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Ray’s Ruminations

Several weeks ago, my good Facebook friend, Gigi Estrella, aka Gigi Star, a radio personality who can be heard on 84.3iFM from Bacalod, Philippines, urged me to write a column for a local newspaper. Gigi can be heard at https://www.radionowonline.com/2018/04/listen-to-ifm-943-bacolod-video.html on Sunday mornings US time playing all the romantic oldies.

Promotion of my column in the print edition.
More promotion

But, I digress. I agreed to write the column, thinking it would be no big deal. First one appeared on line, looked good, so I decided to do four a month, and sent them along to the editor. What I didn’t know until today is that my column had been promoted in advance, and was also appearing in the print version of the paper in a very prominent position. Good things come in bunches. Last month I had seven of my titles in Amazon’s Top 100 best selling westerns and now I can call myself a newspaper columnist with an international audience. On top of everything else, they also promoted three of my westerns in the second column.

Now, ain’t that something to crow about?

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Bass Reeves is back in the saddle

Bass Reeves’ fans will be happy to know that the Adventures of Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves adventures that were published by Outlaws Publishing, a publisher who unfortunately went out of business, are now being reissued by Longhorn Publishing thanks to the heroic efforts of Outlaws’ former publisher J.C. Hulsey.

These are just a few of the old titles that have been reissued and are available for Kindle on Amazon.com for the amazing price of just 99 cents, along with my other westerns which I’m sure you’ll enjoy. Not to worry; more are coming, including a couple of new ones that I had been working on before Outlaw Publishing’s demise.

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History versus Heritage

While I usually only write here about books and writing, current events are such, and the debate so rancorous, I felt compelled to share my thoughts, especially on the issue of preserving Confederate generals’ names on some of our most important army bases, and the President’s childish petulance over bipartisan agreement that they should be removed. He talks about maintaining an American heritage. Is he talking about the heritage we should all want to preserve and pass on to our descendants? I hope not. Here’s what I had to say about that:

The United States is currently in a full-blown crisis; actually, two full-blown crises.

      In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has yet to run its course, we face the crisis of a rising awareness among a significant number of Americans that we need to take a long, hard look at how we treat our nation’s history, especially the history of race relations. The latter is playing out in an often-rancorous public debate about the status of symbols of the short-lived Confederate States of America, its flag, statues of its leaders, and the names of Confederate generals currently designating 10 army posts in the American south.

      Those opposed to removing these symbols from public display, including the President, argue that they are symbols of our American heritage, and removing them erases our history. Such arguments show a lack of understanding of the difference between heritage and history.

      Dictionaries define ‘history’ as an account and analysis of past events, while ‘heritage’ is defined as something that is handed down from the past that shows characteristics, culture, and tradition; in effect a nation’s birthright.

      I do not argue that these symbols illustrate a heritage, nor that they are not a part of this country’s history. But I do wonder if they illustrate the heritage that we wish to claim as a ‘birthright,’ or a history that we wish to celebrate.

      Leaders of the confederacy took up arms against the United States, and one of the motivations behind this act was the desire to preserve the peculiar institution of human slavery. Those military officers, many of them graduates of West Point, and active duty officers at the time, violated their oaths of office, and, in the words of some of our current serving and retired military officers, committed treason. There is no euphemistic way to put it. No matter how agonizing their decision to do so was, they committed treason.

      Is this the heritage we want our brave men and women in uniform to consider as their own? As a 20-year army veteran, my response to that question is an unequivocal NO. Our country deserves better; our young people deserve better. Our President should know better.

      I am not calling for history to be erased. These symbols are a part of our history, and they should be in museums or private collections where historical relics belong. They should not be on or in public institutions such as schools or federal military installations.

      Contrary to the President’s assertions, these symbols do not stand for Winning, Victory, and Freedom. For my ancestors, they stand for Slavery, and for the men and women of today’s military, whose mission is to Win wars, they stand for Betrayal and Loss, and in the case of some of those who have been honored by their names on our most famous posts, Incompetence and Recklessness. Is this the heritage we wish to bequeath to the younger generation, the history we wish to honor? I think not.

      Anyone who truly loves this country should wish to see it live up to the promises implied by our founding documents.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

      The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution describe the kind of heritage we should be striving for. Sure, many of the Founding Fathers, following the practice of the times, were slaveholders, but a deep dive into the background of the colonial independence movement indicates that most of them realized that the peculiar institution, as slavery was sometimes called, was at odds with what they were fighting for. They were looking toward the future, while today’s leadership seems fixated on looking at a romanticized and distorted past.

      History doesn’t stand still. Today’s events will be tomorrow’s history. We can delete or ignore the chronicles of historical events, but we can’t actually erase history. Those events have happened, and had an impact on those living at that time. We might try to forget them, but they will have happened, and nothing can change that.

       Heritage can also change, or perhaps it’s better to say that our idea of our heritage can evolve over time. As we look back on our past, we should try to understand our history, good and bad. The former to help us better understand our true heritage, the latter to avoid repeating our past mistakes.

      All Americans who love their country should commit themselves to preserving those elements of our history that portray our better angels, for those are t he elements that make up a heritage worth preserving. We should insist that our political leaders do the same, or elect ones who will.

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Finding Your Zone

Whether you’re playing golf or writing the next Great American Novel, you will, on occasion find yourself transported to a mental realm where everything just seems to click into place. You perform almost in a kind of ‘out-of-body’ way. This condition is called being ‘in the zone,’ and it often results in outstanding performance.

            As writers, I’m sure we’d all like to be ‘in the zone’ every time we sit down at the keyboard, or pick up a pen and notepad. We want our muse to guide us to that place where the right words just flow with ease. News flash! In my more than fifty years of writing I’ve learned that the muse ‘don’t work like that.’ Getting into the zone, whether you’re playing golf or writing, is something you have to do for yourself. Here’s how I finally learned how to do it.

            When I write fiction, I approach the story as if it’s a movie. I picture in my mind what the characters are doing and saying, and why, and then convert those mental visions to words. For example, I introduce a new character, a garishly dressed fat man. Now, I could use hundreds of words to describe him and my protagonist’s reaction to him, but think about it; when you watch a movie, you get a quick look at a character and based on quickly-seen visual and auditory cues, you develop an attitude about that character. So, let’s take the aforementioned fat man. Here’s one way I might introduce him: “He waddled into the room, his man boobs jiggling under the green and black shirt he wore open to his sternum.” Do you have an image of this character in your mind from those words? You probably do, and you probably have some not-so positive vibes coming off him. See; all those words of description are not needed, and you can keep going with the story.

            When I write like that, I’m not working off some detailed plan, and often I’ve written the words without a lot of conscious thought—after all, I’m just describing what I saw in my mind.

            Working this way, I often knock out five to six thousand words a day when nothing happens to pull me from my computer. Sometimes, I go back and rework a passage after giving it some thought, but mostly I just look for those pesky typos that creep into your writing when you’re just banging out words. That’s okay, it’s the editing and rewriting that makes great prose even greater.

            One other thing that might not sound like a sophisticated creative technique, but which works for me; I write every day. Sometimes it’s just entries in one of the many journals I keep, sometimes it’s a piece of nonfiction, like this present missive, but always, without fail, I generate words into sentences into paragraphs to the tune of about 2,000 words per day. That keeps the mental muscles facile.

            The other thing I do to facilitate getting into the zone when I write, is I take breaks. Lots of breaks. I will write for two to three hours, and then I’ll grab my camera and go for a walk, or work a crossword puzzle, or even go to my mat and do some resistance band exercises. What does that have to do with improving your mental ability to write better, you ask? A lot, I say. It’s been shown that exercise not only improves your physical body and mood, but it does positive things to your mind. That old, ‘healthy mind in a healthy body,’ adage is real.

            Okay, that’s it. Just a few short words to help you jump start your writing in 2020. And, before I sign off, I hope 2020 will be a productive writing year for all of you.

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Calabash Crossing’s Sheriff dressed to kill

My series Sheriff B.J. Kincaid, is about a young woman who wrangles her way into the job of sheriff of her home town, Calabash Crossing, Arizona–the town, by the way, is fictional. The first printing had some pretty good covers, but they’re being reissued with new covers. There was a bit of a glitch when someone in the editorial and art departments forgot that B.J. is not a man–minor issue that is being fixed–but if I may be so bold, it’s a western series you don’t want to miss.

If you want to catch up quickly, the first four stories are now available in one volume (for a great price). The Blazing Guns of the Lawman Kincaid (see what I mean about the gender confusion) is on Amazon. Get yours today.

Guns of the Lawman Kincaid

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