Yes, I meant to write this up almost at once, but the event on Sunday afternoon took up all of my energy for the day – and on Monday I had other work to do, and by Tuesday I had a touch of the crud that seems to hit people who otherwise don’t go to crowded events in events and conference centers very often. So – there were a fair number of other others and venders whom we had seen before. My table was next to Allan Kimball, who lives in Wimberley and writes travel guides – Texas Redneck Road Trips is one — and a series of historical fiction novels. I don’t think that we sold all that many copies of our books between us, but the conversations with Mr. Kimball and other authors were interesting. If the event was not all that great from a sales point of view, the networking might prove interesting in the long run. We both agreed enthusiastically that the awful miniseries Texas Rising which was inflicted upon the poor, long-suffering audience last month was a perfect horror, beginning with the location shooting, the costuming, and the flagrant abuse of historical fact. No, the Alamo does not and never did have a crypt. Even Pee Wee Herman knows that. (I would have done a full review of that turkey, but I only had stamina to watch more than the first episode, and Mr. Kimball thought even that was too generous – he bailed after the first fifteen minutes.)
The venue was a former large retail space in the Wonderland of America Mall, at Fredericksburg and 410 – which was nice in one way, being indoors, and in a retail location anyway. But perhaps a Saturday might have been better. Malls are not quite the going thing any more; of two of the half-dozen big ones in San Antonio, one has been repurposed by Rackspace, and the other torn down and replaced by free-standing shops. Another near us has been staggering on for years, as a half-empty retail zombie … you’d think that since open air destination shopping centers seem to be doing very well, thank you, that malls ought to be as well, but not so. No idea why, save that perhaps the rent is too high for all but well-established chains, or high-end merchandise. Wonderland has gotten around that by renting to doctor’s offices and schools of this and that on the lower floor, and having a super-Target and a Burlington Coat Factory outlet on the upper level, but still … there was a miasma of mall glories past, lurking about. That, and dust or mold in the AC vents, which gave me stuffy sinuses the next day. And that’s the way it was, last Sunday in the Alamo City.
We did have fun at the Patrick Heath Public Library in Boerne last Saturday – although, alas, I don’t think we sold many books, those of us who were in the community room. The new library building is altogether splendid, and with a lovely landscaped area in back and to one side, and with a large open space in front that may eventually become a sort of overflow adjuct to historic Town Square. If we had been in the old library building, which was in one of the old buildings edging Town Square, we might have had more foot-traffic from Boerne’s Market Days … but then there wasn’t room for anything like that in the old building, and as the saying goes, if my aunt had balls she’d be my uncle. But still – I was at a table across from Jeff Morgenthaler, who does local history non-fic, and whom I have known about for years: the owners at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg now and again ventured that they would love to host a joint event for the two of us, as he did in non-fic what I did as a ripping good yarn in the Adelsverein Trilogy. The book of his which I always recommend to readers is The German Settlement of the Texas Hill Country, for a good and readable overview – of exactly what the title says – and an encyclopedic bibliography, for those who want more, more, more.
Next table to us was Jack Lyndon Thomas – a Vietnam veteran with several novels focusing on that war – among them one with the intriguing title The Monsoon Killed the Tiger. He hit it off with my daughter, both being veterans of wars four decades apart. 
Really, though – I think the biggest hit of the whole book event was a kid’s book author, Tina Mollie Fisher – her book is called Pig’s Big Adventure … and she brought a tiny, very young piglet as part of her table … well, table and enclosure display. The piglet’s name was Princess, but I wouldn’t have been able to resist naming it Bacobit, or Wilburina. I can see why people get them as pets, and then are totally appalled when they grow to three hundred pounds or so. And that was my Saturday ….
We will do it all again next year – it’s only about the second time for this book event, and sometimes these things take a while for word to get around. Even without a pig ….
The arrival of Santa, with a spare mount. It’s a long way from the North Pole, you see.
Another weekend, it must be another book event. And so it was last Saturday, so it will be this coming weekend. Last Saturday it was Christmas on the Square in Goliad, a place which I hold in affection – because it is a pleasant small town, full of nice people who all know each other and are connected by one to three degrees, has some claim to historicity, but is otherwise relatively unspoiled by excessive tourism and what my daughter calls the YA contingent. Which doesn’t stand for Young Adult, but ‘Yuppie *sshole’ – that variety of well-to-do and socially conscientious arriviste who roar into some unspoiled little country locale, en mass, and gentrify the heck out of it; the kind of people who love the country and farms and quaint friendliness, but who promptly turn it into upscale suburbia, can’t stand the smell of cows or the noise of agricultural pursuits at odd hours, and condescend to their neighbors as being hicks from the sticks. This also raises the prices of everything from property, rents, and everything else from a sandwich and cuppa coffee on up. Given the chance, I would take up a place in a nice little Texas country town like Goliad, renovate a little house and live there quite happily – but I would keep very, very quiet afterwards. I don’t think I am a snob or even a reverse-snob, particularly – but I always liked the remote little suburb that I grew up in precisely for the lack of pretense and the low-key, working-class friendliness.
The weather was wonderful on Saturday, there were enough vendors to make a double-line of booths along one side of the square, my daughter was persuaded not to bring home any of the cats on display from the local animal shelter, and gratifying number of shoppers and fans fell upon my books – especially Lone Star Sons – with cries of happy joy.
Anyway – what brought that these musings about class and neighborliness? Fondness for Goliad, the fact that they have laid out the streets in the old part of town to bypass certain huge old oak trees, some say they never lock their doors at night, and that semi-rural begins very close – within a block or so to the Courthouse square in some directions – and that the authors at the event fell into two distinct groups, and another author and me. As a repeat author to Miss Ruby’s Book Corral, I readily recognized them, although some were new to me. The first group were academics – they occupy a perch at the local branch of UT, or A & M, or one of the community colleges, and they all had books out which touched on local history in someway or another – at least two of which I was tempted to buy because … I need more microscopically local references because that’s where I get my best ideas! (Blondie talked me out of it … since … hey, I hardly have any more room on the bookshelves anyway.) One or two of them talked to me as we were setting up, or during the course of the day – but since I am cheerfully PhD-less (pronounced fid-less) and a dogged amateur historian, I barely count in the grand academic scheme of things. They clustered together, bought lunches and chattered amongst themselves: I’m not certain that they sold much, between them. This may have been more of a social occasion for them. The second group in the Author Corral were authors who were personalities in the local media – writers and columnists who already had a local following for their books. They were the ones that I mostly knew from other events; I know that they did a brisk business, especially the ladies with the cookbook, which seems to be enormously popular. The single other historical novelist and I shared a table, although my collection of nine separate books very much overwhelmed hers of two – and in hardback and paperback. I eventually sold her a copy of Lone Star Sons and The Quivera Trail purely because she was so intrigued overhearing me talk about them to people who came to my half of the table.
And that was that – for last week. This weekend, it’s Boerne, and on Saturday the market will continue until 7 PM. We have been told to bring a couple of strings of lights for the outside of the pavilion and some kind of spotlight for the inside. I think it will be actually rather lovely, at night – with the music and the lights and all. See you there, perhaps! We’re in the pink pavilion with the black-and-white-zebra-striped top.
Well, for us, it started with the fall market in Bulverde in October, and now it is ramping up to full steam ahead. The Christmas Market in New Braunfels is this weekend, then Thanksgiving (and blissfully, no market scheduled), then Goliad on the first Saturday, for Christmas on the Square, and a final arrival—puffing breathlessly—at the Boerne Market on the second Saturday. Then we can all sit down, count up the take and see if we have come out ahead. These are the events to launch Lone Star Sons, of course. I try and organize my writing and books so that there is a new one to take around to the Christmas market events.
So far so good; a nice round of sales at the Bulverde Craft Fair last weekend, not so much at the library sale at Harker Heights, and a fair amount in Bulverde at the fall market. The next three, being closer to Christmas, I have somewhat higher hopes for. And I have already bought my Christmas present to myself – a set of china for every-day use. After the Bulverde craft fair, we looked in on another sale – mostly of odd bits of ranch equipment, rusting machinery, moldering furniture, and unidentifiable oddments, all sitting out in a field. But there was some stuff arranged on tables underneath a canvas pavilion roof, which didn’t protect it much as the breeze was blowing intermittent rain-showers, and among them was a soggy cardboard carton half-full of china, with a stack of luncheon plates, bread-and-butter plates, saucers and eight tea-cups on the tabletop nearby. They were white, with a random and pretty blue-flower pattern; kind of European-peasant folk-art in appearance. It looked like someone had started to inventory the box and lost interest.
The New Everyday
This was the one thing I was interested in, as it looked like there was a full set of eight place settings, if the teacups were anything to go by. Once upon a time, I had bought six or eight of everything in the basic white-with-a-blue stripe restaurant china from Reading China and Glass, when they had a store in the outlet mall in San Marcos. Thinking that it was a well-established place, and would go on forever and ever-amen, I assumed that whenever anything broke, I could replace it readily, piece by piece. Alas, this was not how it turned out; the Reading China and Glass store closed, vanishing like the mists of dawn under the morning sun between one trip to San Marcos and the next. For a while, I was able to get the same thing through Williams & Sonoma, at approximately twice the price per piece, and then Williams & Sonoma stopped carrying the white and blue-striped bistro-style china. Meanwhile, my stock of everyday china dwindled gradually – a drop to the concrete floor here, a crack in the dishwasher there – and soon we reduced to a random assortment of survivors, augmented by a set of jewel-colored glass plates and bits and pieces that my daughter picked up at a yard sale.
Enough of random – I wanted a full set of pretty blue and white china for every day, and enough plates of various sizes so that I wouldn’t have to wash them incessantly. The stuff in the soggy box would do just fine. I asked for a price on the whole lot – it was from a good manufacturer of fine Japanese china – and got it, having sufficient in my Paypal account from recent sales to get it.
Of course, once we got home, and looked up the manufacturer and the pattern … we wondered if we shouldn’t have been wearing masks and brandishing menacing weapons, for I got the whole lot for only ten dollars more than a single dinner plate in that make and pattern sells for on the discontinued china pattern websites. But – random assortment out to the garage in a cardboard carton (what – I should be wasteful of perfectly good albeit random plates?!) and we’ve been eating off the new stuff ever since. Blondie says, “Good eye, Mom.”
Up in the wee hours for us – no sleeping in this Saturday! For I have a book event at the Harker Heights Library, tomorrow morning from 9 to 1 in the afternoon. The library is at 400 Indian Trail, Harker Heights, Texas … and at a stretch is about a two-hour-and-a-bit drive. There are other Texas authors promised to be there, and there will be a Friends of the Library book sale going in, in addition. Now, I don’t think the sale will be as totally massive as the yearly NEISD book sale in the NEISD indoor basketball court here in San Antonio … but books!
I’ll have copies of all of my books, including plenty of copies of Lone Star Sons … so, see you there!
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