Excellent point, and I appreciate your kind words.

The same things can be said of your work.

And I absolutely agree with you about not bothering if you’re not going to do it correctly. It’s the old “come big or stay home” approach to life. I’ve always been a come big kind of guy, not a stay home kind of guy.

I wish you had told me about your blog sooner. Not only would I have started reading sooner, I would have said something about it here.

Eric

Going to check out your blog and put a link on mine to it.

J.D.

I recently talked to someone who was going to write a book on the 28th North Carolina. I sent that person a large list of letters and theses that needed to be tracked down in order to write a thorough and useful text, and this person said s/he did not have the time to look at the materials. This person just wants to produce a very skimpy text with what is easy to access. Why bother writing the book if you are not willing to look at every single scrap of paper that you can lay your hands on?

Regards,
Michael C. Hardy
http://michaelchardy.blogspot.com
http://www.michaelchardy.com

Mark

As an example, some of my past magazine articles were written in, say, 5 or 6 hours. Take the “First Shot at Gettysburg” article in July 2005 ACW for instance. All my sources were at hand, and I know the subject intimately. Hell, I’ve been lecturing on it for decades. I wrote the piece in an afternoon and that was that.

It’s the same with our recent Stuart Ride book – we may have taken about a year and a half writing it (perhaps it would have taken others many times longer) but we’ve been going over the stuff since you and I were kids.

And I think your results speak for themselves. I truly doubt that anyone who knows you, and reads your work carefully, could never accuse you of “cranking ’em out” like others.

And I’d like to think the same applies to me 🙂

J.D.

Thanks for the post regarding Joe Wheeler. Always been interested in the Confederate Cavalry, especially the western theater.

Do you or anyone else have any comments on the two recent biographies of Wade Hampton?

Regards
Don H.

Eric

Give my best to the patient, When my mother use to say, “Everything happens for the best for those that loves the Lord.” I used to think, “I wish he had time to sit down and explain it to me.” Never said it. Just thought it.