Dac Crossley's Western Blog

Watching the News from Washington

It’s something I’d just as soon avoid, all that breaking news from Washington, but it’s the only thing on TV right now. Looks like we need a miracle to resolve the impasse I keep watching on the tube.

And I thought – they really need some Texas politics. After all, Texas is the home of political miracles.

Remember the time an entire South Texas graveyard got up and marched to the courthouse and voted for a future President? All using the same pen and writing in the same hand? Miraculous!

Or the year when the Amarillo Globe published a headline describing the Texas legislature: HALF THE LEGISLATURE ARE CROOKS! This headline caused so much consternation in Austin that a demand was made: Retract that statement!

Miraculously, a retraction was offered. The next day’s headline read: HALF THE LEGISLATURE ARE NOT CROOKS!

History does not record whether the legislature was mollified by that retraction.

Where is our Washington miracle? If I quit laughing I might start to weep.

No serious commentary, please; keep it light.

Dac Crossley
July 29, 2011

“There are few things in life more liberating than having your worst fear realized.” – Conan O’Brien

A Book In Hand Is Worth --

Last weekend we had the Harriette Austin Writer’s Conference here in Athens, Georgia. I came away with the impression of – not just a good experience, but a genuinely happy one.

Writer’s conferences give authors a chance to learn techniques of the trade. But especially, we want to meet with agents and editors, have our words measured by experts, and (hopefully) find an avenue to publication. It rarely works. Writers are a shy bunch, often reluctant to push themselves at aloof professionals. A few authors strike it lucky. Some us leave the conference smarting from harsh evaluations. Suffering from that depressing sense of rejection.

At least that’s my impression of writer's conferences. But this one was different. I sensed a generally happy mood throughout this year’s Conference. Why was it different?

For one thing, this year’s Conference was smaller. About a hundred attendees, half the usual number, and easier to rub elbows and make new acquaintances. Less structured, somehow.

The other thing – well, there are new opportunities for publishing our works. The world is shifting under our feet. Opportunities for self-publication are opening doors for everyone. Traditional bookstores, large ones and small, are vanishing. One speaker said to me, “If you do get your book published, who will you get to sell it?” Well, Amazon, of course!

The elephant in the room is electronic publication. E-books. For a few dollars you can publish your book electronically and have it available on Kindle (Amazon) or the Nook (Barnes and Noble), or any of 25 other readers. No questions asked. Readers buy it online. Money deposited in your account.

So we come away from the Conference with the assurance that somehow our stories will be told, our efforts appreciated. Handshakes all around, exchange of e-mail addresses, promises of mutual support.

Wait till next year!

Dac Crossley
July 26, 2011
“The world is full of people whose notion of a satisfactory future is, in fact, a return to an idealized past.” – Robertson Davies.

The Music Man

Turner Classic Movies, my favorite TV channel, showed The Music Man the other day. It is Meredith Wilson’s tribute to John Phillip Sousa the “March King,” an old classic and I dropped everything to enjoy it again. Robert Preston and “Trouble in River City.” His best part ever.

Growing up in rural South Texas we had music aplenty from various traditions. Phonographs (is that now an archaic word?) and two-sided records. My grandmother’s Edison (now, that IS archaic) and those thick, heavy disks. Classical, music, popular, country, we had it all.

Especially regional music – I guess that’s what you’d call it. Bob Wills, of course. And Czech bands like Adolph Hofner and his Boys. I could get WOAI from San Antonio – 120 on the dial on my refurbished Atwater Kent radio.

Swing band music, the big bands, intruded on us small-town Texans starting about 1940. It reached us in the movies and then in the record shops. We shoved aside country music to make room for the big bands. Those arrangements soon appeared in local groups, such as The Lamplighters over at A&I College. Real dance music, and dancing like they did in the movies, not that country stuff.

Have we circled back to our roots now? My little city here in Georgia is full of musicians of all types, youngsters with energy and talent and ambition. Old country music and bluegrass, new jazz and some old. Music is local again, even with downloads and iTunes.

What are they playing in South Texas?

Dac Crossley
July 21, 2011.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to recreate oneself endlessly.” – Henri Bergson.

Gone With The Wind?

Recently, PBS aired a biography of Margaret Mitchell, author of the blockbuster novel Gone with the Wind. A long (1,000 pages) romantic tale set in the South during the Civil War and the period of Reconstruction, it called attention to a genre of Southern literature.

I watched my mother read Gone With the Wind back in 1937. She was cleaning our little house out on West Kennedy in Kingsville, Texas. She’d sweep for a minute and then turn back to the kitchen table where the book lay. She’d read a page and then go back to sweeping.

Some of mother’s ancestors were Old South, from Virginia and Louisiana. They lost all during the Civil War and migrated to East Texas to start over. Margaret Mitchell’s descriptions of plantation life intrigued my mother, who’d heard family tales of slavery days (most of which weren’t passed on to me).

The PBS program piqued my curiosity. I downloaded a free e-book copy of GWTW and struggled through it.

It’s a terrible book. Extremely verbose with a weak plot – it really is a romance, not a war story at all. Most disturbing to me is Mitchell’s description of Blacks. She was writing in the early 1930’s in a Jim Crow period, and perhaps expressing the sentiments of her times, but even so I don’t recommend reading it.

GWTW remains a problem for southern writers who must contend with its fame. The Civil War still hangs like a pall over the South. Georgia’s premiere author, Philip Lee Williams, remarked to me, “Dac, you Westerners got over the Civil War. We never have.”

Okay, so now I’ve ordered a copy of the anti-GWTW: “The Wind Done Gone.”

Margaret Mitchell was struck by an automobile in downtown Atlanta and killed in 1947. Just a few blocks away, a teenage Martin Luther King was growing to manhood. Distance is measured in more than miles.

Dac Crossley
7/17/2011.

“Everyone has his day, and some days last longer than others.” – Winston Churchill.

Season of the Spiders?

Comes July, and the spiders are grown up and spinning. Remember those golden garden spiders hanging upside down in their large webs, in the bushes beside the house? We kids called them “writing spiders” because the white patterns in the center of the web looked like big letter “W.” And the little girl next door would tell you, if the spider wrote your name in its web, something bad would happen to you. (Wonder whatever happened to that nasty little girl?)

In the vegetable garden, among the pepper and tomato plants, you could run smack into the web of one of those mean-looking little spiny-backed spiders. Wipe the web off your face. Where did the spider go? Is it in my hair?

Back in the garden shed, reaching for a hoe handle, you’d poke your hand into a tangled web. Hey, could it be a dangerous fiddle-back spider? No, there it sits in the web, a long-legged cellar spider. Brush the web off your hand. Look loser. No, its not a daddy-log-legs.

Under the porch light at night, a big wolf spider feeds on a cricket that got too close. That one will bite, I know from experience. (It used to be called “Lycosa.” Now, it’s “Hogna.” Why must those names change?)

This hasn’t been a good year for spiders, here in Georgia. I don’t see the garden spiders I’m used to. Too dry, too hot in June when they’re growing up?

I’ll keep watching.

(By the way – thanks to all for encouraging me to proceed with the Lifetime TV interview. I’ll go to Florida for taping on August 1st. Stay tuned – as they say).

Dac Crossley
July 9, 2011

With spiders I have friendship made,
And watched them in their sullen trade. – Lord Byron

A Television Interview?

What’s a TV interview worth for an aspiring writer?

I had a call from a producer working on the Lifetime Television Network. An opportunity to be interviewed on their early morning program, The Balancing Act. To discuss my latest western novel, Escape from the Alamo.

Heart-stopping! Details to be settled sometime in the next few days. I signed a “Product Insertion Order.”

Here’s the rub – There’s a “scheduling fee.”

Some of my writer friends thought I should pass it by. Don’t pay anything for an interview, they said. It’s not a major network. What you are doing is an infomercial.

Others pointed out that you have to pay for advertising. This is national TV. Great exposure. Go for it!

I plan to go ahead with this one, pending on the final details. Fly to Florida and be taped in their studio.

Skeptics ask – Do you expect to see an immediate jump in book sales? If not, you’ve wasted your money. I reply that there may be long-range benefits to that kind of exposure, even if it doesn’t pay off in the short term.

So, winner or loser? My friends, what’s your advice? Breakthrough or waste of money?

I’ll let you know if and when this interview will be aired. Keep your fingers crossed.

Dac Crossley
July 5, 2011

The six most important words an author may say: “Nice to see you again, Oprah.” – Dan Poynter’s Self-Publishing Manual.