THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Some of this info can still be found in more succinct form at Technorati where, among other things concerning the blog, you will find this:

“Retired Texas newspaperman (politics, crime, science, medicine, technology), married father of one child, antique rose gardener, self-publisher, and Vietnam combat veteran (MACV, I Corps, 1969)”

That more or less sums me up, for the purposes of this blog. I might have added sailor to the list. But I recently sold the family sloop, after twenty-three years of sailing Lake Travis, west of Austin. I faced the fact that I am too old and too slow for it any longer. And the summer heat is enervating.

But I stopped linking to Technorati when it became obvious the “service” was not updating me. I know they have millions of blogs to deal with but I have to wonder about their software when nine days after the fact they still had not noted that Instapundit, a top blog with many, many thousands of links, had linked me on Dec. 5, 2006.

It was a great honor, of course, but it produced next to nothing in new, unique visits. Only seventeen, in the first two days. One rare reader suggested I may have made blogosphere history getting such a small response from an Instapundit link. Yes, well.

I started the blog a few months after retiring in April, 2006, after thirty-five years of newspaper reporting and editing, mostly reporting in the subject areas above, preceded by one year of television and radio news writing and delivery–essentially because I didn’t want to stop writing every day, although most of what I had done before wasn’t personal in the least.

That has been a challenge, to get a personal voice into this, although my choice of subject categories already does that to an extent. I’m not after any sort of persona, just to go with my personal reaction to the news, ideas and feelings of the day.

I write about my son, my only child, who was newly six when I retired. I refer to him as Mr. Boy to maintain his privacy, and won’t be including too many embarrassing details about him so that he continues to think kindly of his old man when he’s grown. So old I am already that his teachers sometimes confuse me with his grandfather. Although I have found that older men being new fathers is not such an unusual thing anymore.

Gardening, of course, is mostly weeding, which isn’t a lot of fun, though it carries a certain satisfaction, and even more when you plant something you like. For me that’s antique roses, particularly hardy Chinese roses, so-called because they entered Western commerce from China in the late 18th through the 19th centuries.

They are bush-like, rather than tall and spindly in the fashion of modern hybrid roses. In truth, they don’t usually require much attention, except judicious (but non-finicky) pruning twice a year to encourage repeat blooming in spring and fall. But I’m finding them a challenge at Rancho Roly Poly (click on the category and scroll to the bottom to see where that name comes from) because all the oak and elm trees on the lot reduce the amount of sunlight in the yard, of which roses need at least six hours a day, and the maurauding deer (who think of rose leaves as candy) when they get into the back yard. As the roses bloom each season, I post pictures of them from time to time.

Self-publishing is something I never considered until the recent advent of print-on-demand and the birth of lulu.com which is free if you do it yourself. Unlike the vanity presses of old that charged thousands of dollars, and even their POD offspring such as iUniverse which still charge hundreds. Lulu will get you on Amazon.com and other online sellers and the the rest is up to the book and your own efforts to publicize it. You only have to pay for each book as you buy it. They also offer discounts on large quantities.

It’s even easier to do with ebooks at Amazon, which will take them from you directly, but getting them formatted can be a bear if you don’t know HTML or can’t pay for a professional formatting.

My books so far are a collection of sixteen post-war short stories “Leaving the Alamo, Texas Stories After Vietnam.” There’s also a free preview of one of the sixteen stories if you buy the Kindle edition. Reviewer Marc Leepson in Vietnam Veteran Magazine called it “…a first-rate collection…”

Go to Amazon.com to buy it here. The ebook is just 99 cents for a limited time. And if you’re (understandably with self-published stuff) more cautious, you can download a free pdf version here. Then, if you find value in what you read, you can go back and buy a copy.

I recently finished “Knoxville, 1863,” an historical novel about a little known Civil War battle involving some of the most famous commanders and units of the Union and Confederacy. On February, 2009, I entered its first chapter in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award contest. It made the first cut, to the top twenty percent. Then it went down in flames on the second cut to five percent. Bragging rights, at least, in the hunt for an agent. Or so I thought at the time. Turns out agents are not impressed by such things.

Indeed, after more than a dozen agent rejections (of my query letter, not the manuscript) I finally got the message (as I also later read at Publishers Weekly) that Civil War fiction is no longer in great demand. So I went the POD and DIY route, once again, at Lulu. And the finished product is available here. Where it is also available for the Kindle for 99 cents.

Meanwhile I am polishing a Vietnam war novel, finishing a non-fiction regimental history of the Thirteenth Mississippi Infantry Regiment, and writing a memoir of growing up in the Cold War. I hope to finish all three by the summer of 2012. More on them later.

I included my veteran status in the old Technorati profile summary above, and at Milblogs.com, for a bona fide, because I blog about the War on Islamic Facism and the American, Israeli and other allied troops involved from the perspective of a veteran who supports the war and them and has little patience with those who throw stones at either one.

Meanwhile, contact me at Scribbler (at) TexasScribbler DOT com, if you have any questions or comments that you don’t want to share with the world–as worldwide as my modest readership is. It had grown to more than 200 hits a day, but has recently declined for reasons I know not.

I hope you find something in The Texas Scribbler that interests you.

Best regards

Dick Stanley

LAST UPDATED:  Nov. 28, 2011