How come Oprah Winfrey is on the cover of every issue of her own darned magazine? I mean, even Martha Stewart gives it a rest.

Why does it have to be so bloody hot in Texas in the summer? And how long will summer last this year? How many more months of running the AC night and day will we have?

How come we were supposed to be moving beyond race with the nomination of the Fresh Prince from Chicago… and yet here we are again, having the same old discussion! But with the added frisson of being called a racist it we don’t vote for him. (Oh, yeah, and can we have a break from his entitlement-addled BAP of a spouse moaning about how hard it is to get along on a yearly salary of more than I will ever make in the next decade? Or two or three? Thanks.)

How deep are major media in the tank for Obama, actually? Deep enough to need a snorkel? A deep-sea divers’ suit and something to pump down oxygen to them?

How come anyone cares what celebrities think? About anything other than their next professional appearance, that is.

Who the hell cares about Paris Hilton? And why?

Which one of the dogs or cats threw up a strangely reddish patch of vomit, and please god, let the red color be from the reddish chunks of stuff in the dog food.

What’s Madonna’s new remaking of herself going to look like? Anything age-appropriate? She’s pushing 50, you know.

Will the price of gas go down? Would it be a little cheaper to run the car on milk? It’s at about the same price per gallon this week. How soon will the owners of all those big honkin’ SUV and pick-up trucks replace them with something smaller and fuel efficient. I remember the 70s, people – I remember this happing once before, and yes, I’d like to be able to see past the vehicle waiting next to me at a stoplight. Instead of looking at the step that allows them to climb into the cab of their big honkin’ SUV, which is at my eye level, thank you very much.

When those SUV’s and pick-ups get to expensive to run… will they wind up in the hands of people, who… I don’t know… live out in the country and really need a big, sturdy, 4WD vehicle with space to stuff a couple of Angus cows in the back?

How badly am I going to hate the part-time and regular job that I start next week at “Enormous National Call-Center Which Shall Remain Unnamed” by the next of six months? One year? Can I stick it out long enough for some of my books and on-spec writing jobs to pay off… so that I can turn in my employee badge of servitude and shake the corporate dust off my feet… again.

Stay tuned – we’ll know the answers to most of these in a couple of months. Or a year, tops. All but the one about Paris Hilton. That’s a mystery for the ages.

Just because…

I’m tired of Yahoo f**king up.

I’m tired of never getting any answer to the mailings and emails that I send about my books.

I’m tired of being treated like crap because I’m a writer and there are another ten-thousand of writers just like me (only most of them are F**king worse!) on the next bus. And that most of them seem to be better connected than me.

I’m tired that most of the ones that I am connected to, appear to to blow me off like an embarrassingly incontinent relative.

I’m tired of being stalled on payment on work that I have done.

I’m tired of having to work like a dog just to get a one-hundredth of the interest awarded to crappy, mediocre writers, just because they’re the flave of the moment. Or they have well-connected friends and fans.

I’m tired of looking at things that I should like to buy, but can’t because I can’t afford them. Oh and I am really, really tired of jugging bills. (please don’t construe this as a bleg, I am just venting.)

I’m tired of non-essential stuff but non-the less non-functioning stuff around my house that I can’t afford to fix. Like, giving the animals the vet care that they deserve.

I am really tired of Pajamas Media - my reason for sticking with them is…

Oh, yeah - I am really tired of Old, Traditional, Established Media. That’s what my reason is. Otherwise, I can’t see that I am really getting anywhere with the PJ Media association, anyway.

I have a couple of glasses of chablis in me. And tomorrow, or the day after, I will have to go into a couple of employment offices and make a pretense of being all about them and tending to their coporate needs, just so that I will have enough to fund the last bits of the Adelsverin Trilogy. Like mailing copies of same to reviewers - three-quarters of which will take the copy of Book One and never do a damn thing with it. Except take it down to the local second-hand book outlet and get a couple of dollars for it.

Pardon me while I swallow the vomit in my throat.

1. Borrow a tall ladder from the next door neighbor.

2. Climb up to the top of the fiberglass and lattice porch roof on a hot afternoon.

3. Cover your hands and lower arms with a couple of thicknesses of those long plastic sleeves that the newspaper comes in, on rainy mornings. (OK, so those came from the neighbor, also. I cancelled my subscription to the San Antonio Express news a couple of years ago. The neighbor hasn’t, and she has bags of the damned things.)

4. Reach under the eave of the house and gently scoot the remains of an extremely defunct opossum towards the edge of the porch. Said remains are practically liquid

5. Attempt to ignore the truly amazing stench. And the squirming maggots.

6. Scoop it all into a very large black plastic trash bag and remove.

7. Silently curse neighbors who are putting out poison for the rats and opossums.

And by the way, it took several hours and a couple of glasses of chablis to banish the smell. Just thought you would like to know, in case it happens to you

Sorry, I knew I promised way back when not to indulge in juvenile name-calling when it came to this years election campaign, but that was just too rich to pass up, too much like a dense and fudgy slab of Mississippi Mud chocolate tart with pecans, whipped cream and a whole real maraschino cherry, on top, the kind with a stem and a real seed pit in the center… temptation, I can resist anything but temptation.

I will say this for Mr. Hopey-Changey-Chicago-Machine-Pol… he is at least a bit more personally charming than John Kerry, who alas, came off as an unfortunate cross between Lurch and Eddie Haskell. I still wish I could reach out and give the mother of all dope-slaps to whichever of his strategist-minions suggested that he make his military service the centerpiece of his campaign, lo these four years ago. I am still cringing at that awful salute that he rendered… God, the Air Force gets all kinds of stick for sloppy salutes, but that one of his took the absolute cake. And as for reminding everyone of how he made his first political bones… Way to go, people. I couldn’t find a single Vietnam-era military vet in San Antonio who didn’t despise him so much for his part in Winter Soldier and other anti-war follies that they could hardly say his name without adding some serious bad language. Or at least, making a face like they had just bitten into a breakfast taco and discovered a palmetto but into it. However… water under the bridge, people, water under the bridge. Now we are faced with a gorgeous, well spoken well-connected and charming… empty suit. It doesn’t help that his most prominent military affairs advisors appear to be Wesley Clark (better known as Weasely and worse to those who served with and under him) and Merrill McPeak… the very mention of whose name still makes NCOs who served during his tenure spit nails, not the least for his pet project – the new Air Force Uniform (ta-dah! – god, what a dog, and we would have had to buy it, too!) To steal a phrase; of all the possible advisors on matters military, I think that the Obama campaign has hit upon the two most likely former general officers to make military veterans run screaming. That takes a kind of genius, really. A warped genius… and has anyone seen Karl Rove, recently!!!???

Obama is an empty suit, albeit a beautifully tailored one. As long as the suit is reading off the teleprompter, and dazzling with it’s considerable charm and piquancy, distracting attention from the fact that it’s resume is as slender as Callista Flockhart’s thighs… no, I do not care for Mr. Obama. Or his friends, his resume, his pathetic father-abandonment issues, his irritatingly resentful wife, his propensity for throwing friends, family, staff and allies underneath the metaphoric bus… there are so many people under it now, it must be jacked up like one of those pick-up trucks that you need a tall ladder to climb into. I am allergic to demagoguery, to charming people who say whatever they need to say to one audience – mostly airy promises - and something else to the next audience, and then get their well-tailored knickers in a bunch when asked searching questions about whatever it is that they have said.

Still, there are more lawn-signs and bumper stickers out for him than there ever were in my neighborhood for M. Kerry, four years ago. It’s going to be a long summer…

Well, strictly speaking, you will still have to wait for it a couple of months longer – but the epic “Adelsverein Trilogy” will be available on December 10, 2008. All three volumes, covering nearly fifty years of eventful Texas history, starting with a bang at the massacre of American and Texian volunteers at the Presidio la Bahia at Goliad in 1836.

I mean, how suspenseful and exciting is that – something that starts with a hero’s hairsbreadth escape from a mass execution?

The excitement doesn’t stop – there’s a perilous journey to a new world, Comanche Indians at peace and at war, Texas Rangers (Republic of Texas edition), brave men and strong women, true love, tragedy, betrayal, adventure in the wilderness, stolen children, dire revenge, cattle rustling and cattle drives, a couple of wars… and just about every bit of it is based on things that really happened. Oh, and cows. Lots of cows.

I am taking pre-orders, here through my Celia Hayes website (where there are sample chapters! And the cover for Volume 1 – isn’t it gorgeous!) , for anyone who wants to put their dibs on an set of all three autographed volumes, to be put in the mail and delivered to you just before the release date, well in time for Christmas! I know this is a good few months out – but on the other hand, I am offering a discount for all three volumes bought together at once - I ask you, does J.K. Rowling offer a deal like this?

(edited per M. Simon’s suggestion!)

I am trying to see this as a sign – that I am plunging in considerably more than shin deep in the waters of ‘making it as a writer’. Thanks to all the copies of “Truckee’s Trail” which sold in January thanks to a nice review from Eric at Classical Values, which was Instalanched, I will receive a fairly substantial royalty check this month. Royalties for sales other than through Booklocker are on a 4-month delay, then another month for Booklocker to forward them on to writers. I am fairly sure there will be another good check next month, for sales in February also carried on fairly steadily.

This is all to the good, making a living at writing, because it seems that all three of my part-time jobs have melted away in the last month or so. The real-estate guy is having a rough month and can’t afford office help and the work that I did for a client of my computer-genius friend Dave was only a temporary assignment. They were quite pleased with my work, and would recommend me to any other clients, but it was still a long drive to get there and a lot of telephone-calling his potential clients. And just yesterday, the ops manager at the public radio station called to say regretfully that one of their full-time employees was taking over my Saturday afternoon shift, as he was more of an opera guy. I will no longer have a regular shift there. I think I was nearly the last of the one-shift a week part-timers. They have just hired a new full-time announcer, and apparently were extensively revamping the shift schedules.

That was a bit of a surprise, as I had worked there for longer than I have practically anywhere else than the Air Force. I had originally hoped to transition into a full-time position there, which never came about. I think I just kept on working Saturdays out of habit more than anything. Still, when all is said and done, I am not sure that I mind very much. Just about all the announcers that I worked with closely over the years are all gone; moved on to other things. I see this as a hint for myself to move on, to let go of something that I stopped being really interested in a couple of years ago – and being pushed just as I was making up my mind to jump.

So now, I have my Saturdays back, I no longer have to make that 40 minute drive across town, and with the cost of gas, that is some consideration. I will be able to do more book events at a prime time and day, and at least a little bit more family stuff, since Blondie works or goes to school during the week. And I have to go full time at this writing and marketing my books now, with no distractions from any other job, none of this working for other people stuff. It’s time to work for myself.

One big consideration is that I am planning on releasing the Adelsverein Trilogy, or Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms (thank you, Andrew!) in mid December. Yep, all three volumes at once – and believe me, I am snowed under with revising, editing, and sorting out the publicity angle for them. I have been offered an opportunity to work with another IAG author and publicize them through his own publishing website. He does westerns as well, and has all sorts of ins with that market and a lot more experience in book publicity than I do. The Adelsverein Trilogy will sell like hotcakes, locally. I’ve already been told so by no less than three local bookstores.

While the official release for the Trilogy won’t be until December, I will begin accepting pre-orders for the trilogy next month – all three volumes, at a discounted price of what they would be separately, and delivered in November, in advance of the official launch – and autographed, too. I’ll post links as soon as I get the pricing figured out.

So, how was your week? Better than Hillary Clinton’s week, I am sure.

Yes, this news story was a bit of an eye-opener. So it’s only one of those specialty stories by a specialty media outlet, but still; how very nice to know that I had the good taste and good fortune to wind up living in San Antonio. Whooda thunk it? Apparently we scored really high on clean air and water, reasonable housing costs and diversity, whatever the heck that means – possibly the ready availability of breakfast tacos, the food of the gods, at some divey little outlet on every block of every major street in town, and being able to buy bottled cajeta . Why, yes indeedy, we are diverse, and some of the neighborhoods are being gentrified at a pace that would warm the cockles of a real-estate investor’s heart. My dear late friend Dave advised looking toward wherever the gays are moving in and rehabbing. By his estimation, that would be Mahnke Park and Government Hill, around the fringes of Ft. Sam Houston. Umm, yes – despite all that you might have heard to the contrary, this part of Texas is diverse. They’re just not about doing it in the road and frightening the horses, k’?

Part of the charm – and there is considerable charm, once you can get past the incredibly awful summer heat – is that San Antonio is a small town, cunningly disguised as a city. I swear that everyone is only two or three degrees removed from everyone else. It seems to be a very tight set of interlocking circles, and once you become a member of two or three of them then you are linked to everyone that all the people in your various circles are linked to, and so on and so on. I wish I could play this a little better, because I would probably sell more books that way, but still, it is amazing how you can put out a call for help and have so many people just pop out of the woodwork. Last year, I needed to become acquainted with the workings of an 1836 Colt Paterson revolver – and lo and behold, within a couple of days I was getting a briefing session with the only owner of a replica pair in the whole of San Antonio. (Note to self – must remember to tell this nice person when the Adelsverein Trilogy will be available, and to include a thank-you in the book notes. Yes, there will be notes and a laundry-list of people and institutions who have helped me incredibly with the whole project!)

The walk with Weevil and Spike – or rather the usual round of them dragging me around the neighborhood at a brisk pace this morning only made me realize again that this is a very nice place to live; the sky was a clear rain-washed blue and it was cool, much cooler than we normally have a right to expect for May. Recent rains have made everything green, everyone’s garden looks lovely, even those gardens of neighbors who don’t usually fuss with their garden. There are some houses for sale, but no more than usual – and I expect that a lot of them will be snapped up in the summer PCS season. Yes, that is another sort of diversity; having military rotate in and out, and for a lot of them to retire here. I had read somewhere or other that just about every Korean restaurant along Harry in the vicinity of Fort. Sam was started by an Army spouse. This sort of phenomenon probably also counts for the Vietnamese restaurants and the British tearooms.

And if I needed any more proof of the fact that San Antonio is a very nice and upcoming place to move to, I have only to look out the kitchen window. They have put the frames, roofs and siding on two more houses that I can see, in the new development that took up the segment of the green-belt along Nacogdoches road. Every Sunday that we take the dogs around through the new development (which is called Rose Meadows, BTW – even though there aren’t any roses and hardly any meadows left!) a house or two more is finished, a house or two more is sold and a house or two more is moved into.

Hopefully by nobody who will be such an idiot as the one who abruptly cut in front of me from the center turn-lane on Perrin-Beitel just below the turn-off for Nacogdoches. Yeah, you in the beige Toyota Corolla. We got all the idiots we can handle – can you please learn some basic courtesy or go back to where you came! Thanks a bunch, sweetcakes – You’ll make San Antonio an even better place to live, in either case. We have a reputation to keep up, now.

Just this afternoon I finished the last few pages of the final chapter of the final volume of the Adelsverein Saga (known to all as “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and Lots of Sidearms” - first draft, so there is quite a lot of snipping, editing, revising, et-cetera to be done.

But still - a grand total of 437,800 words, spread over three volumes. It’s nearly as long as Lord of the Rings, which is supposed to have clocked in at half a million. No wonder I feel like I have just finished a marathon.

There is so much that I wanted to do, to flesh out the characters and the various dramatic incidents, to include some significant backstories and to generally do right by the epic, even if some of the not-so-essential stuff is snipped, I may very well finish with just as many words or more.

Something to think about, perhaps dividing the final volume into two. Say the heck with that and make it a quartet….

Slightly depressed this evening - the part-time job that I went to, after my dear friend Dave the Computer Genius and part-time employer died most unexpectedly, has come to an end. Also somewhat unexpectedly. Eh, I knew it was temporary, I just thought it would last a little longer! But they did think the world of my work and enterprise, will call me in again to work on specific projects and will recommend me enthusiastically to their various clients, I departed on extraordinarily good terms - it’s just that I am back to a certain degree of job and financial uncertainty.

On the up-side, the commute, even once a week was a bear and I would have slashed my own wrists with my teeth after spending another couple of eight hours a day on the phone doing cold calls.

Being a child of the later baby-boom, of course I remember seeing Charlton Heston on the big screen – the very big screen at the drive in, when Mom and Dad packed JP and Pippy and I into the back of the trusty jade-green Plymouth station wagon for an evening at the double-feature. We were all in our pajamas for this sort of excursion, with our pillows and blankets in the back; lamentably, we usually fell asleep before seeing very much of the first feature, let alone the second.

But I do have a hazy memory of him as El Cid, in desert exile, seen through the windshield of the Plymouth, between Mom and Dad’s heads, as “Ben Hur” – especially the bone-crunching chariot race - a very much better one of him as Moses in “The Ten Commandments” – this one at one Pasadena’s gloriously ornate picture palaces, and of him as the devious and worldly Cardinal Richelieu in Richard Lesters’ Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers. Mom always said it was because of his background in classical theater, that he could swish about in historical costume so convincingly.

So, he was about the biggest star that any of us had ever heard of, when he came to Zaragoza, Spain sometime in the late 1980s, and the Public Affairs office informed us that we had a chance for an interview. We were all of a twitter; Zaragoza was kind of a backwater – I used to compare it to Bakersfield – and whereas it had a lovely old downtown, a cathedral (two cathedrals), a Roman bridge and a Moorish castle, practically everywhere else in Spain had better, more beautiful, more historic and better preserved. Our radio and television broadcasters there had practically no chance of doing celebrity interviews; I saw more interesting and famous people come through Sondrestrom, Greenland than I ever did in Zaragoza.

What was he doing in Zaragoza, of all places? Filming the commentary for this program series, on location in the old Alcazar; of which he said jokingly during our interview that it was practically the only castle in Spain that he hadn’t been to before. We were the only news outlet to get a TV interview with him on that trip; he was terribly busy with the location shoots, and it wasn’t the sort of enterprise that needed additional publicity anyway. We all liked to think that it was because of his service connection that we even got in the door. He couldn’t have been more gracious or considerate to our two nervous young airmen who shot the interview.

No, I did not do the interview; I came up with the questions for our staffer to ask, since the ones suggested by the Public Affairs officer were embarrassingly amateurish. We all watched the raw video of the interview afterwards and marveled – because he was a pro. We could use practically every second of the footage we taped, he was that good. Most people we did interviews with were nervous, fidgety and stiff. They radiated discomfort; it came off them in little wavy lines that you could almost see, like those used in cartoons to signify a stink. We usually had to spend a lot of time putting them at ease, and a lot of video time and editing to just get something useable that didn’t make them and us look like idiots.

But Charlton Heston sat still, graciously playing to the camera – (Of course! He was an actor!) – he didn’t fidget nervously. His responses were thoughtful, smooth, as composed and literate as a small essay or sonnet. No awkward umms and pauses, no false starts; he was at ease, completely comfortable and polished to a high gloss in a way that most of us- even those who had interviewed various currently popular celebs before – had never seen. He wasn’t just a star –besides being a military veteran, he was a total pro in a way that you rarely see these days.

(Note - I am a bit off Amazon.com, and protesting their recent decision to pressure POD publishers into using their print service by sending all my links for books and DVDs to Barnes and Noble. Take that, Jeff Bezos!)

The grave-side service for Dave, my good employer and good friend, mentor in all things computer-related was held this morning at the Fort Sam Houston cemetery. I think his daughters had initially wanted to make it more private than it turned out to be. His sisters made no end of fuss over being so exclusive, especially when Dave had so many other good friends likely to be considerably miffed at being left out. Matters like this are sometimes the cause of family feuds that last for decades, with so many kinds of feelings running high. Grief, guilt and stress make a fairly toxic brew when words are spoken and cannot be taken back.

A good collection of his close friends and clients attended, scattering their cars alongside one of the rule-straight roads under the oak trees adjacent to pavilion number two. The Fort Sam cemetery is all very tidy and organized– as it should be; acres and acres of green grass and sturdy white marble headstones. With the newest, the letters on them are clear and picked out with some kind of paint; with the older stones, the paint has weathered away, and it is harder to read the names and dates from a distance. It was cool last night, but clear and mild today with a light breeze. On the whole and if there is such a thing, it was a very good day for a funeral – the first day of spring.

I went with my other regular employer, Mr. W, the Worlds Tallest ADHD child – who was also a friend and client of Dave’s computer business. Dave had referred me to Mr. W., precisely because Mr. W. was absolutely hopelessly disorganized, and Dave was tired of going to his place of business and doing secretarial-admin work at 65$ an hour, when I could do just the same for considerably less. So we gathered under the sheltering oak trees, in the little pavilion, while the honor guard stood off well away with their rifles among the marble stones.

Dave’s family asked that flowers not be sent – it was going to be a very simple and short service. I brought some anyway; from my garden. The Spanish jasmine that I planted when I first moved in is blooming in showers of little white stars that bathe the house and the garden in their scent. I clipped half a dozen long strands and tied them with a cream-colored ribbon, laying them before the little box of his ashes on the dais in the pavilion. I was glad I thought of doing that – very simple, elegant and tasteful, but not so large as to present a hassle for anyone.

There will be a celebration of his life tonight, at a place in Alamo Heights that he was fond of. I have promised everyone that I would be there, for even more of his friends are coming to it, and I will have to support his sisters and his father – they have been absolute sweethearts, have said over and over again how much they appreciate what Jimmy and I were able to do. I really wish we could have done this immediately after the ceremony, for I am so tired now that I feel like I have been beaten up. I’ve been over at Dave’s place every day this week, helping them sort out things.

It has been a very long week and it still isn’t over yet. I was paid – and I have a job interview from one of Dave’s other clients, but even if I get that job, I won’t begin work until April. I am more incredibly grateful for everyone who hit my tipjar since Sunday, who sent me advice, and even some offers to consider my resume. On Saturday, it looked like the wolf was not only at the door, but had moved right in and made himself comfortable in the living room. As of now, the wolf is banished – at least as far as the bottom of the driveway, or even to the next block over.

I am sending personal emails as soon as I am not so tired that I am cross-eyed, thanking each and every one of my readers who were kind and generous. But for now I can thank you at least in this post. Your kindness to me allowed me to help Dave’s family in a way that wouldn’t have been possible, if I had been freaking out over the taxes and the entry fees.

Again, thank you so much! John M. H. , Barbara S., Jason van S., Theresa H., Frank G., Philip M., Janet B, Tony Z., Christopher H., Bill W., Robin at Rant ‘n Raven, Michael T., Thomas S. Sean W., The Mind Body Institute (huh?), Winston C., Oren W., John M., Paul Van B. Barbara P., Heather M., Sissy W. @ Sisu, Mary Y., Eric S. @ Classical Values, D. Scott A., Sherry R., Brian @ FasterJags, Day By Day, Kevin B., Michael W., Clare T., Paul K., James McM., and especially Da Blogfaddah, who was kind enough to link to my original post. Thank you so very much. – Sgt Mom

Dave’s family arrived last night – his father, two sisters and a brother-in-law, along with his older daughter. His second daughter arrives tonight… maybe. Weather and the airline schedule permitting. So far, sorting out everything has not been as fraught as expected. I spent a good part of the day at the trailer with them: very nice, level-headed and sensible people, not much given to hysterical demonstrations. His brother-in-law was doing valiant duty with various local funeral directors when I arrived this morning, while Jimmy and Dave’s oldest daughter sorted out what was in his various accounts. One of his sisters set to sorting out his clothes, the other to the books and various family pictures and Dave’s Navy memorabilia – the usual clutch of things that accumulate in a corner of a military veteran’s desk or bureau drawer; a couple of metal or cloth rank insignia, some name-tags, the usual handful of ribbons and decs. Jimmy’s little boy amused himself with a box of dominoes, and built towers and walls out of them on the glass coffee table. Jimmy, Dave’s daughter and B-in-L went downtown to get the death certificate and to sort out what they could about Dave’s car, which is still at the garage. I drove his youngest sister over to the grocery store for some cases of soda and water, and a Little Cesears for enough luncheon pizza all the way around.

I can only think that doing all these practical things is very steadying, and obscurely comforting. Occasionally one of us teared up, but just a little. They have decided on a private interment at Ft. Sam on Thursday afternoon, with a gathering at a place he was particularly fond of, for all his friends afterwards. I have edited the website to reflect this, and added a picture of him, from when he finished Navy Basic – which his sisters unearthed and we all thought was just perfect.

But I just don’t know how long it will take, when I am having trouble with a computer to get over the impulse to call Dave and ask for help with it.

Later: his website is here - it was down all last night when I wrote this and wasn’t available for the linkage.

(Thanks to so many friends who read and linked to my Saturday entry - thanks to some incredible generosity, my financial crisis has been whittled down to fairly manageable porportions. I can never say thank you enough!!! - Sgt Mom)

Saturday – it’s a work day for me. My weekend is split – Sundays are for a long hike with the dogs and work in the house and garden. Wednesdays are my Saturday, a long day given up to writing, both morning and afternoon. Mondays and Fridays are my workdays with my friend Dave the Computer Genius, doing office admin for his computer repair business, trying to launch the carpet-cleaning business for his friend Jimmy. Dave is a Navy veteran, horrifically overweight, divorced and a good platonic friend and as I said – a computer genius. I’ve known him for about six years, ever since he gave the coup de grace to the computer I bought in Korea to start my writing career and sold me a rehabbed computer to replace it.

Since then, he did work for the company I worked for then, for the company my daughter works for now, referred me to many of his computer clients… and when he discovered last fall that his admittedly serious and chronic health problems were not going to carry him off in a matter of weeks, he hired me to do his admin work, intending to build up his various businesses again. It suited me fine to work for him, two or three mornings a week; he had fitted up the back bedroom closet of the trailer that he owned and currently lived in as a tiny home office, just for me. That was my regular job to go to, on Mondays and Fridays, five minutes drive from home and I didn’t have to wear anything more formal than sweats or jeans. Fridays, he was usually out on jobs, but Mondays were days that we did marketing, and plotted out various mailings and letters for the computer business. He was a night owl – most of the times still asleep when I arrived. I am a morning person, so I was used to this. He had a key in a lockbox, so that I could let myself in.

He had planned a couple of weeks ago, to move again – into a small apartment attached to a house owned by some friends in Alamo Heights, a neighborhood that was closer to his computer business clientele. On Friday, he was out all day, but he telephoned me to ask if I could pack up all the things in my little office and from the bookshelves in the hallway – which I did. One thing about being in the military – good at packing up stuff for moving – and Moving Day was Monday. I finished packing up my office, all the files and mailing materials and stuff, broke down my computer and packed that, took down all the books from the hallway shelves and packed them. By then, it was almost two o’clock, an hour past my usual time; I was out of tubs and boxes and Dave wasn’t back from his afternoon job. I went home to call him – no phone at the trailer. All of his business went through either email or his cell phone. He asked me to come back in the morning, if I had time before going to the radio station; there were some more tubs I could use to pack the stuff in his desk. In the kitchen where I had not thought to look for them. And also, he said he would leave my salary for two weeks work in a place where I could find it.

So I came back this morning, just before nine. His car wasn’t in the driveway – not at all unusual. His Saturdays are like mine – a work day, usually. I didn’t have any reason to go down the hall, since my office was already emptied out, and everything I needed to work on was in the living room or the kitchen. It took barely an hour to empty out the desk, and the drawers, sorting everything into plastic zip-lock bags and layering it neatly in the tub. Well, everything but what looked like a couple of moldy, gnawed barbequed short-ribs in a plastic baggie, buried and forgotten a couple of layers down. OMG, every story about forgetful guys and computer geniuses – it’s true! I was looking forward to razzing him gently about that. I even made a note to point out the disgusting things, on the top of the kitchen trash. But my salary was nowhere to be found. I called up his schedule – oh, he had an appointment at 10 AM. Maybe he had left early and I had just missed him.

And I had also left a handful of computer equipment boxes on the top shelf, not being entirely sure that he wanted to haul them down to the new place, I had asked him about those when I talked to him on Friday afternoon. No, he said – they were for things that he might want to sell as used – keep the boxes and pack them. I had an empty crate still – perfect for the boxes. When I went down the hall to get them, I glanced into the bedroom and saw him lying sprawled on top of the bed, deep asleep. Oh, another one of those mornings when I tip-toed in and worked for hours without waking up the slumbering night-owl. Happened often enough before - I tapped on the door-jamb and said that I was done.

I didn’t tap very loudly, and I didn’t want to go any farther into the bedroom – yeah, we were friends and all, but I have imbibed so many of those Victorian principles about single gentlemen and bedchambers and all that. No, better to go home and call him on the cell-phone, save us all the embarrassment, since he was so deep asleep; night-owl and all. I went home and called his cell number, said that Blondie and I would stop in, on our way to the radio station. She wanted to take me to work this weekend, kill some time hanging out in Huebner Oaks, take in a movie, and I thought that it would give him time to wake up, pull himself together and remember where he had put my paycheck. And besides, Blondie wanted to see my tiny closet-office.

So, we let ourselves in again; I showed Blondie the closet-office, and I saw when we went down the hall again that he was still in the same position. Not a good sign.

And it was what might have been expected to have happened to an obese man in his late fifties, plagued with a colorful assortment of ailments. I didn’t even try looking for a pulse: his arm was cold, his chest was motionless and his fingertips were a uniform bruised blue. We called 911 from her cell-phone; the paramedics took what seemed like an ungodly time to get there, but were very kind when they did. So was the SAPD police officer who arrived sometime afterwards. I think he was weirdly relieved to find that both Blondie and I were calm enough to be of help; to locate some documents in the packed tub of stuff from Dave’s desk with his social on it, the cell-phone number for his next of kin from the computer data-base, to call Jimmy and find out that Dave’s car was in the garage for a suddenly-developed problem on Friday afternoon.

We stayed until the contract medical examiners van arrived, having already spent considerable time on Blondie’s cell-phone. His daughter authorized me to see to locking up the place, and on her instructions, the very helpful SAPD officer let me keep Dave’s wallet and keys. While we were waiting for the medical examiner’s crew to do their job, the manager of the trailer-park came by. It’s a natural nesting place for snow birds, so I imagine that this has happened many times before. The manager was very understanding; a special eye will be kept on the place, until matters are sorted out. Dave’s daughter will come to San Antonio on Monday, but tomorrow, Jimmy and Blondie and I will sort out more of the housekeeping things at the trailer.

So, not only am I now out for a regular job… I am short of a crackerjack computer tech, a hosting service… but most importantly, a very good friend and mentor, in one fell swoop. He tried to teach me everything he knew about computers; I am lucky if I retained about a quarter of it all.

I’ll be a week or so, sorting out all this and trying to keep calm. He had been dead for hours, as I worked away in the living room, packing his desk stuff. I keep telling myself, if I hadn’t come in at all, it might have been Monday before anyone thought anything amiss.

(Later note - as well as being a personal loss, this is a financial disaster for me, at a time when I most particularly needed a paycheck. I have a tax bill coming up, and the entry fees for a couple of literary contests that I had planned to enter “To Truckee’s Trail” in. I hate to bleg… but donations to my paypal tip-jar would be particularly welcome at this time.)

I read – in a couple of places on the intertubules or overheard on a TV fluffy-news item sometime in the last couple of days that some genius has deduced that mid-January is without peer, the most depressing part of the year. Forget about Christmas, and such moveable feasts such as post-natal depression, the suckage-factor of this time of the year cannot be measured with current technology. At least he got some news coverage out of this blinding flash of the obvious.

And this is actually rather bizarrely comforting – at least I know it just isn’t me. Other people are feeling the great dreary weight of generalized malaise and suckage too. I’d be cheered right up, except for my own accumulation of post-Christmas blah.

Let me count the ways, enumerate the bleakness, have a nice wallow in it… at the very least, it gives me a nice blog-entry topic. Actually I haven’t felt much like blogging, either producing free bloggy ice cream or reading anybody elses free bloggy ice cream. Some of the best have quit, pulled the plug, nothing more to say, and everyone – including me seems to have said it all before; much better, with more zest and with a great deal less laborious effort. It all seems terribly stale, flat, pointless, joyless.

The presidential contest 2008 promised to be unutterably depressing and pointless; Her Inevitableness versus The Fresh Prince of Illinois. Yuck. Bill Clinton. Double-Yuck. Nancy Pelosi. Triple-Yuck.

Even the discussion groups I participate in, the other members appear to be enervated and depressed. Days go by without any comments or new topics. I am winding up a project for the Independent Authors Guild, to collect up a number of books by our members to donate to the BAMC patients’ library. Since before Christmas, authors have been mailing books to my address so that I will be able to deliver one big box of them to the volunteer librarian. Getting boxes of books in the mail almost every day – what could be more exciting? But I haven’t been able to generate much interest in this outside of the contributors themselves… and the library may already have enough book donations anyway. Delivering yet another box of them to BAMC just feels like one more onerous chore.

I had a spike in sales from nice book review and instalanche around the first of the month, but nothing much since then. There are six or seven other copies of “To Truckee’s Trail” that I sent to people in September on promise of an eventual review, but no review produced to date. I’ve pretty much given up on following up. Just as a note, the cost of those review copies come out of my budget. No review means I might as well have made a nice bonfire and burnt them in the fireplace, except for this way I can claim the expense on my income tax.

Another cause for malaise – income-tax filing time. I know the deadline is April, but I like to beat the rush.

Received a rejection from a publisher on the first volume of the Texas-German trilogy, from a place that didn’t even have the courtesy to even send a letter saying no thanks. I don’t know why this annoyed me so much, but it did –having to hunt them down and ask seemed very much like waiting to hear the results of a medical test. You wait and wait and wait, never get a call… and then when you finally call and ask, they tell you “Sorry, you’re dying from the ingrown toenail. Have a nice day and best of luck.” This is why writers go mad, although I would swear a lot of them started out that way anyway.

The weather is dreary, it’s cold. I’m not making any money, from the book or much else, the dogs are doing their best to kill me on the morning walkies, and I don’t much want to do anything else than sit down and pound out another half-chapter for the last book of the trilogy. It’s a refuge in a way, just about the one thing that I can control. If great writing comes out of misery and depression – it’s going to be a pretty damn good read.

I’ve been lax in blogging the last couple of weeks – three reasons for this. One – slogging away at the epic known as Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms, for I have reached a Very Interesting Chapter, one that I had thought a lot about – so the narrative does not have to be yanked out of my consciousness, inch by reluctant inch, like pulling a large boa constrictor out of a tight-fitting drain. I have spent four or five chapters setting up all the characters in place on the literary chessboard, establishing motivations, dabbling on the foreshadowing and setting up the conditions for what happens now. It’s a lightening-fast raid by a Comanche war party, which results in death for two characters and the kidnapping of another characters’ children. I am not planning on being particularly politically correct in describing the aftermath of the raid. I imagine Mom’s English-professor friend who has been reading the story all along will be terribly freaked out by this development. There’s no getting around the fact that the Comanches treated adult captives with a brutality that can really only be described as psychotic.

Second reason: my various employers – Dave the Computer Guy, and The Worlds’ Tallest ADHD child have gotten their respective post-holiday business plans in order and for the past two or three weeks I have been working almost every day for one or the other. The Worlds’ Tallest finally got the last little scrap of his office organized. Heretofore, he had been in the habit of just scraping off the top of his desk whenever it reached an unbearable degree of clutter and dumping everything in a file box. When I first began working for him, more than a year ago, there were more than a dozen of such boxes piled up under the living room table… and naturally he would be in a tizzy because he could never find anything; a file, a post-it note reminder, a scribbled telephone number, last weeks farm and ranch property classifieds, a past-due bill from the utility company. You name it – he couldn’t find it. But over Christmas, he sorted out the last two boxes – mostly by throwing out the contents on the very fair assumption that if he hadn’t missed anything in them in a year, than there wasn’t much important therein. The file cabinets are purged, the desk-tops are clean, he found a whole case of copy paper buried in another closet, and I have almost trained him to put receipts into a manila envelope in the wire file-rack on my desk instead of leaving them crumpled up in the most unexpected places. So he is off to take pictures of various ranch properties, and on the morrow I will start making up nice little one-page write-ups for each. Which is what I was supposed to be doing, all along, but never mind.

Dave the Computer Guy is helping one of his friends launch a carpet-cleaning business, in addition to the computer-repair and website stuff, which he runs from his home. Yes, he is diversifying his vast corporate empire; and I am doing his market-mailing and general office support. He went all-out and set up a private office for me, in an attempt to untangle the office stuff from the computer-repair stuff and the carpet-cleaning stuff. They were formerly jumbled all together in the second bedroom of a double-wide in a trailer-park on O’Connor Road. Yes, I have achieved the dignity once more of a private office, but alas, no corner view – no window, for the office was formerly the walk-in closet. It has worked out rather well, actually – for it is just large enough to accommodate an L-shaped worktop, with shelves above and below, a single office chair and myself. The neat thing is that I can reach everything, just by scooting the chair about six inches one way or the other.

Third reason: Not much interested in the spectacle of Her Inevitableness and the Fresh Prince of Illinois slugging it out, other than relishing the irony. It’s gonna be a long political season, and I’d like to pace myself.

Oh, so it looks like the ever beloved New York Times has nobly volunteered itself to be the Piniata o’the Month for unleashing yet again – in the words of Maxwell Smart “the old Krazed Killer Veteran Story”. You know, the same old, same old pathetic round of stories that those of us over a certain age saw in the 1970s – and not just in the news but on every damn cop show; the freak who got a taste for killin’ and brought it home with him after the war. Honest to key-rist, NYTimes-people – what is your assignments editor these days smoking these days? I am a little late to joining the predictable pile-on from every quarter, which looks like it includes just about everyone short of the VFW.

At least it’s nice to know legacy media drones can do a google search these days and assemble a laundry list of whatever it was they were looking for in the intertubules. A step up from a couple of years ago, all things considered. But… and that is a big but there, almost as big as a Michael Moore butt…it is just that – a laundry list of incidents where someone who was a military veteran of a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq was subsequently involved in or thought to be involved in a murder. Or manslaughter, or something.

No context, no analysis – just OMFG, the Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming (and it’s all the military’s fault!) Look, NYTimes-people, coincidence is not co-f**king causality. Sometimes, it is just a co-incidence, and laying on a smarmy layer of sympathy and glycerin tears over the poor *sniff* innocent *sniff* widdle misdiagnosed *sob* veterans does not make your s**t-sandwich of a story any more palatable. Not to veterans and their families.

Not only can we remember this kind of story post-Vietnam, but the very senior among us can remember it post-WWII. I am reliably informed that there was even a certain amount of heartburn over an anticipated propensity for free-lance violence on the part of returning veterans from the Civil War – and no, I will be not sidetracked into a discussion of how the still-expanding western frontier managed to provide an outlet for all of those Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs seeking post-war excitement.

My point would be that when this same-old-same-old went down post-hostilities every other damn time, the experience of military service was a bit more evenly spread among the general male population. The general reader had enough friends and relations in his immediate circle to take the whole Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming narrative with a large handful of salt. They knew enough veterans personally to not take what they read in the papers as necessarily the whole truth, and to put the sensational stories of post-war veteran crime into context. And they could blow them off as just another grab at the headlines.

But service in the military these days draws on a smaller sub-set of the population – and unfortunately that set does not include the media or cultural elite. Tripe like the NYT’s Krazed Killer Veteran – if it is not challenged and countered robustly- will soon solidify into conventional wisdom, just like it did with Vietnam veterans. And that, my little scribbling chickadees at the NY Times – is not going to happen again. Welcome to attitude adjustment, Times-folks. I can promise a real interesting and educational time for you over the next couple of days. Take notes. They will come in handy, especially for the next time you are assigned a story about military veterans.

Later: (Update from Iowahawk, too delicious to leave unlinked. Beware, NYTimes- this one is gonna leave a mark!)

Still later: And so will this blast from Col. Peters. My advice to the NYTimes writers is to load up on Midol, as well as taking notes.

I suppose it is only one of those vast cosmic coincidences that mil-blogger Andrew Olmstead would be killed in an ambush in Iraq at about the same time that George Macdonald Fraser died of cancer in his 80s. On the surface they would seem to have had nothing much in common at all – save for being writers and having similar terminating dates on their memorials. Different ages, nationalities, different professional experience and all that… but one similarity – they both were soldiers and wrote about their experiences in uniform in a way that people who weren’t military could connect to and begin to understand something about what motivates men (and women, too) to take up a lonely position on the walls.

It’s one of those elemental and primal things, I suspect – almost the first obligation of a citizen to a community is to take up arms and defend it. Most Americans, or Brits or western Europeans have lived so long in relative safety that most people feel this duty can be farmed out to specialists; no need to serve in the same way as all adult male citizens of ancient Athens served as their cities army, or the Colonial militias, or rangers on the Texas frontier needed to defend their own isolated communities. The downside to this specialization is that most citizens – most especially our political and intellectual elite have little to do with the military, or that part of their community from which the serving military is drawn. Andrew Olmstead and other military bloggers have tried over the last five years with some success to bridge this experience gap, to convey to people half a world away what it is like at the point of the spear in this war.

G.M. Fraser is most famed as the creator of Flashman, the Victorian era rogue-hero, who managed to participate in just about every important 19th century event and meet up with every prominent personality of the time – usually unwillingly and glimpsed over a shoulder as he fled with great speed, buttoning up his trousers. His memoir of his own time as a soldier in WWII. Quartered Safe out Here or the adventures of his alter-ego Lieutenant Dand O’Neill in the post-war British Army as related in the McAuslan Trilogy, is a little less known than the flamboyant and fictional Flashman but very well worth reading. The O’Neill-McAuslan stories especially are a peep into the world of a military that if you take away the superficial trappings, the specific-era technology and the very specific slang… is timeless as it is familiar.

I kind of picture Fraser and Olmstead, sitting quietly together with a bottle of especially fine Scotch in some otherworld officers’ club, swapping stories and memories and eventually getting quite merry. For they had quite a lot in common, and one of them – to judge on what they wrote about being soldiers would have been agreement with this sentiment;

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the gate:
‘To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods,

Thomas Babington Macauley – Lays of Ancient Rome

So, we went to the radio station’s annual staff Christmas party last night; generously catered with comestibles supplied by some of San Antonio’s finest. There were also, as Blondie described it, a fine assortment of tasty adult beverages, but no – this is public radio, so the drunken revelry was at a fairly well-controlled level. I bored the socks off a couple of hapless spouses by telling them more than they possibly ever wanted to know about Republic-era Texas and the entrepreneurial scheme and the perils of POD publishing and book-marketing. Blondie renewed acquaintance with that handful of staff members who recalled her as a high-school student volunteer working in the phone room during pledge drives.

The nearest we all came to a riotously party-hearty atmosphere was during the gift exchange, which was the white-elephant gift “Bad Santa” exchange. Everyone brought something of small value and occasionally dubious taste, suitably gift-wrapped. At the height of the evening revels, we each took a turn and drew a gift from the pile. The hope is that you go home with something a little more desirable, or at least, not as hideous and/or useless as what you brought, but this is a chancy preposition.

The rules of Bad Santa are open to negotiation, but the general custom is that someone drawing a gift can exchange it, unopened, for something that someone already has opened. Sometimes there is a limit on how often a desirable gift can bounce from person to person – and there are occasionally rather desirable items salted in among the white-elephants, which can make for a very lively exchange. At one unit I belonged to which did this, a set of lottery tickets, and a pair of hearts and teddy-bear printed boxer shorts proved to be in demand… whereas an awful plant container of hand-painted cast plaster in the shape of a tree stump with a squirrel on it had been around the Christmas exchange block for five or six years in a row. The unlucky soul who got stuck with it, returned it for subsequent Bad Santa exchanges; for all I know, it may still be in circulation, unless someone struck a blow for good taste in decorating and smashed it into little tiny bits..

The most popular items last night was a game of Texas Monopoly, a pair of Lord of the Rings bookends and a universal remote in the shape of a calculator the size of a roofing shingle – yes sir, try and misplace that puppy sometime. Least popular? I’d guess that was the 2005 road atlas. Well, the rules do say ‘white elephant’… I lost two boxes of gourmet dog treats and came home with a metal bowl trimmed with antlered deer heads. Not the least sure what I will do with it, although it might make a jazzy pet dish for Weevil or Spike.

Blondie and I are heading out to California tomorrow to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad and the rest of the family. We’re taking Blondie’s laptop, but Mom and Dad are not anywhere near being in tune with the internet age. I may be able to check in from a wifi spot alleged to be located in the public library in Valley Center… or I may not. Have a Merry Christmas, happy New Year and all that. We’ll be back after New Years, at the Same Old, Same Old.

(In the meantime, could someone occasionally approve comments and empty out the spam queue? Thanks – Sgt Mom)

A few items of note to report

A bit of progress in the first draft of Vol.3 “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms” – well into chapter 4 of the final volume. A test reading by my skilled and perceptive first-line editors (ok, Mom and Dad) provides positive feedback and a high interest in a new cast of characters. I am setting up a positively soap-opera-esque level of drama here, and yes, I will be careful not to turn the sister-in-law aka the Southern Belle from Hell into a caricature… although she is a walk-on, and at full strength these ladies tend to seem terribly over-the-top to us repressed Anglo-Yankees anyway. Mom and Dad give high props to the introduction of new leading characters, BTW. Since this is by way of becoming a family saga, and covers about half a century of eventful Texas history, this was necessary… a hero of a wild, wild western creaking around on a zimmer-frame just does not work for me. There may be writers of genre fiction this would work for, but not me and not this genre.

I’m tinkering a little with the first volume, and meditating upon revisions to the second volume; I’d like to finish the whole thing before going out and fishing for publishers again – just in case I am struck by a wildly creative notion about two chapters from the absolute end, and need to go back and set up the preconditions.

Blondie and I finished Christmas shopping last weekend – er, rather we emptied out the closet where we chuck the items as we buy them here or there throughout the year, take an inventory and figure out what few little items we need to put on the glorious display of generosity to our nearest and dearest that custom requires of us.

Never mind that most of our gleanings were bought on sale, from yard sales or are items for D-I-Y gift basket assortments needing assembly and the lot is currently spread out over the dining area table along with rolls of Christmas paper and a bundle of bags and Christmas tissue paper picked up on sale after Christmas last year. Note to our nearest and dearest – the book-writing thing is not paying off that well yet although I do have hopes. “To Truckee’s Trail” is available at Amazons’ Kindle reader store. Can’t figure out how come the cover pic isn’t posted, and given their customer service degree of friendly helpfulness I am afraid to ask why.

The Fat Guy did a lovely review here; so did Juliet Waldron for this month’s issue of the Independent Authors Guild newsletter (scroll down, it’s on the third page), and Jaime at FictionScribe posted a long interview on how I came to write it. Might I suggest that it would make a lovely Christmas present for anyone who likes a good old-fashioned read?

I’d work up some bile for Franklin Foer’s belated and protracted apologies for the Private Beauchamp/Baghdad Diaries debacle, but I have to be in a sour mood to do it proper justice.

As for Legacy Media/The End of/As We Know It, I’ll note that a sales rep from the local newspaper called last night, offering a special home delivery deal; the Sunday paper for $2.00 and the rest of the week at no additional charge. I love the smell of economic desperation in the morning. Or whenever.

Sorry to have been a bit chintzy with the free bloggy ice cream over the last couple of days; I was wrestling with the many-limbed monster that is technology – or at least that aspect of it involved in doing a version of “To Truckee’s Trail” for Amazon’s “Kindle” reader. It turned out that the PDF version that I have, which is the final print version was incompatible with what Amazon has established for their system.

Which was a bit of a facer, because it uploaded and converted and looked – if not perfectly OK, at least fairly OK – but some of the other information I had to load – about which I would never in the world goof up (you know, like my SSAN?) were kicked back as invalid. What the hey? Email to Amazon customer service, expressing bafflement and considerable annoyance. Received an email back, with an option for a phone call to a customer service rep, which was totally surprising. I mean – there’s an option for speaking to a real hoo-man at Amazon?

Well, there was, but the first person I talked to sounded like a cousin of Special Ed, who handed me on to a technician who was about as helpful as one of those terrifyingly crusty old senior technicians, back when I was not Sgt. Mom, but merely Baby Airman… with a completely baffling problem.

You remember – the exchange with the crusty old technician with enough stripes on his arm for a zebra farm, which went roughly like this:

Baby Airman: Umm… can you tell me how to perform this insurmountably complicated and obscure task about which I have not the slightest clue?

Crusty Old Senior Technician: It’s in the manual. (Which is, let me add, about the size of the LA phone book, and printed in eeensy weensy type)

Baby Airman: (quavering slightly) Yes, but I…

Crusty Old Senior Technician: (growling contemptuously) Didn’t you read the manual?

B.A.: Yes, but…

C.O.S.T: Well then, what are you asking me for? Go and read it again!

B.A.: (creeping away in silent despair, racking brains in a futile attempt to figure out task)

So the Crusty Old Senior Technician – Amazon version basically told me the file format was all wrong, contemptuously forwarded a page with a lot of links to discussion forums – none of which really addressed my problem, since I wasn’t really sure what it was, exactly, and I wound doing just as what usually happened back then: some slightly more knowledgeable tech whispering “Pssst! Try this!” and handing me a short and well-thumbed little cheat sheet which told me exactly what I had to know to perform that formerly insurmountably complicated and obscure task.

In this case, it was one of the other Independent Authors’ Guild writers who said, “Oh, just convert it from PDF to Word and upload it again.”

So, within another ten hours, assuming something else hasn’t thrown a spanner into the works ( translation: a monkey wrench into the gears) “To Truckee’s Trail” will be available for purchase by those who are keen on the latest hot technological gadget! Enjoy! And thanks to those of you who have purchased paperback copies in the last couple of months!

So Philippa Gregory still has nothing to fear in sales competition from me as the author of “To Truckee’s Trail”, as I have to sell another one million, nine-hundred thousand plus copies before I can even think of buying that tastefully renovated castle in J.K.Rowlings’ neighborhood. I can’t make out from either Amazon’s stats or Booklockers’ how many – if any copies have sold in the last couple of months, because the book distributor Ingram has a four-month lead anyway. And individual POD books like mine are so expensive, relatively speaking, to print when they are done in runs of fifteen or twenty, rather than fifteen or twenty hundred thousand copies at a whack – that bookstores usually can’t get them at a 40% discount… which is a whole nother ball of wax, and the reason that the big-box-bookstores are an un-crackable nut for us independent authors. Thank god for the small local bookstores: I have a book-signing event planned tentatively at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg in December, and another one January 16th at The Twig in Alamo Heights. And my Number One fan, Mom, might be able to twist the arms of her literary friends in Escondido and Valley Center, and schedule something for me over Christmas week. Discouragingly, it still takes months to get reviews, though. Apparently not everyone can read a book as fast as I can.

Still, at least independent authors can get published now – they can get their books out there without having to pass through the gates of the literary industrial complex. There are other options than paying a bomb of money to a printer and stashing crates of copies in their garage. There is another way to find an audience, as independent musicians and independent movie-makers have already discovered. I have gotten together with a handful of other writers to brain storm some marketing strategies; all of us are either small-press or POD and totally exasperated with the current paradigm. There must be a better way for our books to reach interested readers. Without very much more ado, we formed the Independent Authors Guild, put up a website and a discussion group, published a newsletter (which will be a monthly) and began recruiting more members. So far we’re still working out future moves, and putting in sweat equity rather than a lot of cash. Check out the website… my work! (Not the logo, though – someone else did that, and it’s a book, not a pair of panties!)

Oh, and I scored a stack of books for reviews that I have to read and then write about. I promise I will post some more of that good bloggy ice cream here.

And I am four chapters in to the final volume of the “Adelsverein” trilogy - or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”, and need to do some very specific research on 1) how to harness a team of draft horses to a wagon, and what driving them involved -diagrams would help enormously and 2) 19th century prothesis available for a below-elbow arm amputation. Does the BAMC medical museum have a collection, I wonder?