Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

 So, on the whole, speaking as a freelance scribbler of work for pay, and an unabashed perpetrator of well-researched and at least competently written historical fiction, 2011 has not turned out too badly at all. I managed to bring out an all-in-one hardbound omnibus edition of the Trilogy, and a second edition of To Truckee’s Trail – my very first historical fiction, through the Tiny Publishing Bidness … and the two-part prequel (Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart)  to the Trilogy as well. Now I am exploring the means of getting a German-language translation of the Trilogy out there in the coming year … and meanwhile I have a commission to co-write a non-fiction book about a certain aspect of the Old West. This project tracks very well with my interests. As well, this paid project banishes the wolf from the door; removing it at least to the very bottom of the driveway, if not the length of the block.

I had very promising days at two local Christmas markets: the Weinachtsmarkt in New Braunfels, and Christmas on the square in Goliad, and am waiting for a bump-up in sales on Amazon.com for both the print and the digital editions. I have also made the Complete Trilogy, Daughter of Texas and Deep in the Heart available for Amazon’s KDP Select for the next three months – it’s a lending library for Kindle owners who also sign up for Amazon Prime membership.

In January, I hope to be able to republish the individual volumes of the Trilogy in paperback through the Tiny Publishing Bidness, which will allow them to be priced more competitively – at about two dollars less. Towards late summer, I hope to be able to get cracking on the next book of my own; a Gold Rush picaresque adventure, involving a herd of cattle driven to California from Texas in the early 1850’s. I’ve always wanted to write that kind of a story; this will be young Fredi Steinmetz’s venture into the California gold mines – this is alluded to, several times in passing in the Trilogy. I can’t really say much more about what will happen, but there will be bandits, vigilantes, gold mines, an eccentric Fenian and a runaway girl dressed as a boy … and as always, cows. Lots of cows.

And finally – because it’s Christmas – what is cuter than a small dog dressed as Mrs. Santa?

I did wake up very early Saturday morning, with an anxiety nightmare that it would be pouring rain all day in Goliad, and that I wouldn’t sell a single copy of any of my books … but not to worry: it was overcast all day, but pleasantly shirt-sleeved as to temperature … and there were two awnings set up in the little patio next to the Chamber of Commerce, and this year the organizers had added many more booths and extended them down the block where we were.

I came away with many fewer copies of my books than we arrived with, and my daughter went around and took some pictures of the venders and some of the things that caught her eye (with permission, of course!) and so a lovely but exhausting day was had by all!

Shopping was not the only focus for the day – this is a community event, with live bands, music, good food … and a doggie costume parade.  And Santa, too  –  who arrived riding on the back of a longhorn as is traditional in Goliad.

There was also good food – my daughter brought me two carne asada tacos for lunch, which were stuffed so full of goodness that I didn’t want anything else for the rest of the day. We even gave up on a late lunch/early dinner at the Hanging Tree (where the chicken-fried steak is absolutely fab) when the festivities were all over for the day.

This was something that we rather regretted not buying, especially once I got home and looked at the pictures. The gentleman who does these ornaments also does the most amazing bowls and vases of turned wood – wood that is pieced together so that the different types and colors make a pattern.

There were cute kids and cute dogs; all dressed up for Christmas. I’ve gone and put the rest of the pictures in an album on my Facebook page, but I couldn’t leave out this darling little fella … who was, so his owner told us, only three months old. The cute as a button quotient was exceeded by a factor of ten.

Deep in the Heart – the sequel to Daughter of Texas officially launches tomorrow, at Goliad’s Christmas on the Square, which features all sorts of seasonal celebrations – including Santa riding into town on a long-horn steer, and addended by a posse of cowboys. Miss Ruby’s Author Corral will be set up in a little park right next to the Chamber of Commerce … rain or shine, although I do hope for good weather. It was very cold the first year that we did this event, and rather warm the next year, so maybe this year it will all even out!

There will be arts and crafts for sale, and a parade of poochies, and food booths and all. Hope to see many of our Texas friends there on Saturday!

(PS – all pre-ordered copies of Deep in the Heart were mailed this week – and thank you!)

 My Grandpa Jim, who was short, energetic, and as a young man, fabulously charming, emigrated from Five-Mile-Town, County Armagh in 1910. Sometime over the next few years, he fetched up in Southern  California. Having been trained as something of a specialist – a professional estate gardener, he took employment with an old-moneyed California family and spent the following five decades as their old family retainer, keeping the grounds of their estate up to par.

(Right – Hotel Vista Del Arroyo, Pasadena California)

 He was mildly renowned in the neighborhood where he lived, with Granny Jessie and his two children- my mother and her older brother, Jimmy-Junior – for not only having been employed during the Depression, but for having held on to the same employer from one end of it to the other. 

(SS Majestic  – back in the day) 

 I was rather vaguely aware of this employer’s family, as I grew up: when we drove from Sunland-Tujunga to Pasadena to visit my grandparents’ house, on South Lotus St., Mom was often given to pointing out their old original mansion – a grey neo-Gothic style roof-peak, rising out of the trees lining the edge of the Arroyo Seco, as she drove the old green Plymouth station-wagon over the bridge. That was where the senior B – ‘s had lived throughout the Twenties, the Thirties – and a good way into the Sixties. Grandpa Jim was rather feudally devoted to the senior lady of the house, always referred to as Old Mrs. B , to differentiate from the wife of her oldest son, Young Mrs. B.  Old Mrs. B.  loved roses, the nurturing of which Grandpa Jim was most particularly skilled.

 (Roman Forum with Trajan’s Column)

 Besides the oldest son, there was a sister and another brother, and a much younger boy whose name was Mark, called Markie, who happened to be very close to my mother’s age. She was born in 1930 – but Markie was delicate, an invalid, with health problems so chronic that he died as a teenager. He was never well enough to go to school or to participate very much in life as his parents and sibs lived it; and my mother was frequently imported to be his companion.

(Canal Street, New Orleans)

 I’ve often thought it must have been rather like the children in The Secret Garden – except that Markie was treasured by both his parents, and Mom was not an orphan. Still, there was something rather Old World about it all – the gardener’s daughter being brought to the enormous grey manor-house, to play with the invalid little boy of an afternoon. Old Mrs. B. loved shopping, loved to buy dresses for little girls, and Mom was the beneficiary of this impulse – except that Old Mrs. B never thought to buy practical things, and so Mom had the prettiest and most lavish dresses – but only ragged underwear, to wear underneath.

 (Scenic oak trees and hanging moss, Florida)

I was, I think, about nine or ten – which would put this happening in the mid-60s – when the old B. mansion was closed up and sold. Young Mr. B and his family – maybe to include Old Mr. B – went to live in a grand estate on the outskirts of Santa Barbara. I remember our family going to visit them, and I think I recall me being given a bouquet of flowers to present to a very, very elderly man, but to ten-year-old eyes, everyone fit to receive Social Security appears enormously aged …

(View west from Hotel Cecil, London)

Anyway, there was a day when Grandpa Jim took Mom and I, with my brother J.P. and sister Pippy to the old B. mansion, because there was a bunch of excess stuff in one of the outbuildings, and Grandpa had permission to let us have the pick of it. My mother chose a cast-iron lawn-chair, and regretted for decades that she hadn’t also taken the love-seat that went with it. Both were layered with decades of paint, and as heavy as original sin; it was just that the love-seat was so much heavier than the chair. I don’t remember what J.P. and Pippy came away with – if anything at all – but I came away with a shoebox almost full of old postcards.

(Mountain scenery, Rocky Mountains)

They were unused, un-postmarked, un-written upon, and there were heaps of duplicates among them – pictures of hotels, of steamship liners, of views of half a hundred of places as far removed as Japan, and Naples.

(Palace of Justice, Monaco)

There was a collection of views of New   Orleans, and of Washington  DC, with the streets full of antique-looking cars, and the skies tinted peculiar shades of pink and pale blue. There were postcards that were actually paintings of spectacular scenery in the Far American West, of tree-ferns in Hawaii, and stands of azalea-bushes in Florida, colored in not-quite-natural hues. Taken all together, they offered an entrancing view into another world, another time. They exuded – and still do – a faint and evocative smell of old paper. Some of them were even places that I had seen myself, and a few were of local landmarks; sequoia trees in Northern  California, like the Devil’s Gate Dam, a nearly-empty reservoir in La Crescenta, and the old Arroyo Seco Hotel, within eyesight practically, of the B’s mansion.

(View of Havana and SS Havana, from Moro Castle)

The elder B’s and their older children traveled widely, so Grandpa Jim and Mom explained to me, when I showed them the postcards. Mom ventured a guess that perhaps the cards were brought back for Markie, the invalid little boy who was never strong enough to venture much of anywhere. So, his parents, his older brothers and sister, wherever they traveled, by train or steamship, they picked up handfuls of postcards, and brought them home for Markie – although the oldest of them would have predated his birth by a good few years.

  (Luxemburg Gardens) 

 Perhaps the senior B’s had made a habit of this all throughout their marriage, and travels. Over all those decades, the postcards had gravitated from across the world to the neo-Gothic mansion on the edge of the Arroyo Seco, tucked into a purse or train-case, perhaps a suitcase with hotel-stickers on it. Going from there to a desk, to a box in a closet with a bunch of other oddments – until the day they came to me.

(Shijo Street, Kyoto)

I’ve had them ever since; maybe the old box of postcards, with their vivid link to a not-quite-out-of-touch past was what set me off on a love of history and travel. Or maybe I would have come to that anyway.

(Tomb of Unknown Soldier, Arlington)

 So, the Weinachtsmarkt in New Braunfels has been going on like a well-oiled machine for a good few years now: four days of serious Christmas shopping, at a wide variety of booths set up in the Civic Center  . . .  which, by the way, is a very, very nice venue as civic centers and conference facilities go. It’s all pale limestone and heavy wood beams on the inside, and for Christmas, lavishly decorated with hundreds of slender green Christmas trees decorated with white lights. On this last Saturday, it was crowded, crowded, crowded – especially at the end of the hallway where we set up shop, as that was where Santa Claus was. All during the day, we watched a procession of babies, small children and larger children, all dressed up in their best holiday outfits, trooping by to have their picture taken with Santa. In New Braunfels, this seems to be the venue for that particular holiday tradition. The Market is one of the premier local events, and publicized widely, so it wouldn’t be as if we would be sitting in a lonely corner, watching the occasional shopper wandering in, and trying to slip past without catching the desperate eye of the author.

 Having a book fair/author tables, for local authors – well, this is the very first year they offered this, and I leaped on the opportunity with considerable enthusiasm. For one, I’ve done a few talks about my books and local history in New Braunfels, and being that the Trilogy has a local setting, right there in that very place, and concerns many of the ancestors of people who currently live there! – how better suited could a venue be? There would be other authors, too – so that if we were left to ourselves during the whole time, at least there would be other writers to talk to. And the second reason; it’s a holiday craft and merchandise fair; people are coming with money intending to shop until they drop, looking for that perfect unique gift. An author at a holiday fair is not in competition with every other book in the place, as it is at a bookstore book event.  

The author tables were set up along both sides of a wide corridor, running from the parking lot/s out in back, to the main entrance in front, which practically guaranteed lots of traffic, even if were just from people looking for the ticket table, or the bathrooms. The tables were smallish, so the stacks of books that I had brought: the hardbound Trilogy, three leftover copies of Book 3 of the Trilogy, To Truckee’s Trail, Daughter of Texas, and a single example copy of Deep in the Heart filled it up rather nicely. During the morning, the table next to us was occupied by an energetic lady of certain years, selling the Assistance League of San Antonio cookbook – her table was covered with stacks of the cookbook, ten deep – and by early afternoon, she had pretty well emptied it, through dint of tirelessly pitching to all who passed by, glanced at the tables or even slowed down a little. In the afternoon, her place was taken by another indy author with a series of children’s books; like me, she had a bit of a local following, or at least recognition.

Most gratifyingly, I was recognized by a number of ladies who remembered me from the talk I gave in the spring to the Lindheimer Chapter of the DRT, and another handful who had read one or another of the books, and were just thrilled to bits to have a chance to buy the latest installation from me  . . .  although it was a bit awkward, explaining that one book was the prequel to the Trilogy and another was the sequel to the prequel, which began to sound an awful lot like Danny Kaye’s ‘chalice from the palace’ bit. Our stacks of books also diminished nicely: all the copies of the Complete Trilogy and  Daughter of  Texas sold out, plus two of the new edition of To Truckee’s Trail, and I passed out a lot of informational flyers about the books to readers who wanted them in Kindle or Nook editions. Still have to see the after-event bump-up in internet sales, though.

In two weeks, we’ll be at anothe community Christmas celebration and craft sale – at Goliad’s Christmas on the Square, which will be the official-official book launch for Deep in the Heart. We are just hoping that the weather will be pleasant, for this will be outdoors. The Author Corral will be next to the Chamber of Commerce building, should you be looking for us!