The last several days when I’ve tried to click on the link for Adam Hendel’s blog, I’ve gotten a message that indicates that it can’t be found on Blogger’s site. That means that it’s been deleted from Blogger’s system. As a result, I have deleted the link to it from this site. If anyone knows where Adam’s blog can be found, I will be happy to put up a new link.

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I’ve added a link to Michael Aubrecht’s blog, Pinstripe Press Blog. Michael is a regular reader of this blog, and I’ve enjoyed interacting with him.

There are two reasons why I haven’t added his blog previously.

First, and foremost, it’s only partially about the Civil War, and the Civil War posts often delve into religion, an area that, to be very honest, holds very little interest for me. However, Michael has some good and interesting insights, and I think that it’s appropriate for me to share those with you since I read them myself.

Second, it’s in part devoted to the New York Yankees, the greatest team money can buy. As someone who firmly believes that George Steinbrenner is, without any doubt at all, THE single worst thing to ever happen to the game of baseball (which is one of the great loves of my life), I despise the New York Yankees with a deep and abiding passion exceeded only by my hatred for the Dallas Cowboys and George W. Bush, which makes them all pretty poor company no matter how you slice it. I have an absolute and inviolable rule: no matter how much I might like a player, the instant he joins the Yankees, I MUST hate his guts. Thus, I find myself hating Bobby Abreu, whom I loved when he wore a Phillies uniform, and Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson, who was one of my very favorite players for many years until he sold out and signed with the Yankees. I can’t support or endorse anything associated with the Yankees.

So, Michael, I’ve added you as a link in the blogs I like section, but that only applies to the Civil War portion. However, until you develop better taste in baseball teams, I can’t endorse that aspect of your blog. 🙂

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One of my partners in the new law firm practices only in the realm of sports and entertainment law. In other words, he’s an agent. Most of his clients are NBA coaches, but he also works with some entertainers as well. He recently took on a new client, a female reporter at our local NBC affiliate.

Our law firm is brand new. It was only formed 90 days ago. The suburban community where we’re located has been trying to attract new business, so it wholeheartedly supported my partners when they decided to light there, offering goodies such as tax abatements and the like to sweeten the pot and make it worth their while to do so. The town fathers wanted to have a ribbon-cutting ceremony to celebrate our launch, which was held on Thursday night. We decided to make it a small open house, and invited some clients and friends.

Since the reporter had been in the office earlier today meeting with my partner, he invited her and her husband to the open house. I’d met her briefly earlier in the day, but was in something of a hurry and couldn’t do much more than have a brief conversation on my way to a meeting on the other side of town. When she and her husband came to the open house, we got to talk quite a bit more. I asked where she’d gone to college, and when she told me Virginia Tech, I asked if she had ever taken a course with either Bud Robertson or Jack Davis. She then mentioned that her first job had been with a station in the Harrisonburg, and I mentioned how much I love the Shenandoah Valley. With that, she got a big smile on her face.

It turns out that she is a native of the Shenandoah Valley and grew up in a town that was destroyed during Sheridan’s burning of the Valley in October 1864. Her father is a reenactor, and she told me in an e-mail tonight how much she likes the Cedar Creek battlefield and Belle Grove Plantation. It truly is a small world. Who’d have thunk it?

Everywhere I go, I meet people with fascinating connections to the Civil War. I think that’s what I enjoy most about my travels in the Civil War community, and why I love talking to the people I meet along the way. It’s what makes what I do rewarding.

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Although I’ve devoted most of my life to the study of the Civil War and I have visited lots of battlefields, there are still plenty I have never seen but definitely want to visit. That list includes, in no particular order:

1. Stones River
2. Pea Ridge
3. Champion Hill
4. Most of the battlefields around Atlanta (or what’s left of them, anyway)
5. Nashville (or what little bit is left of it)
6. Franklin
7. Brice’s Crossroads
8. Aiken, SC (site of another instance where Judson Kilpatrick was badly surprised and barely got out with his command intact)
9. Sailor’s Creek

And there’s one place that I’ve only visited once for a total of five hours–nothing remotely close to enough time to do it justice: Vicksburg.

There are other battlefields I’ve only visited once, but would like to see again in greater detail. They include, in no particular order:

1. Shiloh
2. Chickamauga
3. Most of the Seven Days
4. Perryville

These two lists pretty much reflect my eastern theater bias, don’t they?

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Ted Savas informed us today that the Stuart’s Ride book will ship from the printer tomorrow. At long last, we have a book!

For those who’ve expressed an interest in having a copy of this book, sit tight just a few days longer, and I will have books in hand.

I’m excited. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of this one, probably more than any other book I’ve ever written. I can’t wait to see the finished product.

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The Dahlgren bio is the first full-length biography that I’ve written solely on my own. That he died in combat at 21 years, 11 months made it relatively easy from the perspective of there being a very finite period of time to cover. The fact that I managed to get 100,000 words out of it should tell just how jam-packed this young man’s life actually was, and how much he accomplished in terms of military deeds in less than two years in the army.

So, the bigger question–as yet unanswered–is how much of a challenge it is going to be to tackle the life of someone who lived a long full life and accomplished many things in the years after the Civil War. Frankly, that’s something that I have never yet attempted.

I’ve previously mentioned my very long term interest in General David M. Gregg, who settled in my home town of Reading, Pennsylvania after the end of the Civil War. Gregg resigned his commission under some very uncertain circumstances in February 1865, just before the end of the war, and then settled in Reading. He lived until 1916, and reached the ripe old age of 83, and had a long and successful career after the war that included diplomatic service. There are two large collections of his papers–one at the Library of Congress and the other at the Berks County Historical Society in Reading, PA–and an unpublished memoir of the General’s pre-war service in the west written by his son. A biography of David Gregg presents a very different challenge than writing a biography of a young man who died in battle before his 22nd birthday, the primary difference being that Gregg’s life was not ensnarled in controversy like Dahlgren’s was.

Gregg has long needed a good full-length biography. There has only ever been one published, and it’s 22 years old, only 136 pages long, and self-published. I own a copy. It’s not a good book. Gregg deserves much better.

Some time ago, I decided to tackle a full-length biography of Gregg, and I’ve started the process of gathering material. It’s going to be a number of years before I’m ready to put pen to paper, but I’m looking forward to the challenge of trying to tackle his life.

The same thing holds true for Theodore J. Wint, except for one thing. Although Wint served in the Army for 43 years, there are no known collections of his papers to be found anywhere, whereas Gregg left a large legacy of writings in his own words. Trying to cobble together a full-length biography of Wint poses different challenges. Most of his career was spent fighting Indians under Ranald MacKenzie–something I know little about and will have to educate myself about–and then fought in Cuba, the Philippines, and in China during the Boxer Rebellion. In order to cover his life in detail, I’m going to have learn a great deal about a lot of things that I presently know next to nothing about.

So, it’s going to be a real challenge. But it’s one I welcome.

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When I choose the topics for my books, I do so understanding that they will often have limited commercial appeal. Let’s face it–a book about a cavalry battle that took place on the grounds of Fort Bragg in the closing days of the war will have a far more limited commercial appeal than, say, the 147th book devoted to Pickett’s Charge. I get that. It makes a certain amount of sense to me.

At the same time, I don’t do this to lose money, either. In a perfect world, I would actually make some decent money from one of these projects. The book on Stuart’s Ride seems to offer the best hope of really selling a lot of books and making some money of any project I have yet published.

I’ve already mentioned here that J. D. and I had put together a web site for the promotion and sale of the Stuart’s Ride book. However, Ted Savas, our publisher, pointed out to us that we’re not professional web designers and that neither of us really have the knowledge or tools to really create a slick, professional web site to sell our book. We’ve decided to spend some money and engage the services of a pro to develop the site for us, and he’s getting started this week. The book is supposed to ship from the printer next Tuesday, so there’s not a lot of time.

Ted put us in touch with Val Leolagi of Digital Architects, who has done some fine work for several of Ted’s authors. We’ve retained Val to do our site for us, and, once it’s done, I’m planning on hiring him to do an overhaul of my Rush’s Lancers website to not only continue to include the great content that’s there now, but also to majorly jazz it up as a means of promoting and selling my new regimental history of the Lancers. The web site has not had any sort of an update of any substance since Susan designed it in 1999. It would be really nice to make back some of the very large investment I’ve made into documenting the history of this regiment for the past twelve years, and I need every edge I can find to sell more copies of the book.

Stay tuned.

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Sean Dail posted a note on his blog today indicating that he had decided to shut down his blog for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is a distinct lack of time to devote to the task of regular blogging. I’ve known Sean for a long time, and I know him to be a smart and diligent student of the Late Unpleasantness, and I regret seeing him abandon blogging. However, I understand, and, as he has suggested, I will be removing the link to his blog that has graced the list on the right side of my blog for the past several months.

Please stay in touch, Sean. Your insights will be missed.

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I’m now in the process of tweaking and editing my own work. I typically prefer to get things down on paper and then do a lot of tweaking, editing, and rewriting as I go. I print out the manuscript and work off a hard copy. I will typically take three or four passes at it before entering the revisions into the computer. I use a different color ink for each pass in order to make it easy for me to tell when I’ve made a change. For this first pass at the Dahlgren manuscript, I’m using a green pen. The next pass will be red, the third pass will be in purple, and if I do a fourth pass at it, I will probably use black. When that process is completed, the work is then ready to be sent out for review and comment by a select group of friends who read virtually everything that I write.

My first drafts tend to be plagued by too much passive voice, and eradicating it and making those constructions active tends to be the focus of the first editing pass at the draft. The other drafts focus on fine-tuning and tightening things up. By the time I’ve gotten through my review process, I’ve pretty much done what I can do with the thing, as I can no longer even see problems any more.

I’m nearly finished with my first pass at the Dahlgren manuscript, and should finish that first pass tomorrow night. There’s plenty of green ink bleeding all over the manuscript, and I will definitely have my work cut out for me when the time comes to input all of the changes. I will then take a couple of days off and then pitch into my second pass.

By the time that this process is completed, I’m thoroughly sick and tired of the thing, largely incapable of even looking at it again for a while. It’s a good thing that it typically takes my readers a month or two to go through the draft and get it back to me, because I DEFINITELY need the time away from the manuscript.

I will keep everyone posted as to my progress.

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At the risk of sounding rude and/or ungrateful….

This is my blog. This is where I get to rant. You, my readers, also get to rant in the comments.

However, that privilege is not absolute. Nobody gets to make personal attacks in the comments, and nobody gets to shanghai them for their own agenda.

What I will not do is spend what little precious free time I have moderating my own blog. When I started this, that was never within the realm of contemplation, and I am not willing to do it. Likewise, the abuse of the comments section is not something that I will tolerate. My way of dealing with problems is to eliminate them. If the comments continue to be a problem, I will eliminate the problem by disabling the comments. That is neither subject to discussion nor appeal, nor are my decisions about how people are permitted to behave on my blog. I pay for this website. That means I get to make the rules. Bottom line.

Stuff like what transpired in the comments to the recent post on Dave Gaddy’s take on the Dahlgren controversy will NEVER happen again, or there will be no more comments.

End of story.

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