Mason of the Bar X

Some books a person remembers for a long time. They bear reading and rereading. Others are kind of middle of the road. Some, a body has to wonder how they got published. Mason's the latter.

This was published in 1920. The Virginian had been around for years. Zane Grey, Max Brand, and B.M. Bower were writing. Mason reads like a six-reeler from the picture show.

Jack Mason, the scion of a banking millionaire, gets the choice of going to Dad's old friend's ranch and making good or getting disinherited for his scapegrace ways. This is kind of standard opening number 28 for westerns. In the better ones, Jack would go west, learn how to be a cowboy and a man, maybe fight a grass fire, deal with a stampede or two, track down some rustlers, and win the love of the beautiful daughter of the rancher.

In this one, Jack hangs around the house, and fiddles with his motor car. Josephine, the beautiful daughter falls for him right off the bat, but at least she tries to keep him jealous until the end. Every time she goes riding without an escort she gets kidnapped by the bad guy, who intends to force her to marry him. She says things like "You beast!" The beautiful Mexican girl is named Waneda and addresses Jack as Signor. She seemingly manages to fall in love with him at a glance. There's a Marshal who's a Master of Disguise. He shows up at the ranch, says he had to come west for his health, and would the old man mind if he stayed at the ranch. Sure. No "who sent you," no questioning of bona fides. One character, Percy, shows up when Mom and sister Ethel come to visit and has no significance except maybe comic relief. Jack's aviator friend flies in, finds the kidnapped girls by coincidence, then flies out.

This is the sort of book you read with your mouth open, stunned by the awkward, complicated plot, the lack of motivation, the lack of work it takes to run the ranch, and generally how bad the book is. It's actually so bad it's to be treasured.

Nellie Moriarty

Nellie is published on Smashwords. I changed the title from Sweet Nell to Nellie Moriarty because of the identification of Sweet Nell with Nell Gwynne. I changed the cover to a Poconos scene instead of Afghanistan. It's just short of 77,000 words, by Smashwords' count.

I feel like this might be my best book yet. I think I've painted Nell as a human character, not as a damsel in distress. Her feelings and her thoughts are rational for the person she is. Quincy might be a little bit too Country Prince Charming, but I think he's pretty human too. He's looking at content, not container. Both characters might be a little old-fashioned in outlook, but I'm pretty old-fashioned myself.

Sweet Nell

Sweet Nell isn't quite finished yet -- almost there, but not quite. It's around 72,000 words, and I doubt greatly it will reach 80,000. I had a slight case of writer's block as I was reaching the end. I had two alternative endings, one of them too abrupt and the other one a potential second half that would have been another 60,000 words to resolve. I went back, added a chapter in the middle and that fixed the too abrupt ending. I took part of the second ending, and rather than following it all the way down the road to a tedious resolution I just used it to finish the other thread, rather neatly, I think.

I'll go through the whole thing another time or two, to take out a few of the repeats, or to try and smooth them over. Nellie spends lots of time dwelling on her problems, and the problems are the same ones: her missing arm, her missing leg, her scars, and her self-image. Considering that it's a story about an attractive woman whose husband rejects her after her physical trauma as a pilot in a combat zone, she kind of has to spend a lot of time agonizing over the same things; her entire persona is wrapped up in them.

I like her though. She's a tough babe and she's been through a lot. She's got guts. She's just trying to be tougher than it's possible for a normal person to be. She's like lots of vets: she's reluctant to rely on other people. Having her home knocked out from under her -- her husband is a slimy lawyer who dumps her cat while she's deployed in a combat zone, then has multiple affairs while she's in rehab -- reinforces that tendency.

Nellie ends up Going Home to Mother. She moves back into the room she occupied as a girl. Her brother takes her out with his girlfriend and their friends for a night at a beer joint, where she meets Quincy Holmes. Naturally, if I was going to write a love story involving Holmes, Nellie's maiden name had to be Moriarty. So I could write a story about a Dustoff pilot and one of her former transports, set it in the Poconos where most of my other novels are set, use existing characters from the other books, and come up with something new.

I've consciously made it a very lower-middle class story. Quincy and Nellie grew up in the same town, a year apart in school. She went to Penn State, he went into the Marines. He's working framing houses, her brother Todd's stuck laboring for a bricklayer, and his girlfriend's a horny hairdresser. Quincy and Todd get into a fistfight with a couple dirtbags the first time they take Nellie out. He takes her to a hog slaughter on a "date." Quincy and Todd do under the table work for Pete the Plumber, and strike a fountain of shit when a slumlord want to unblock a sewer line on the cheap. (Pete says "Smells like money to me, boys!" -- true story.) Quincy buys the house both he and Nell separately grew up wanting to live in, a 1600 square foot rancher built in the 1930s. They have advice from other people, some of them wealthy, but they're the ones who solve their problems, and they're the ones who'll make a success of themselves.

Now I've got a bit of cleanup to do. I'm not a helicopter pilot, and I've never been one. I've never worked in Medevac. I've never been to Afghanistan. I crewed (didn't pilot) on fixed-wing aircraft in Vietnam. I worked with the Marines, but I was in the Army. I was an EMT in my younger days, but not an Army medic. Probably my terminology and my references are slightly (if not wildly) off.

I've never, thankfully, been an amputee. I got to thinking about the problems amputees face listening to Mary Dague's talk to a VA group. I've done research with the help of Google on artificial limbs, but as far as I know, Nellie is a member of a small to non-existent group of right arm-right leg ATE-ATK amputees. I've had to do a lot of theorizing on how she would cope with life, and probably I've gotten lots of details wrong. It would be nice if I could find a Dustoff pilot, a double amputee, a current Marine NCO, a small farmer, and probably a few other people with specialized knowledge that I lack as proof readers.

The photo for the (first hack) cover is a modification of a DoD photo of Dustoff operations at Camp Blessing in Afghanistan. I don't know at this point if I'm going to go with that idea or if I'll emphasize the amputee aspect.