The next installment of the Lone Star series is done – the further adventures of Texas Ranger James Reade and his blood-brother, Toby Shaw of the Delaware – Yes, it’s titled Lone Star Blood, and will be launched in print and ebook by the end of this month! Yay, me! Another item checked off my yearly to-do list! One of the short adventures was published last year in the anthology volume Tales Around the Supper Table Vol. Two! I intended it as a retelling and homage of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King, which at least two reviewers of the anthology considered to be a rip-off. No, it’s an homage – every excellent plot ought to be taken out for a romp in every geographical location where it might be made to fit! Anyway, my version of that adventure and four others will be available in print and ebook by the end of March, 2023.
The name of the town, incidentally, is pronounced “Bernie” – it’s one of the small Hill Country towns first established by the German settlers enthusiastically crowding into to Texas by the Adelsverein, and then by the failure of the various 1848 revolutionary movements. It’s rather more wealthy than most such, to judge from the number of very nose-bleedingly-high-end retailers lining Main Street. We hadn’t been up to the town in more than a year, when we visited just before Christmas to have a picture taken of Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson sitting with Santa, and in that time some things have changed – the gas station/meat market/BBQ place on the corner of Main and River Road closed, and the building demolished. It’s now an empty lot. The beautiful Victorian house on Pecan Street which my daughter loved with the intensity of a stalker has changed hands. The new owners apparently cleared away most of the garden and trees, and put up a fence around the yard. A good friend of ours used to manage the Squirrel’s Nest thrift shop, in an old building on Main which benefited a local animal charity, but the shop had to relocate to a less-well-trafficked location because the owner of the property wanted to expand the restaurant next door into that space. The Bear Moon Café seems to have closed their dining room inside their premises. All cause for sadness on our part.
But there were some positive developments, and one of them was discovering a new independent bookstore, at the back of a newish building on Main – a relatively tiny but comfortable place, of two rooms filled with an appealing and well-curated selection of books. The very best part is that they are ready, willing, and eager to stage author events – and so, when I had dropped off my card with the staff, when we discovered the Boerne Bookshop, I heard from them almost at once. We set a date for a Saturday in February – which was yesterday – and it all went very well. Very well, indeed – the Bookshop was frequented by lots of walk-in traffic over the two hours. Not a bit like the last time I did an author signing – sitting at a table in an almost-deserted bookstore, watching people try not to catch your eye. Perhaps I have gotten better at this kind of thing, or the elaborate Edwardian costume with hat and all makes a good ice-breaker for starting conversations. That, and in a small place like the Bookshop it might be considered rude to ignore someone sitting there, with a stack of books at hand. Anyway, enough copies of My Dear Cousin and Adelsverein; The Gathering sold, and I handed out enough of my business cards and flyers about my historical series to have made it worthwhile. I’ll definitely go there to launch the next installment of the historical series – That Fateful Lightning – when I buckle down and get it finished. My daughter noted that the cashier was ringing up sales on a regular basis – including her’s – as she had found four books that she simply had to have, unlike the last two or three times she wandered through a Barnes & Noble outlet; which now seem to be novelty stores, selling toys, magazines and stationary … oh, and a few shelves of books in the back.
It’s a mixed bag for indy authors, dealing with bookstores, large and small, independent bookstore and chains alike. We often lamented this, in the various indy author groups that I have been a part of, over the years. Barnes & Noble were generally hostile, with a few individual exceptions, if they had a manager or an event coordinator who could think outside the box. The local Borders outlets were magnificent to local indy authors; one location here in San Antonio even held a mass indy-author event at Christmas; alas, they went under. Hastings outlets were also nice about hosting author signings, although their focus wasn’t really books, but media generally. It was just very pleasant to have an event at a welcoming store, where there were enough interested people among customers and staff, and I didn’t feel that I had wasted my time for two hours. It’s often said among other indy authors that writing the book itself is just half the job – and the other half is marketing it. It’s also been said often enough that the national chains of big box bookstores like Barnes & Noble drive the small independent bookstores out of business entirely – but looking at independents like the Boerne Bookstore and others like them, who are holding on by getting and staying involved with local readers and writers – the independent little book stores may have the last laugh after all.
At only five weeks into 2023, it does look as if I am closing in on some of the goals outlined in my end-of-year wrap-up. As for the books in progress, there is only one more story to round out Lone Star Blood. I looked over the four completed, and they strike me as rather grimmer than some of the previous stories in Lone Star Sons and Lone Star Glory – but then, on looking again at those two volumes; eh, they deal with personal treachery, several murders, suicide, political treachery … and escaping to another life, so maybe not all that grim.
That Fateful Lightening still remains half-finished, while I do that last short adventure for Blood.
But as for the household goals, one is done and dusted – the dryer vent. Yes, finally got that one done, although it wound up costing about four times what I thought that it would. Still – the amount of lint scraped out of the vent was enough to line every bird nest for at least half a mile around, and now the dryer completely dries a load in one brief cycle, unless it is one of the heavy cotton blankets which always took forever, anyway. I definitely know that the dryer vent was never cleaned during the time that I owned this house – save for efforts by my daughter and myself with a vacuum-cleaner attachment to suck out lint from the inside of the house. It may not even have been done by the original owners. The tech hired – and who did the job for about four times as much as I was expecting to pay, as none of the other local companies never did me the courtesy of responding to my requests for bid – said that the cap of the vent was firmly nailed into place and looked to him like it had never been shifted at all. Yeah, my mind boggled, at that point. But now that the job is done – we are happy with it. So now the house won’t catch on fire through the accumulation of heated lint in the chimney-vent, which is always a plus.
The second goal is construction of the short fence and gate to make a little private patio and play space in the paved area by the front bedroom – a room that when I had the windows replaced, I asked for and had installed a French door, instead of a double window. The contractor/handy guy/crew came on Friday morning to start work – it’s just a short run of fence, all of 12 feet, but with the gate – it complicates the project a bit, necessitating four postholes, two at either end and two on either side of the planned gate. And the construction crew, which is run by the husband of another realtor who is my daughter’s good buddy at the brokerage – dropped off one single worker to dig the four holes, before heading off to another job. So that one late teenaged worker went to work with a posthole digger and shovel and managed to drill down into the rock-hard caliche layer – which lies about a foot down, after a layer of solid, brick-like-when-dry adobe clay. He finished gouging the required four yard-deep holes after lunchtime, and then sat with his cellphone in the little patio … and then and then …
We messaged the handy-crew boss; Hey, your guy is still here. Gonna come and finish the job or at least collect him?
Reply – yeah, this is what they do. They get paid for the day, if they finish early, they get to slack off.
Us – OK.
But it was getting cold – it really was. And it was getting later and later.
Ok, surely the crew is gonna finish whatever job they are working on at five … six … and the minutes ticked by, and their worker is still there, sitting on the bench in what will be the small patio, absorbed in his cellphone. And it’s getting colder and colder, supposed to get down to near freezing in the wee hours … my daughter finally came out and told him to come inside. His grasp of English turned out to be nearly non-existent, but my daughter found some translation programs, and was in touch with the manager of the firm, did manage to discover that the work crew were coming back from another job, some distance from the city. And this was Friday at rush hour…
I should point out that we didn’t have any apprehensions of doing this; he was barely teenaged, had no visible tats and was wearing paint-splattered clothing, and we have a large and very protective dog as well as divers other means of personal protection. So – we wound up giving the kid supper – since we were both starving anyway and it would be horrendously bad-mannered to eat in front of him and not offer a plate. If the crew hadn’t shown up, I think we might have just given him a blanket and let him sleep on the couch but they did show up to collect him, eventually.
They are supposed to return on Monday to finish the job. Pictures to follow of the completed patio project.
Although ruckus is perhaps too mild a term for the flaming dumpster fire, train wreck or thirty-car pile-up on the interstate, for the public relations disaster that has been called down upon the Windsor family by the present king’s younger son. One isn’t so much drawn to look, in horror – just that one can’t look away from the international spectacle of a man napalming relationships with his own family, all egged on by his wife and the news/entertainment media.
I can’t help knowing what I do know about the British royal family, and the Kardashians, too, as I am a regular reader of the Daily Mail. Curiously, both the British royals and the Kardashians are an obsession of that publication, and it’s a slow week where there aren’t half a dozen stories concerning either. To be fair, I would guess that most of the royals are a bit better grounded, more obedient to duty, and all-around pleasanter people than the Kardashian clan. I really don’t know any of them, in the accepted sense – all I do know, like Will Rogers, is what I read in the papers. But the royals figured a lot in the news, over the last twenty or forty years – what with Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee, the assorted family weddings, divorces, scandals, nostalgic looks backward at the abdication of Edward, the wartime conduct of Queen Elizabeth’s parents, her own coronation, and her recent passing … well, one picks up a lot of trivial knowledge by osmosis.
One of those things is the realization that it’s a burden enough to be born into a family such as the Windsors, and as for the individuals who willingly and for love marry into it? It’s not a fairy tale; it’s more like an indeterminant sentence of glittering privilege and hard labor, into which those volunteers must go with open eyes and a willingness to fit into that life and give up just about every shred of privacy as the rest of us know it. The late Queen Mother did so, apparently assuming at the onset that her husband as the second son would be allowed a relatively obscure and private life on the edge of the royal circle. (I have read in several different accounts that her resentment of Edward VIII was unrelenting, as she was convinced that the responsibility of the office her husband was thrown into, willy-nilly, contributed to shortening his life.) As queen consort and later dowager, she never put a foot wrong. Catherine Middleton did the same; it would seem that Prince William let her have a good long time to consider and consent to what she was letting herself in for. Camilla, the present queen consort was in two minds about the degree of commitment necessary to join the royal family firm; apparently, so did Prince Harry’s previous serious girlfriends, and who could blame them in the least/
Another of those realizations is the knowledge that their lives are terribly peculiar; privileged for certain – but always in the pitiless and unsparing eye of the public – always “on”, whenever in public, the cynosure of all attention. The lifelong burden of attention and responsibility must be a terrible weight; only the strongest and most dedicated are likely able to hold up under the strain without cracking. That the late Queen and her husband held up under it for decades argues for the strength of their own characters, and the steadfast support and affection of a close family circle and those long-time members of their private circle – those few with whom they can relax, let their hair down, metaphorically, and trust to share confidences with – confidences and feelings which will not immediately be blared to the public at large. A close-knit and close-mouth family circle must be a large part of that support system. And Prince Harry has just blown all of that to heck. Not just breaking family confidence, as if that weren’t enough, but publicly venting a reservoir of spleen and resentment with just about every member of his family. It’s horrifying to watch as a disinterested spectator. Those once closest to him must be in agony. One must wonder if he was always an immature and resentful dumpster fire of a human being, and the royal public affairs office and a sympathetic British media just managed to keep that under wraps … or was Ms Markle every bit as awful.
If anything, the divorce coming along in five to seven years, is going to be an even more disastrous spectacle.
It is the accepted and conventional wisdom among the various authors that I hang out with on line, that if you are putting your books out there, either through independent publishing or through the established Literary Industrial Complex, as long as you have a minimum of 25 devoted and dedicated fans who will instantly go out and buy any books, stories, collections or whatever that you make available the moment that it drops – then you absolutely have it made as a writer. Those 25 dedicated and devoted fans are the ones who make it all happen, because not only will they buy your stuff, but they will also buy the books as gifts and give to other readers, they will sing your praises to anyone who will hold still and listen, they’ll post reviews, send encouraging messages, even support you in times of crisis … and they aren’t relatives by blood or marriage, either.
Some dedicated fans will make themselves known to you, although many don’t and never will – but they are out there. I know for certain that I have about ten or a dozen such diehard fans; three or four of whom I have actually met, face to face. There’s Robin, who set up a blogger meeting at a picnic pavilion in McAllister Park a good few years ago, and Mary, who donated her accumulated airline miles so that I could go home to California and support Mom when my father died rather suddenly in 2010. Then there was Ken in Fredericksburg, who alas has passed on, who deeply adored the Adelsverein Trilogy, once he had been pestered to read and vet the manuscript as a local historical expert; also Mike and his wife and her book club circle in that same town. Then there is Leslie in New Braunfels – also a fan of the Trilogy. Then there was the first Alice, one of two; my late business partner in the Teeny Publishing Bidness. Alice G. marveled at how very polished my first couple of books were; and she had read enough as a publisher and editor to know all about first novels, or second novels and the pitfalls awaiting the unwary. Alice the second in California loves the Luna City books and hangs breathlessly on every installment.
Among the fans which I have never met face to face with is Kathy, who showed the movie treatment for the project that eventually became my first novel to a professional writer friend of hers, who very kindly coached me through writing that first historical fiction and gave me solid tips to writing what became the Adelsverein Trilogy. Like Barbara, on the east coast, Kathy was also a fan when I was just a part-time mil-blogger and worked a regular full-time job in an office.
And so was the earliest and still most dedicated fan of all, Woody, from east Texas. Sometime during the first couple of years after I began blogging, I began writing about my somewhat eccentric family – and when those posts became a book, my mother commented rather wistfully that she thought I had made us all sound ever so much more eccentric and interesting than she thought we really were. But even before I had the idea to put all those entries together for conventional publication, Woody emailed me to say that he loved those posts – about Mom and Dad, growing up at mid-last-century – and that he only had internet access at home. If he bought and sent to me a box of CD media, could I copy the posts about my family to one, and mail it back to him so that he could read the posts when he was at home? (And use the rest of the CD media for anyone else who wanted a copy of those posts.) Well, I knew that the readers of that long-ago milblog loved my posts – but this was the very first time that I realized on a significant level that readers really liked the things that I wrote! Hey, they would even pay to read it! Wow … I wonder if I could make a living out of this writing thing? To this day, Woody signs himself as my biggest fan – the one who came first, almost before all the others, and the one who, almost inadvertently, sent me off on a journey as a writer who did a little office work on the side, instead of a office worker who did a little writing on the side.
Merry Christmas, Woody – and Alice, Leslie, Robin, Barbara, Mary and all, especially the ones that I haven’t ever heard from – and the best and most prosperous of new years in 2023!
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