Sgt. Mom's Open Salon Blog

A Post on the Far Frontier

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:11:03 -0500

Most people, when they have a mental vision of an Army fort on the American frontier, think of a wooden stockade of standing timber – but that was hardly ever the case in Texas. Indians almost never attacked those forts, so defensive walls were not necessary. An Army post on the far frontier for much of the 19th century, consisted of four ranges of buildings – necessary offices like the hospital and guardhouse, warehouses, enlisted barracks and officers’ quarters, all arranged around the quadrangle of the parade ground. Some of these posts are still in use by the military – but many were made redundant as the frontier advanced. Fort Martin Scott, on the eastern outskirts of Fredericksburg, just off US Route 290 is one such. It was established late in the 1840s, rendered almost redundant by the early 1850s, briefly garrisoned by the returning US Army after the Civil War, and the site of it finally sold to a local leading citizen who transformed it into his family’s homestead.

Most of the buildings present, set out among a scattering of oak trees in a foot-ball field rectangle running from the verge of Rte 290 down to the banks of Baron’s Creek are reconstructions. There are some few foundations left here and there of a sulter’s store and the laundry, set conveniently close to water, down on the creek-bank. There are a few stones left of a huge oven to bake bread for the soldiers, nothing at all left of where the warehouse and post hospital was, nor of the stable for the dragoon’s horses, and the blacksmith’s forge. The approximate position of the commander’s house is merely outlined in stones. The only original building, from the time when it was an active US Army establishment is a thick-walled limestone building with very tiny slit-windows in one end which served as the guardhouse and military jail – when the property was sold to the Brautigam family, it was added onto and became their home, until the site was sold to the city, and restoration of the long-decayed original buildings began.

It wouldn’t have been one of those dramatic forts, in it’s time – no bloody sieges, no great expeditions launched from the little parade-ground, between the whitewashed log, or stone buildings. About the only instance of drama would have taken place in about 1850, when a soldier from the Fort became drunk, angry and abusive in one of the general stores in Fredericksburg: when it came to blows, the soldier drew a knife, and in the melee with the storekeeper, the soldier wound up with the knife in his chest, with fatal results. In retaliation, his comrades came back that night and burned the store to the ground – coincidentally destroying many of Fredericksburg’s early civic records. The storekeeper was also the town clerk. (A version of this incident opens Book Two of my Adelsverein Trilogy.)

The front-porches of the officer’s quarters, and the breezeways between the three-pen log enlisted barracks would have looked out on little but the same military garrison routine, day after day. Moving supplies from wagons coming up the road from San Antonio and the coast into the warehouse, shoeing horses and doing laundry, mounting guard and standing retreat at the end of the day – that would have been it, for the soldiers and their officers sent here for a bare handful of years. No doubt many of them spent their time in a quiet backwater of the Texas frontier, hoping that something exciting would happen, something to break up the boredom and routine of peacetime service, something that would bring them glory and renown.

For a good few of them, that supposed wish did come true, in the following decade, when officers who had served at Fort Martin Scott – like James Longstreet – did indeed find glory and renown. Very possibly, they looked back then on their tour of service at a tiny fort on the banks of Baron’s Creek with considerable nostalgia.

Scrumptious Persimmon Pudding

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:11:19 -0500

(A couple of weeks ago, another OS-er posted an essay about the joys of persimmons, and I remembered this recipe for persimmon pudding which was so popular whenever I baked it and took a dish to a pot-luck supper that the baking dish would be practically licked clean and everyone would want a copy of the recipe. It's been a while since I baked it, and I had trouble remembering what book the recipe was from - so here 'tis, as promised! Straight from page 225 of the Sunset Recipe Annual 1994 volume - Perfectly Scrumptious Persimmon Pudding!)

Combine and set aside:

1 1/2 cups pulp, from 3-4 very ripe Hachiya-type persimmons with 1 TBsp baking soda, and set aside. Pulp will thicken and jell as it stands, when ready to use, just whisk until smooth.

Beat together with an electric mixer:

3 eggs, 1 cup firmly packed brown sugar until foamy. Stir in the persimmon pulp and add:

1/2 cup melted butter or margarine, 1 cup milk, 2 tsp vanilla.

Sift together and add to the egg/pulp/butter mixture:

3/4 cup each flour and whole-wheat flour, 1 1/2 tsp baking powder, 2 tsp cinnamon, 1 teaspground ginger, 1/2 tsp ground nutmeg.

Add when combined: 1/4 cup bulgar wheat and 1 cup chopped almonds or walnuts.

Scrape batter into a buttered 8-in 2-1/2 to 3 qt souffle or casserole dish. Bake at 325, until center of pudding springs back when gently pressed - about an hour and ten minutes. Serve warm, or at room temp, topped with whipped cream. There will be no leftovers, and I absolutely guarantee the baking dish will be scraped absolutely clean of every tasty crumb.

On Being A Real Arthur

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:11:32 -0500

That expression became something of a family joke, as I came around, by easy steps, from being a teller of tall tales, an intermittent scribbler, an unrepentant essayist, a fairly dedicated blogger … to being – as my daughter put it - a real arthur. Yes, a “real arthur” in that I have a number of books, ranging free in the wilderness of the book-reading public. Not that I am in any danger of buying the castle next-door to J.K. Rowlings’, and my royalty checks and payments for consignments and direct sales dribble in but slowly. Slowly, but steadily, which is gratifying. Readers are buying my books, as they find out about them in various ways; through internet searches, through word of mouth, and the odd book club meeting, casual conversation and interviews on blogs and internet radio stations. It has been my peculiar good fortune to have come about to being “a real arthur” just when the established order of things literary was being shaken to the foundations, and not wasted very much time fighting – or trying to smuggle my books past the toothless old dragons of the literary-industrial complex, defending the crumbling castle of Things That Once Were.

Time was – or so the older “real arthurs” tell me – there was an excellent chance that if you were a fairly adept storyteller, with a pleasing voice, a discriminating way with vivid description, and could construct a setting and create characters which the general public would want to pay some trifling amount to read about – you would eventually find a literary agent to talk you up to any number of established publishers, or that someone given the onerous duty of sifting through the slush-pile would fall upon your MS with tears of happy joy. It might take a bit and a couple of tries – but it would happen. The publishing world was small enough, and the body of ambitious scribblers convinced that they had the “next great novel!” within them was small enough that the good stuff would be sifted out from the dross in fairly brisk order; if not at one publisher, then another. And there you go – you would have the benefit of an editor, a printer, a team of publicists to get the word out about your book, ready acceptance at all the established sources for reviewers. The only alternative to that was (*shudder*) the cold hell of a so-called vanity press, the last resort of a scribbler with more money than actual talent. This is what I was assured time and time again, and what I trustfully assumed to be the case when I was a teenager, scribbling embarrassingly derivative fan-fiction in spiral-ring notebooks.

But the world changes and we move on. Sometime around 1997 I remember going to a writer’s club meeting, where there was a presentation by a local printer, outlining what was possible for a writer who was tired of standing outside the castle of the publishing establishment trying to lob their MS over the battlemented wall. What set this little presentation apart was his statement that some authors who had published and printed their books through his business were marketing them to local outlets – and that a good few had gone into second and third printings, due to high demand. He named some titles, which I had recognized because I had seen them, here and there. It did seem like a lot of additional work, taking boxes of copies around to bookstores and souvineer shops, and sweet-talking the owners thereof into putting them among the stock. And a print run of a couple of thousand copies was well-outside my budget at the time. Still, I tucked that tidbit away for consideration at a later time; I hadn’t written a book, anyway, only some freelance articles and short stories.

Even then, it was becoming harder to get the attention of the major publishing houses; and as I began moving closer and closer to be serious about my own writing, the word around the book-blogs was that you had to have an agent. More and more of the big publishing houses not interested in unsolicited manuscripts, and generally preferred to deal only with well-established big names. The chore of actually searching through the slush-pile for the big literary thing was something that had been outsourced to agents.

And then, the agencies were swamped, with the flood-tide of manuscripts, to which I contributed my own bits, only to be sadly informed by a couple of them who did take the time to read them, that although I was a very good writer (or at least fairly competent) my first novel just wasn’t what they termed “marketable to a traditional publisher." I went back to consulting the handful of professional writers that I knew, and to the various knowledgeable book-blogs; ah, the received wisdom was that publishing a novel, and especially a novel by a new and unknown writer was very much a gamble for a publishing house. Before going through all the trouble, and the considerable expense of publishing such a book – major publishers wanted to put their chips on a sure thing, or something very close to a sure thing. Sometimes publishers would ask for marketing plan, including a website and blog, as well as a manuscript. More and more, mainstream publishing looked like Hollywood: ten humongous ten-million-dollar block-buster sure-thing movies a year, rather than a hundred one-million dollar not-quite-sure-thing-maybe-a-little-adventurous movies a year.

Around the time that I was really getting serious about getting published – Print On Demand technology had changed the whole publishing paradigm once again: unlike the old vanity press, which required an outlay of at least a couple of thousand dollars, it was now possible to get in print for considerably less. Of course there were, to put it kindly, quality issues, now that everyone out there who wanted to publish could do so. POD-published books had a horrible reputation – and in most cases, richly-deserved. I also heard frequently that having done a POD book was the kiss of death, in trying for an agent, or a mainstream publishing deal. Submission guidelines for quite a few agencies specified that manuscripts must not have been published.

But the reluctance of traditional publishing to even consider more than just a tiny portion of new authors out there drove more and more first-time authors, and writers with considerable experience with the written and published word to consider POD publishing. Many now go with the various POD services, and the truly dedicated hire an editor themselves, and set up as the boutique publisher of their own book. If the filtering mechanism provided by literary agents, and publishing houses can no longer cope with the quantities of books out there, then publishing through POD at least allows writers to circumvent that bottle-neck, and have readers themselves to be that ultimate filter. Very likely, my own books will be published by the boutique press which I currently work for, once we set up printing services through Lightening Source – the print service used by many POD and traditional publishers. I will have an editor, and the services of a design studio for the cover and interior formatting – why do I need to go through the whole submission process again, now that I have an established fan base through the books that I have out there to date?

There have certainly been some widely-reported success stories over the last decade or so, of books like The Shack or The Christmas Box and The Lace Reader which sold initially and widely as POD books - and suddenly became visible to a traditional publisher. With those books, it seems as if the acquisitions editor at a traditional house came out of a torpid state, exclaiming “OMG, that book has sold a bomb of copies already, we’d better hop onto the gravy-train and sign that author to a deal!” (Note – in 2006, a NY Times article estimated that the average POD book sells 150-175 copies, other experts quoted less than a hundred, possibly as low as 50.) In the last six months or so, I have encountered hints and portents that traditional publishing houses may be reconsidering POD books; yes, even to the point of patrolling Amazon.com, searching out those of excellent quality and consistent, yet unspectacular record of sales.

At least one IAG author that I know of, Dianne Salerni has a contract with a small, but substantial traditional publisher, on the basis of her first book and an option on her second. Harper-Collins UK set up a website called Authonomy which allowed authors to put up all or part of a published or unpublished MS and allow other people to read and recommend. I have read some terrific historical novels at Authonomy, and am considerably mystified that some of the best have not been published with much acclaim months ago. Another book-blog & website, the Publetariat has recently set up a searchable database of books offered by POD authors, to include hard stats on sales and royalties. It appears to be the hope of the Publetariat that making offering this, along with a synopsis and sample chapters, would make it easier for agents and publishers to locate promising books with a proven record. I don’t imagine that the business of writing books – and it is a business, never mind how much one enjoys the writing aspects of it – will ever go back to the old way, of lobbing manuscripts over the castle walls, in the hope that they will magically fall into the hands of a kindly editor. Seriously, though – I think I’m having more fun this way.

Real Texas BBQ

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:11:19 -0500

The real stuff comes hot off the grill, wrapped in heavy butcher-paper, served up with a couple of slabs of plain white bread, lashings of sauce, onions, coleslaw and beans. When it's still on the grill, and you go out to the screen-enclosed porch where the industrial-strength griller/smoker sits - about the size of a small dumpster - and they crank open the heavy lid and ask you to pick out what you favor, it looks like this;

I must ask that the vegans at OS avert their eyes - the vision of this will be doubtless prove overwhelming!

You eat inside, sitting at a narrow metal-topped table, or on the shaded terrace outside, while men in hunting garb, with gimme caps or stetsons on their heads bring in their families for Saturday brunch. Behind the service counter, the elecric carving knife buzzes through brisket and smoked turkey breast, and girl running the cash-desk takes a moment, and empties a vat of ice-cubes into the dispenser with a crash that temporary drowns out the sound of the country-music station on the radio in the corner.

The coleslaw is sharp with vinegar and caraway seed, crunchy with cabbage, the beans are velvet-tender; you serve it up yourself, in little styrofoam cups from a huge electric slow-cooker - because a lot of the custom is take-out and carry-away, anyway. You can pick from three kinds of BBQ sauce, also in three crock-pots, labeled with hand-lettered cards- vinegar and Grandpa's and plain. They have stacks of smaller styrofoam cups with lids for the sauce - again, to facilitate take-out.

This is accompanied by soft-drinks, or iced tea which comes as sweet and unsweet ... but anything tastes fine, next to the brisket; which is tender and flavorful, smokey-rich, and dripping with meat-juices.

Nothing finer in this part of the world, I swear. This is the place - anyone on OS know how to drag Anthony Bourdain to it?

It's called Easy Pickens Bar-B-Q, on Main Street in Harper, Texas - right next to the Methodist Church. I'd make a crack about keeping body and soul together, but next to 'Q this good, it would seem a bit blasphemous.

The building that houses Easy Pickens appears either old - and carefully and tastefully renovated, or built-new and designed to look old. Inside, it is rather small for a restaurant - and so that accounts for the extra tables and chairs on the veranda outside on two sides. They are only open on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, from 11 AM to 2 PM, or whenever they run out of whatever bounty of meat is on the grill. We were advised to be there no later than about noonish, or run the risk of walking away hungry.

On the other side of Easy Pickens is a resale shop that supports the local library - a library which had invited me to come and do a talk about my Adelsverein Trilogy. The library staff in the Harper library recommends it to everyone new in town, who wants to know more about local history, as it is a painless and fairly enjoyable way of becoming familiar with it. Pleasingly, the Trilogy is also very popular with those local people from the old families - I talked to a woman who was descended from one of the men killed during the Civil War in the Spring Branch murders, and another lady who was descended from the Fellers - Clara Feller's husband was one of those killed by the Hangerbande in the Grape Creek settlement - and in fact, I had based some of the plot in The Sowing on Clara Feller's brief memoir. So, a couple of hours talking to book fans, and then on to Fredricksburg, and along the Texas Wine Road...

Oh, you haven't heard about the Texas Wine Road, or that Texas is actually producing some very tasty wines? Oh, I'll save that for next Foodie Tuesday.

(Right across from the library was the Bode feed store. The owner is a writer and local historian, who came over to meet me before the talk. He has a good few books too!)

The Sgt. Mom - Mary Wollstonecraft Interview - Re-Post

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:11:32 -0500

(By request, from May of this year - a reposting of the basic Sgt. Mom interview)

Sgt. Mom, 1978

Do you mind telling me some basics things about yourself--age, sex, where you live, where you grew up, any siblings, any children, nieces and nephews, where you attended school. ? Feel free to say as little or as much as you like.

I am 55, hetero female, living in Texas, but grew up in Southern California and lived all over, courtesy of the Air Force. I have two younger brothers, and a younger sister, and one daughter.

I am just old enough to remember a lot of things about the 50s... but not old enough to have participated very much in the (ugh) late 60s. I felt like I have gone through my life cleaning up after some of the excesses committed by those who fully participated in the whole youthquake thing.

How much are you involved with kids right now? Do you enjoy being with them?

Not much, alas - but I do enjoy very much being with them, and being the dashing and eccentric auntie.

What were your parents like? How much equality existed in their marriage?

My parents were very level-headed, and quite traditional - but I have always thought their marriage was a well-adjusted partnership. The nice thing about them, was that they did not play favorites between my sisters and brothers, when it came to household chores. We all of us had to help with dishwashing, with laundry, and looking after the younger ones. I have often heard of women in my generation being stuck with it all, while their brothers were free to loaf about. My parents would never have permitted that.

Would your mother consider herself a feminist? Have you ever discussed the question with her?

Hell, no, and yes, I have. I’ve often had the feeling that she is terribly ambivalent about feminism, as she finished college early in the 50’s. She was very bright, and wanted to be a veterinarian, but there was just so much against her doing that. She flunked a key chemistry course, as she used to tell us, but I’ve often thought that for her, it was just too easy to give up under all the social pressure to get married and do the suburban housewife thing. Her maternal instincts and interest- and she really poured a lot of energy into it – kind of faded out halfway through us. My sister and younger brother in a lot of ways looked to me for mothering; and I’ve always thought Mom was a little bitter about my sister and I having wider opportunities for a career, and a career which could be combined with having a family

Family, 1966

Dad with Younger Siblings

What jobs have you had? Please remember to include all caregiving jobs--e.g, babysitting, parenting, elder care.

Oh my - aside from the military, and then the corporate admin/office manager; I was a summer camp counselor, a Sunday School teacher, a volunteer social worker helping to resettle Vietnamese refugees, I routinely looked after my youngest brother, who had the rare good fortune to have been born the year that I turned 12, I am the media rep for a local political action organization, I helped organize an on-line writers' support group, the Independent Author's Guild, and I am the editor for the historical section of an on-line literary magazine, TheDeepening.com. Is that enough?

What was happening with women when you were a girl?

We were just getting our heads around the possibility that we could do something more than be a teacher, a nurse, a secretary or a saleslady, and that we didn’t necessary have to get married. It was kind of heady, exciting, exhilarating, even. The women's movement was Practically non-existent when I was a child, but flickering up and growing stronger as I became a young teen - when a lot of women keep asking, in tones of rising agitation, "Well, why can't I....(insert action, lifestyle, etc, here.)

If you identify yourself a feminist, when did you accept that?

A small-f feminist is how I describe myself: I believe that a woman or a girl ought to have the same opportunities in education, in her professional life, and as a citizen; nothing more and nothing less. Anything more than that is whining for special treatment, and anything beyond that is quibbling over someone else’s dogma. The personal is not political, and not particularly interesting to the rest of us.

What does feminism mean to you?

Equality of opportunity.

What did you first notice sexism, whether directed at you or anyone else.

Nothing particularly overt seems to stick in my mind; but there was this sort of assumption that there were things that it just wasn’t proper for a woman to do, or that it would be terribly daring and non-conformist for her to attempt.

Has anyone else accused you of sexism?

Oh, yes - while in the military, I was accused of being an awful man-hater; I was actually attempting to explain to some of my fellow NCO's why some women did have reason to fear men - and those guys took it all the wrong way! It is quite comic, to think of being a woman in the military - and yet hating men (Gee, men are EVERYWHERE in the military - what a shock, eh?) but those particular guys were not much on logic.

Are you an egalitarian rather than a feminist or masculist?

I'd prefer to think of us all as human beings, actually. Some of us are just equipped to bear children, and some other of us are very good at fixing mechanical stuff, and sometimes those qualities overlap. And sometimes they don't.

Do we live in a postfeminist era?

Yes for American and western women, definitly, especially rembering what I recall from my childhood, and then looking at the scene today.

How much sexism did you perceive in the 2008 primaries and elections?

Oh, by the bucketful - it was quite nauseating, to watch the slime being splashed all over Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin - and the worst of it seemed to come from other women.

Are OS men too nervous to post on sexism and feminism? How could we help?

Yes and I don't blame them much. For about the last thirty years, the doctrinaire large-F feminists have been pretty much demonizing men! . Did anyone read Naomi Wolfe's Fire with Fire when it first came out? Basically she advised us that we have what we want, let's act like responsible grownups, make political alliances, stop denigrating women who do not agree with us in every particular - and stop with the male-bashing.

I don't know how much we could help the OS men at this late date, other than maybe refraining from screeching at them any more.

What books shaped your ideas on women?

In my formative years? I suppose various books by Andre Norton and other science fiction writers like Marian Zimmer Bradley, who wrote about strong and decisive women who were equal to men – not superior or inferior to – but equal.

Who is your favorite woman novelist? Do you think she is a feminist (I fervently believe Jane Austen was.)

Light novels – nothing literary: Rosemary Sutcliff, and don’t know about the feminism. She wrote very sympathetically about men and women characters both. I also used to like Mary Stewart, who did the same. These days – Lois McMaster Bujold, who definitely is, and Barbara Hambly, ditto.

Oddly enough, in my own books, I write about men and women both – but about three quarters of my fans are men! I was trading emails with the senior editor of the on-line magazine, who is a fan also – about this curious element and she said that I have that tough, and gritty element in my stories; nothing soft and fluffy-sentimental. Must have come from all those years of hanging out almost exclusively with guys!

Daughter, 1992