This weekend is a pause in the mad waltz of the writers’ life marathon; between the kerfuffle-du-jour of Pvt. Beauchamp, the milblogs’ rebel without a clue, and me spending a couple of days at an assortment part-time jobs… and next week when proofs of The Book will be finalized, and I have to start marketing it. Yes!!! It’s nearly here, “To Truckee’s Trail”! Any day now… please buy a copy, when I post the link to Booklocker’s catalogue! I need to buy the software to update my literary website, a decent new printer to generate my own marketing material and letters, and to buy the advertising on websites where they just can’t afford to give it to me out of the goodness of their own hearts and appreciation for my talents as a fairly OK genre fiction writer!

My friend, Dave the Computer Genius has referred me to a handful of his clients who have need of admin-secretarial help a couple of times a week. They are most often small entrepreneurs and hobbyists, who maybe have taught themselves a little with the computer that they bought from Dave to use for their home business, don’t quite understand how to generate what they need and want out of it, and are willing to pay me to come and do it. Or for me to show them how to cut and paste in pictures, pretty up excel spread-sheets, enter useful contact data in their personal scheduling software, and to perform heavy-lifting… like do Google searches. Eh… it’s part-time, pays enough to make going to their workplaces (usually a home office) and leaves me the afternoons to write.

Yeah, writing… still have time to do that. By my calculations, I’m about halfway through “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees – and a Lot of Sidearms”. That is the epic about the German settlements in the Texas Hill Country. Right now, I am plunging into rather interesting territory, with an account of the storms of the Civil War, as they were weathered in Gillespie County. When I talked to my parents on Friday, I was reminded of how interesting, in the sense of the old Chinese saying, that completing this volume is likely to become. One of their circle who they let read all my manuscripts as they are written, is a retired professor of English. She’s a very experienced teacher and editor, and I particularly value her critical feedback. Mom let me know that she has just finished reading the first volume, and has made many, many notes… but that one was a long critique about settler-Indian relations, as I had written about them.

Which… since I am trying to write as accurately as I can about the Texas frontier, circa 1845-1885 means that the opinions and beliefs of the characters that I am writing about are not particularly socially correct by today’s lights. I will not commit the literary sin of “presentism”; that is, putting the attitudes and opinions of a late 20th century person into a 19th century character and either imputing that this person is very brave and non-conformist to be so advanced, or implying that 19th century people were just like us but dressed up in funny costumes and with horses instead of automobiles. Most 19th century Texans hated and feared the Indians; it’s an anachronism to pretend otherwise. There were curious exceptions to this, and all sorts of interesting shadings. Sam Houston and Robert Neighbors were distinguished in their lifetimes for their friendships among various tribes, and for their effective consideration of Indian interests. Members of the Lipan Apache and Tonkawa bands fought alongside Jack Hays’ Ranger companies, and the German settlements negotiated and kept to a peace agreement with the Southern Comanches that was never broken, even though other Indian tribes eventually began raiding at will in the Hill Country. It’s all a great deal more nuanced than someone looking backwards from the late 20th century might give credit for… and I haven’t even gotten to slavery and racial relations, yet. About all I can promise to do is to clean up some of the intemperate language. Which puts me up to the same challenge as Robert Lewis Stephenson, of writing about obscenity-spouting people… without actually using obscenities.

That’s going to be fun, since I am running into all kinds of interesting people and situations, in my first quick pass through Civil War period memoirs and histories. Texas was on the far fringe of the Confederate South. According to one of my notes, the biggest slave owner in the state on the eve of the Civil War owned 300 slaves. The second and third biggest owned far fewer than that… which meant … Off on another track here, which will be reserved for another post.

Bottom line, I am having fun with this. Especially since I have always hated Gone With the Wind, and that romantic lost cause and noble Confederate cavalier crap.