Busy, busy, busy

I've been a busy bee lately. As I mentioned before, my wife and I are running a photo exhibition on Ethiopia to benefit the charity A Glimmer of Hope. Opening night was on Sunday and we met some interesting folks as well as seeing many of our friends. I wrote an article about running a photo exhibition for Gadling that might be of interest to you shutterbugs out there.

I've also been busy on the sequel to A Fine Likeness. The most recent scene involved two bushwhackers hunting each other through the dark rooms of an abandoned plantation, while our hero, a naval officer who has never fought on land, tries to help one of them and finds it's all he can do to survive. I had a lot of fun writing that scene. Always a good sign!

In completely unrelated news, my fellow blogger Melanie Renzulli recently visited the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. This museum has many grim anatomical samples from Civil War casualties. Worth reading. Be warned about the photo gallery, though, it's not lunchtime viewing!

Victorian vampire hunting kit up for auction

Vampires were big in the Victorian era. Books such as Dracula and Varney theVampyre were bestsellers and adventure travelers to eastern Europe reported that the people still believed they existed.

A rare vampire hunting kit from this era is now for sale. The box contains a crucifix, pistol, wooden stakes and mallet, a Book of Common Prayer from 1851, and bottles of holy water, holy earth, and garlic paste. There's also a handwritten note quoting Luke 19:27: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me."

Vampires have been in the news a lot recently. Archaeologists in Bulgaria have just discovered two vampire graves. Hit the link to read the Gadling article I wrote about it.

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons, from Les tribunaux secrets, published in 1864.

Ethiopia photography exhibition opens Sunday!

My wife and I are opening a photography exhibition about Ethiopia this Sunday at 8pm here in Santander, Spain. If on the off chance you happen to live nearby, please come along. You can find the details in this poster. It was designed by my brother-in-law, who also used his talents to design the cover of my Civil War novel.

All proceeds will go to benefit A Glimmer of Hope, an NGO that's doing excellent work building schools over there. You can read an article I wrote about them here.

The local paper El Diario Montañes gave us a nice writeup today, and they even mentioned my novel!

Civil War Photo Friday: Cherokee Confederates Reunion, 1903

This fascinating photo shows a reunion of Cherokee Confederates that took place in New Orleans in 1903. Like many other Native American tribes, the Cherokee were split in their loyalties. Some sided with the Confederacy since they were slaveholders and wanted to get back at a Federal government that had treated them horribly. Others sided with the Union in the hope that their loyalty would be rewarded with better treatment for their people. Well all know how well that worked out.

Native Americans fought in many battles and campaigns in the Trans-Mississippi Theater. Stand Watie, a Cherokee, became a brigadier general in the Confederate army. He was the last Confederate general to surrender, not giving up until June 23, 1865, more than two months after Lee had surrender at Appomattox.

The Indian Territory (modern Oklahoma) was torn apart by rival factions backing opposing sides and by Union and Confederate campaigns. In addition to battlefield casualties, many civilians died from starvation and exposure when they had to flee their homes. It's safe to say the Indian Territory suffered as bad as any place in the Civil War.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

I've made it past 50,000 words in my next Civil War horror novel!

The still-untitled sequel to A Fine Likeness is coming along nicely. Today I passed the 50,000 word mark. I anticipate it will end up being about 90,000 words. My goal is to get the first draft done by my birthday on August 16. That's doable if I write 1,000 words a weekday and don't get stuck. If I do get stuck, oh well, that's an important part of the process and a writer shouldn't fret about it. I can always work on other projects.

For those of you who have read A Fine Likeness, you'll see many of the characters who survived the last novel. There are also some new characters, such as Allen Addison, the naval officer you only met through letters, and Bill Treadway, a Confederate cavalryman in Price's defeated army, who makes one last gamble with the forces of Chaos to win the war.

Much of the action takes place on the USS Essex, pictured above. I just wrote a scene where the ship's crew, under Addison's command, teams up with some deserters from the First Kansas Colored Volunteers to fight a band of bushwhackers. When Addison investigates their camp he find these rebel guerrillas are more than what they seem. . .

I have a reader in Andorra!

Well, I had a reader in Andorra. A friend of mine just came from there to visit me here in northern Spain. He started A Fine Likeness while he was there and finished it on the long bus ride to Santander, Spain. His copy was all battered and dog-eared from being in his backpack, the way a book should look. :-)

That makes four countries that I know of where my Civil War novel has been read: Andorra, Spain, the UK, and the US!

Here's a question for my readers who are writers. Where's the most obscure country where you've been read?


Photo courtesy Christof Damian.

Civil War Photo Friday: Military ballooning

The Civil War saw lots of military innovations, including the first extensive use of balloons for observing enemy troop movements. They'd already been used by the French as far back as 1794 but the Americans and Confederates took it higher (ahem!) by using them much more and hooking telegraph wires between the balloon and the ground station to send messages back.

The North used them more, having many more industrial facilities. Balloons stayed fixed as observation posts and never tried anything like dropping bombs

The Intrepid was one of the Northern balloons, crewed by Prof. Thaddeus Lowe, a balloonist who offered his services to the war effort. The photo below shows him going up to spy on the rebels at the Battle of Seven Pines.

The first of the photos is of a different balloon. It makes for a nice series, though!