And Then There Were Three

In Sci Fi Agonistes III, I chatted about starting on the path toward Indie Publishing for my science fiction novelette, And on the Eighth Day.  As I continued to surf and read more about the process, I found a number of websites and books that have been extremely helpful, and I've mentioned them all in that earlier post.  I'll just say there are many, many, wonderful folks out there blogging and posting and linking great tips and guidelines, and you can really learn from them...so be sure to thank them as well.

So, here I am, exploring and making notes and nodding, "ah ha, didn't realize that," and wondering where to begin--not to mention how I'd be able to accomplish all that new work and still be able to do any writing, oh, and yeah, that other something called a job--when a good friend and fellow member of our fiction workshop, Michael Bloom, says over coffee one day, "How about we team up on doing the Indie thing and start our own boutique publishing company?"  Eureka!  "And let's see if George Evans wants to join us."  Double Bingo!

One by One

Last night, my wife and I were overwhelmed by a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the Palladium.  Britten, a pacifist, combined in telling fashion the latin mass for the dead with poems by Wilfred Owen, the poet best known for "Dulce et Decorum est."  Neither of us had heard the complete piece before, but we were excited since one of our daughters sings in the Symphonic Choir, a neighbor is principal flute in the Indianapolis Symphony, and my wife had trained many of the singers in the Indianapolis Children's Choir.  The work, for orchestra, chamber orchestra, chorus of over a hundred with three soloists, plus a children's choir, is a powerful and moving piece with its juxtaposition of the requiem mass and Owen's pacifist poems, and the audience sat in total silence for nearly a minute after the final "amen" died away.

This morning, those lingering motifs and words haunt me as I continue revising my manuscript, To Strike a Single Hour, a civil war novel intended to find a potential truth amid the puffery of P. T. Barnum's "Spy of the Cumberland," Pauline Cushman.  I've draped my narrative over a bare skeleton of the little known "facts" about the brave and steadfast heroine, a woman who, unlike "...the milk-and-water women of the day, whose only thought is of dress and amusement, but one of the women of old, whose soul was in their country's good..." threw herself, according to Barnum's commissioned vanity biography of her by F. L Sarmiento, into the breach with nary a hesitation.