and general interest venues regarding  the success of indy writer Amanda Hocking  – which, however you slice it, remains a  self-published and e-book success story. Candidly, I think that we need another zombie-werewolf-vampire saga like Custer needed another Indian, but hey- that’s just me. Not my cuppa, but if it floats yer boat . . .   To paraphrase the lyrics of a certain old pop song I can barely run my own life, why the hell should I want to run yours? Yeah Sunshine, go away and get those kids off my lawn!

Anyway as an indy-POD-author, untrammeled by the shackles of the literary-industrial complex, I had to give the Ms. Hocking all kinds of mad respect, for writing savvy,  plus marketing skills and the sheer neck to go out and just do it. 450,000 copies of nine books, each at a price of .99-2.99 and the author getting 30-70% in royalties   . . .   is   . . .   a   . . .   a lot of turnips.*

I’m an English major, dammit! But I appreciate the business aspects of it all.

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Into the Wilderness – Part Two: The Platte, Fort Hall & the Desert Sink

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(The continuation of the essay from 2005 which eventually became my first historical novel – To Truckee’s Trail.   The print version is going to a second edition, but it is currently available as an e-book. Along about 2006 I began to be overcome with a belief that we had to reclaim our American history, to remember who we were and where we came from, to know that the American experiment was a grand and optimistic one, and that our forebearers were for the largest part, decent, courageous and honorable people. So, I turned to writing rattling good adventure yarns in an attempt to educate readers painlessly. We can’t let scum like Howard Zinn and Michael Moore have it all to themselves, can we?)

Fifteen miles a day, more or less; the inexorable calculus of the overland trails. The wagon trains can only move out in late May, when the prairie grass is grown tall enough to feed the draft animals. And they must be over the last palisade of the high Sierra Nevada before the way is blocked by the winter snow. And they must do so before their food supplies run out. Any one of a hundred miscalculations, missteps or misfortunes can upset that careful arithmetic and bring disaster upon all. Is the water in that creek running fast and high? Can it be forded, or should the wagons carefully and laboriously be ferried over. An accident to a wagon, the loss of any of the supplies, an ox-team felled by disease or accident may be compounded later on. Balance taking a day to cross a high-water creek, against a day six months in the future and an early snow fall in the Sierras. Balance sparing a day camping by a pleasant spring of clear water, and the men going to hunt for meat which  when dried over the fire and stored away,  may mean the difference between a nourishing meal by an ice-water lake half a continent away, and starvation in that place instead.

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3,650 Days

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Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that old world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.

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Fire Country

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The winds kicked up over last weekend, here in Texas – and it  was wonderful, after what seems like an eternity of soggy, brutal and unrelenting heat.   It has rained here in San Antonio precisely twice in the last three or four months, and the second rain was nothing but a thin mist that moistened the ground and dried up almost at once.   The temperatures have been in the 100s, all summer long, and now most of Texas is dried to a crisp. Seasonal watercourses are bone-dry. Even in the spring, when my daughter and I took the dog and walked along the Salado Creek Greenway, there were only occasional stagnant pools of water in the creek bed.

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