Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

This was something we actually managed to do for a whole 24 hours straight, more or less, although I swear – next time that we do it, the two small doggies are going straight the Rob Cary Pet Resort for the duration. I had an invitation to do another book club meeting in Fredericksburg – this one extended by Karen V. whose old Houston book club had read the Trilogy and come to Fredericksburg for the fun, the gemutlichkeit, and the wiener schnitzel. Karen had us and all of her visiting friends parceled out among hers and other guest-houses, and a nice conference room at the school district offices for the meeting itself – and a nice sized audience, as well. Blondie and I lugged in two heavy tubs of books, and the little Paypal credit-card processing gadget which attaches to her cellphone, so that we could take payments in all forms …

 And then I answered questions for nearly and hour and forty minutes – the books and how I came to write them, if I had found out anything about certain specific people and organizations, why the Adelsverein fell flat on their collective princely faces … all that and more. Which is strangely exhausting to do, standing in front of an audience and keeping engaged; I had to pull up a chair and sit down for the last twenty minutes or so … since I have finally managed to put on the jazzy vintage and unworn Ariat boots that I bought at my daughter’s very favorite charity gift shop a couple of months ago. (I had to have her help in pulling them off, at the end of the evening, though.) Afterwards – sell a few books with Blondie’s neat little gadget which lets us run credit and debit cards attached to her cellphone. She processed the sales, I signed the books and talked some more … and then it was off to Friedhelm’s Bavarian Inn Restaurant which seems to specialize in wiener-schnitzel in a great many forms and additions, include one which Blondie ordered – a cheese schnitzel, thinking that it would be breaded and fried cheese, but was actually the usual pork cutlet, pounded, breaded and fried – but with a generous topping of melted cheese.

Altogether a lovely, sparking evening with Karen and her friends – all ladies of a certain age, some of them her former co-workers in the school district in Houston, some of whom had traveled far, but none being military veterans. I enjoyed it so much – really, I ought to get out more. But we called it a night and headed back to her house and the little guest-house about nine o’clock. Time was when we first began coming to Fredericksburg, the entire town rolled up the sidewalks at 5 PM sharp, save for a handful of restaurants. Now there are a good few more restaurants open, Main Street is lively and lit, with people still walking up and down – but all the strictly retail establishments still fold up relatively early in the evening. There was a movie theater, Karen told us – she being used to a livelier evening scene in Houston – but the local scandal is that the owner or manager skipped with his inamorata and all the takings, so the theater is closed and under renovation to be a kind of local small-scale Alamo Drafthouse, with dinner, drinks and a movie all at once … which has the virtue of efficiency, always one of those Germanic things. We all gathered in the morning at Karen’s for a Sunday morning breakfast and another one of those sparkling good times. Yes, I really ought to get out more. And to get her recipe for cinnamon bread strata with bourbon sauce …

Back home, to a houseful of rather worried but relieved animals, and a dinner of sliced brisket from the Riverside Meat Market in Boerne. We have another weekend to work on stuff – and then we will be tied up for two days running at the Boerne Market Days, where Blondie will launch her Paper Blossom Productions origami art, and I will have a table of my books … and, curiously enough, a bag of doll costumes left over from doing a Christmas Bazaar at the Zaragoza O’club a good few years ago. I guess I can say that the doll costumes are even more vintage as my boots. And that was my weekend …

The sale of the real estate in California went through – with a momentary hiccup now and again. The buyer was eager to take possession, I was ready to let it go, as I had so much of my personal wealth tied up in it and too little time, means, interest,  or inclination to do anything useful with it. So, ave, California, howdy, Texas! I’ve broken more or less even on the sale, which may be a rare and fortunate occurrence these days. I have spent some of the sale money on a new HVAC system in my current house, which was rather badly needed. The local company came and installed it all in one long sustained blitz of a job, which had four of their trucks parked on the street and in my driveway. They got it all done – the rusty and tattered remains of the old units torn out, and the new installed and hooked up and blissfully functioning in the course of one long day, from about 9:00 AM to wrapping up at 6:30 PM. When it was all done, I think we were nearly as tired as the install crew.  But we have been reveling in the improved condition inside the house ever since. It is alas, still in the high eighties and low nineties at the hottest time of the day here in South Texas. With luck, we should get a whopping big credit from CPS on the electric bill, too.

I was working away all this week on the final stretch of The Quivera Trail, hiding from all the HVAC disruption in my office/room on the day that the HVAC crew was here. A number of edits to be incorporated, a good few searches of certain words to ensure that I was not over-using certain of them, another couple of searches to make sure of consistency in personal and place names, and some other stuff only of interest to other writers and editors … that’s the trouble with writing something over the space of a eighteen months or more. One looses track of minor character’s names, and place names which appear only rarely. If consistency is the hobgoblin of tiny minds, it is also the pet hobgoblin of writers and editors. I added a couple of book references to the notes, enlarged on the backgrounds of a couple characters based on or in part on real people. Quivera Trail is on track to be available in early November and officially rolled out at Weinachsmarkt in New Braunfels – and if my daughter’s car does not need extensive work in the next few days, we may be able to get a table at the Cowboy Market in New Braunfels in that same month.

It’s been one of those weeks – very little time to work on the book stuff, what with the press of work, a couple of emergencies to do with the prospective work to be done on my house, necessary work for the Tiny Publishing Bidness, involving editing, designing a book layout, and in hand-holding various clients. I still work for a living, one way and another – it’s just the work that I do, I have freely chosen to do, on my own schedule, which in the long run, makes a lot of difference. And we just gained another client who would like one of our higher-end, quality products, which is all to my business partner’s liking, as we shall make a very tidy profit from it … as well as kick-starting our appeal to those who like and can afford our high-end editions. And I have a thick packet of papers to sign and have notarized, with regard to the sale of that land in California, which I finally had a solid purchaser for, after three long years of being on the market.

I sent off the semi-monthly newsletter, opened pre-orders for The Quivera Trail, fiddled a bit on various websites that I am a contributor to, went to Seguin last Saturday for a funeral,  downtown on Monday to take some pictures of an art show on the Riverwalk and Friday, I had a trip to one of the more interesting industrial areas on the fringe of downtown – which no one would ever find unless they were hopelessly and irretrievably lost off the IH-10 … look, it’s an unmistakable indicator that when you are in a place where all the ground-floor windows in the neighborhood have barred windows, and there is concertina wire threaded across the top of a 6-7ft tall chain-link fence around any lot containing anything of value – that you are in a slightly sketchy neighborhood. Just saying – it is OK in broad daylight, but not a place you want to be fumbling around in after sunset or before sunrise … not without your good friend Mr. Colt, or Mr. Smith-Wesson, or Mr. Beretta, anyway.

But on the upside, I think that I have found the next ready-to-be-gentrified old neighborhood in San Antonio … that stretch of Blanco, south of Hildebrand. It’s adjacent to several a very nice old neighborhoods – Woodlawn and Monticello – but obviously still affordable and full of nice old decrepit but repairable houses. A few of them along Blanco are already under repair, amid a a scattering of determinedly upscale restaurants and businesses, before trailing off into the semi-industrial wilds closer to downtown.

And this very week, I was invited to another book club meeting in Fredericksburg, late in October when we can count on the weather having cooled down a bit. This meeting may also may also involve a walking trip around town to the various sights where scenes in the Adelsverein Trilogy were set, and an overnight stay in a guest house. The book club members are all coming from Houston, so they might as well get something extra special for their long trip.

And finally – the project – which began as kind of a joke, regarding rebooting the Lone Ranger story as a straight-up historical adventure (after carefully filing off all the superficially identifying serial numbers) turns out to be strangely appealing. Especially if I made it more or less G-rated and aimed to appeal to boys; the suggestion of my daughter, who has noticed that in today’s bookstores, boys tend to be rather underserved when it comes to teen and tween adventure novels. I’ve already been able to work out half a chapter … so there will be that to look forward to.