Location Scout #3: Castroville

Ever since I realized the part played by cotton speculators in the lesbian western I've known that part of my story would have to be set there. Not until yesterday did I realize how hard it would be not to set half the book there.

My Reverend Mom lives in Medina County, further west than my characters have any reason to go during the course of the plot (AFAIK!), so I met her in Houston Square and we walked around a bit. The original plan was to do the Historic Walking Tour, but we quickly realized the limitations of the tour for my purposes. We spent quite a bit of the morning at the Landmark Inn, in Len's day a gristmill, general store, and residence occupied by John and Rowena Vance, a couple not without prominence in San Antonio history, too. Between us, and with the assistance of the locals and the signage (though the signage has some problems; according to one historical marker, Henri Castro died in 1861; to another, in 1865) we figured out how the San Antonio Road ran, where Len would have come into town from Geronimo, and which places she would visit once she got there. Rev. Mom also helped me work out how Len gets the corpse onto Bean in the first place - the practicality of that part bothered her a lot.

Yes, writing is a solitary profession and can lead you to neglect your family; but it's good to talk through difficulties with someone else once in awhile. Usually my husband gets stuck with this part, but it's good to spread the intellectual puzzlement around.

After a picnic down by the dam (also attended by ants and a tiny empidonax flycatcher), Mom decided she'd done all she could, so I walked her back to Houston Square and started again, making notes about the original priest's house, the Catholic church (annoyingly, the first and third ones still stand, but only a photograph of the one Len saw remains), and the course of the roads before starting the tour again. I was delightfully hung up at the Old Alsatian Steakhouse, where the owners (of the restaurant, not the property) were happy to sort out for me which part of the building was standing when and to show me the barbeque pit that's going to be an archeological site next month.

By 3:00 in the afternoon, my notebook and the booklet with the walking tour map in it were both scribbled up with illegible notes, my feet were sore, my water was almost gone, I was cross-eyed from looking at early Castroville architecture, I had names and even e-mail addresses for people I need to talk to, and I knew where and when the next Conservation Society meeting was, should I decide to crash it. I think I sat for a half an hour on the bench in front of Tour House #31, Hans Meat Market, which wasn't even relevant since it wasn't built till 1910; but it has a view of the saloon across from the courthouse where Len will go to report the crime and also happened to be where my feet gave out. I was only halfway through the tour sites on the north side of the highway - for now, at least, the only ones beside the Landmark Inn that matter - but I'd come to the end of my ability.

Well, almost. I realized, looking through the places I'd managed to miss even though I'd walked right by them, that a Certain Person would be well-known at the Tarde Hotel, if it was in fact operating as a hotel at that time. And why wouldn't it be? Frederick Law Olmstead had declared it the best hotel he stayed in during his travels through Texas in the mid-50s, and the Mexican traffic would have been heavy enough to support any number of hotels, assuming that military personnel, merchants, and officials accompanied the actual cotton trains (which presumably camped on the edge of town) in anything like a reasonable proportion. So I managed to stagger by for a look at it before returning to Moby, locating a convenience store, renewing my fluids, and leaving town.

I will go back and intend to take my husband at least once. I owe it to the Old Alsatian Steakhouse to bring them some business and need to speak to them again. Possibly this weekend, though I'm also supposed to go to Belton on Saturday, where Mike Collins of Gault is having a signing for his new book. Clovis Technology , by Bruce Bradley, Michael B Collins, & Andrew Hemmings, is a technical work, but if you're into that kind of thing, the signing's 2:00 to 4:00 PM Saturday, May 15, at the Bell County Museum in Belton. I may have to ditch Pleistocene archeology for Civil War archeology in June, if I can get in with that dig; but that doesn't excuse my falling behind!

Once again I have more things to do than I am physically capable of doing. Crashing that Conservation Society meeting would have made contacts of the sort I'm going to need in order to find out what I need to know; but I would have had to stay late in Castroville and was not at all sure I could make a good first impression. So I decided against it. Now I have to follow up those leads, organize my notes, plan the Belton trip - and oh, yes, clean my house, cook my low-sodium meals, feed birds and cats and husband, keep on the right side of code compliance in my - ahem - wildscaped yard, update this blog, and make some headway on the, um, six sewing projects I want to do before August.

I didn't do any of that this morning. I wrote on the story. Because everything else is organized around that, and if I lose sight of the needs of the story, I'll be spinning my wheels and wearing myself out to no purpose.

Sometimes I compare myself with the truly dedicated people who have made the great contributions to art, science, and various other passions, and feel how little I measure up. But that only makes me more tired, just when I ought to feel energized. Much better to take half an hour off to let the brain unsnarl, and then pick a job and get back to work.

Querying the History of Feet

Yesterday I was busy writing and going to the library; today I was busy going back to Castroville. I am much too tired to write about that now. But my feet hurt just from walking around town in SAS shoes, and I find myself pondering this question:

So, after she wangles the corpse over the back of her pony Bean, Len will pretty much have to walk to Castroville. Even if she picks up a cart from one of the families living between the crime scene and the San Antonio Road (which is far from a given), it'll probably be a small one she has to lead, not a big one she can ride. So what is she wearing on her feet, and in what ways will they be excruciatingly painful when she rides up to the door of the gristmill with her grisly load?

At the moment I think her choices are mocassins and wooden-soled shoes like the ones I saw at the Frontier Times Museum. Mocassins would be marginally better as long as she didn't put her foot wrong on a rock and bruise it, because wooden soles don't flex; but she was expecting to ride all her long distances and I'm not sure a mocassin is suitable for long rides with stirrups. Cowboy boots have highish heels for a reason, after all.

I have a horse-knowledgeable friend about whom I will consult on this and all other questions related to Bean, but I'm not at all sure she'd know the answer to this one.

And yes, this will keep me awake tonight. That and the caffeine I drank to get me through today. And the buzzing of unprocessed data overload. A researcher's life is a hard one, but I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, Fred.

Idea Garage Sale: Married to a Contactee

Although the first UFO abduction was documented in 1966 by John G. Fuller in The Interrupted Journey: Two Lost Hours "Aboard a Flying Saucer," concerning the Betty and Barney Hill case, as long ago as the early 80s the big names in UFOology were still contactees - people who claimed direct contact with "space brothers" bringing messages of peace, love, and how we better shape up or ship out. Folks like George Adamski and Billy Meier met tall, slender aliens who resembled Tolkien elves, received messages, wrote books, took UFO pictures, and acted a lot like gurus.

The trip to Medina Lake jogged my memory of a book I considered writing way back in those days, before anal probes and therapy and little gray aliens with big eyes. I had been reading a book about Billy Meier, and how his UFO photos, contact stories, and non-profit foundation changed his lifestyle. Sorry, but that's what I chiefly remember! He attracted followers who filled his home, and his wife was placed under a lot of stress - I particularly remember one scene where she had a strong hysterical episode and was taken care of by one of the followers, with whom she had no common language. Money came in via the UFOs; but I was struck by how isolated, silent, bewildered, and marginalized this woman was in the midst of all this fuss. Did she believe her husband? The overwhelming impression I was getting is that he was faking for profit, but that he hadn't confided in her; that in fact he seldom told her anything. And when we went to visit one of my husband's co-workers on Medina Lake, I found myself looking at the setting for this novel.

It was a brilliant psychological thriller, if I say so myself - at least the shining perfect version in my head was. You'd have a standard working class Texas family living, not on the expensive waterfront, but in one of the small communities fringing the lake. Like my husband's co-worker, the family would own a small former vacation cottage, in need of a great deal of work to make it comfortable year round. If I recall correctly, this cottage had no insulation; windows opened by being pushed straight up into the wall above them; and space was at such a premium that one child essentially slept in a closet, with her clothes hanging above her. Unlike the co-worker, however, my characters would not be getting by.

The husband would be suffering from some disability and the wife would be working too hard to bring in less money than they needed to cover medical bills (no insurance!) and fix the house. They would be under tremendous financial pressure and desperate for a way out. The husband would spend more and more time out of the house; and one day would start bringing home UFO pictures and strange stories. He'd publish these and, with some canny publicity, become one of the contactee gurus, complete with book, news interviews, followers showing up on the doorstep, fame, suspicion, and fortune.

The POV character would be the wife. The husband always tells her the same stories he tells everyone else. The money is good, he's always been a good husband, and she loves him - she has to believe him. Yet, the stories are so far outside her experience she can't wrap her mind around them, and she never quite manages to see a UFO or an alien for herself - she finds believing him impossible. Strangers fill her house, making work for her and interfering with her children; strangers build a new room for her daughter, load her husband with enough money to get out of debt, tell her he's brilliant. He evades confrontation and behaves as if the most bizarre events are normal as a walk in the park. He develops relationships with female followers that seem closer than his with her; yet if he's lying, he's probably lying to them even more. Over time she will find evidence that he's faking, but he has a plausible explanation for everything and acts bewildered and hurt when she questions him. Is he crazy? Is she? What is all of this doing to her children?

One of the characters would be an investigator with whom she gets closer as the rift with her husband widens, but she was not going to cheat on her husband. The investigator would show her evidence - models perhaps - that would convince her that her husband was lying to her; but in the climax, a flood he predicted and in which he behaves heroically, alternate explanations for the evidence would arise, and the husband would disappear, permanently, leaving her more financially secure, and less certain of what was real and what wasn't than ever. The ending would make readers across America throw their books across the room in disgust, but they'd never be able to shake it.

I didn't write this for a number of reasons. At the time I conceived it, I could tell it was way too ambitious. For one thing, I wasn't even married yet (my husband and I were together five years before we did that). Though I had once been involved with a man I realized afterward was an habitual liar, who made unprovable claims every bit as weird and grandiose as the husband in this book, I knew enough to know that marriage is different, especially once you have kids, and that I would be dealing with complex, intense emotions that were way outside my experience.

The motivation to believe unbelievable things said by certain people is powerful, whether that person is spouse, parent, lover, or mentor. That was the idea that interested me most - the faith we invest in other human beings, and how far that can be tested before we break. It would be 20 years before I could approach this matter as more than an intellectual exercise; and in the meantime, I discovered that this isn't my sort of book. It would have to be dense, psychological, dark, and intense. Worst, it would be an adult book. All the concerns in it are adult concerns. The necessary style and approach to character would be suitable for adults, not children or teen-agers. I don't even read these books anymore. I sure wouldn't know how to peddle it. I could easily spend two years of my life writing this and never circulate it because the idea of breaking into the adult novel market didn't appeal to me.

I suppose I could rework the story from the POV of one of the children, but I find I can't get into it. The thing is, the wife's story is the specific one that attracted me. The children would be under tremendous strain for similar reasons; but ultimately they aren't responsible for their father or the financial well-being of the family. Their mother is. And whereas the kids have no choice about being the children of their parents, their mother gets up every morning and chooses anew whether to remain her husband's spouse.

We all have our limitations. I believe I know mine.

Location Scout #2: Medina County

Almost as soon as I get past the shadow of the I-35 heading south and west of downtown I begin to feel the sky opening up into the South Texas plain. It's hard to judge how far west the city extended in the days I'm thinking of. It's tempting to cut off the town at the present interstate highways running down either side of it, 10/35 on the west and 37 on the east. Mauermann's map encourages me to do so, extending only as far as Pecan in the east and with Laredo the last named street to the west; but since historically these areas are the "black" and "Mexican" parts of town, respectively, and since numerous important sites are indicated off the edges of the map, I'm disinclined to take it at face value. The area west of San Fernando, per one source, was called "Laredito" during the relevant period; and west of Laredo Mauermann shows two distinct streets (modern Santa Rosa and San Saba, I think), numerous tracks, clusters of buildings, the "Dutch windmill," and the plain where Gen. Sheridan reviewed troops. My 1852 plat map also lays out much of the area inside modern Loop 410, with small townlots not giving way to larger lots till west of Alazan Creek. My impression is that the town became less townlike and more villagelike out this way, and that I should mentally replace the present lively cultural life represented by the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center and the giant votive candle with an equally lively suburban life of market gardens, jacales, and a working class that (if we may believe all the accounts of nightly fandangos from this period) also knew how to party hard.

Anyway, I was going somewhere with this, and that's Castroville. The Old Castroville Road loses its identity and merges with U.S. Hwy. 90 at Callaghan Road, within site of Wilford Hall, the tallest portion of Lackland AFB, and it doesn't take long after that to feel that you've "left town." The south side doesn't sprawl nearly as much as the north side (which is a shame, because there's less aquifer to interfere with out there) and though technically you're not out of town till you pass 1604, functionally the border is still 410. This is rolling prairie, not rolling hills, and its beauties require a more trained and subtle eye willing to see a good long way. I like it, myself. The flowers were overwhelmingly yellow and the sky was overwhelmingly blue.

Although technically Castroville was an information stop to get local maps and information to assist me in getting as close as possible to the old Mormon settlement shown on my mid-19th-century county map, I spent a lot more time there than I meant to. Medina County presents a more diffuse historical presence to the visitor than Bandera did - not that local history isn't being done, or that tourist interest is not sought, but that it has no central depository and no single figure that automatically draws the eye. The online presence is negligible, and has no central building. I've received no reply from the first e-mail I sent and the Chamber of Commerce had no contact information to give me. The historical walking tour is on my List of Things to Do, and if I spent too long at Koenig Park blame the barred owls (two of them!) that all by themselves made the day worthwhile. The librarian with the son in Mico and the Chamber of Commerce maps agreed that getting around the west side of Lake Medina was not practical, but were a big help in sorting out what series of county roads to follow.

To approximate the route to the Mormon settlement, take 471 north from Castroville. This is open prairie, with a fringe of hills cutting off the far distance to the west. At Rio Medina, turn west to cross the river on 2676. This bend is shown clearly on the 19th-century map and I presume the river at this point is fordable, but the bridge feels so high above the river and I had already spent so much more time than I intended that I didn't get a good look at. I did not stop in Rio Medina on the way up; and on the way back the "lady who knows," Bonnie Jaks, wasn't at the general store, so I'm still not sure whether Len would meet any real people on her way through here; however, I'll find out.

The Medina River at this point is a boundary line - once across it, you're in the Hill Country. Turn north again at the first right turn you come to. This is CR 271 and will be your lifeline. The road is narrow, with a marge of wildflowers - Indian blanket mostly right now - and then cedar/live oak scrub with some mesquite. The open sky prairie is gone, and I'm afraid I didn't see as much as Len did, because Moby, unlike Len's faithful steed Bean, cannot be trusted not to go off the road while I'm figuring out what the understory plants are. If you want to stop you generally have to block a gate across a private drive or road or crush some wildflowers. The road winds more than it appears to on the map; and Mico is less obvious.

When the dam was constructed in 1912, it drowned not only the Mormon Settlement, but the road to it. As near as I can tell, present-day 151 was the Castroville Road down from Bandera; it vanishes on the north side of the lake now into a maze of private roads. Its nearest heirs on the south side of the lake are the complex, twisty network of 260, 264, and 271. In 1936, a historical marker for the settlement, under the name of "Mountain Valley" (not to be confused with modern Mountain Valley Ranch) was erected on the dam; however, Homeland Security has closed the dam and you can't see even the historical marker anymore. Although the marker claims the settlement was abandoned in 1858, I've seen other information indicating that it had people in it who needed relocating in 1912. The nice Mr. Wilburn I ran across in front of the Mico Volunteer Fire Department gave me the phone number of the man organizing the centenniel, so maybe I'll be able to find out! (Their web page calendar is blank, but their fund raising barbeque is Saturday, May 8th, so if you're in the neighborhood, consider showing up.)

I began to feel discouraged poking around back there. I ate lunch in a turnaround on CR 271 because all the lakefront recreational areas on the south side of the lake are privately owned. I only had $16 on me, and entrance fees based on the assumption that you and a carful of kids are going to hike, boat, fish, swim, picnic, and generally raise cain on the property all afternoon were too rich for my blood. What started out as a massive irrigation project has turned into a recreation lake and a flash point for property rights and public access disputes.

I don't blame the proprietors for my lowered mood. Everyone I spoke to was as friendly and helpful as I could wish. This isn't like the hotels on South Padre Island cutting the locals out of beachfront for the sake of rich tourists; or even the gated community syndrome of rich folks buying up all the pretty and shutting the riffraff out, though such people exist. Locals trying to support a rural lifestyle by making rural pursuits available to citydwellers would be fools to charge less than they can get or make exceptions for researchers who just need a quiet spot to eat trail mix and make notes on floral and faunal assemblages. The only state park on the lake is in Lakehills, on the Bandera County side of the lake, and as state parks go it's nothing to write home about, at least not when the water's down and, as I was, you're too tired to explore properly. (There was supposed to be a $10 use fee even there, but I didn't see anybody to pay, so I didn't.)

The discouragement was the result of a number of factors - frustration at not being able to peel back the present and see the past underneath; the balance-challenged prairie native's unease at having all her lines of sight cut off by graded roads, hills, and second-growth brush; and my natural afternoon crash. But I realized, sitting at a picnic table and wondering if the relief of getting into the water with the frolicking dogs would be worth the effort of finding a place to change into my suit, that my discouragement is a road into Len's head. She wouldn't be crossing this terrain alone (except for Bean) in the first place if she weren't in deepest black teen-age despair. So I thought about that for awhile, and made notes. Mountain Valley to her would feel like the Valley of Doom. And then, on the wind, the letters blowing into her hand, Di's voice in the silent paper; and the echoing directionless shots, and the vultures circling.

So I headed back the way I had come - it would have been shorter to go up to 16, but that wasn't the point of this trip, and I wanted to stop in Rio Medina. Along a stretch of 271, I had noticed different flowers among the Indian blankets, flowers I haven't seen anywhere else so far, of a deep wine color, and when I started coming to them again I stopped to take a closer look. They're poppy mallow, or wine cups. And as I studied them, and tried to decide if the drive I was blocking was ever used, I heard a deep "chup chup chup" across the road. So I crossed. And there they were. The vultures.

Black vultures, which are expanding their range and I suspect will have to be displaced by turkey vultures in the story. I didn't have my camera on me and they flew off, chup chup chup with their ponderous black wings, but first they told me clear as can be: the body's here, among the winecups. And Len, gathering as many of his daughter's scattered letters as she can, comes out of her own blackness to resume the duties of humanity, hard as they are.

I didn't take a picture because I know how it would turn out, the birds all flown, just an open space in the brush with a mesquite tree. It didn't look like this back then, anyway. Livestock has been run up here; people have tried to make their living off this land; it would have been a more open and a more mature vegetation and I'll have to do the best I can with it. Since that moment of certainty I've been awake half the night working out what problems this site solves and which new ones it creates. But I'm not going to argue with vultures.

Half a mile later a roadrunner let me see him scamper along the roadside. I project my feelings onto nature and give meaning to birds. The barred owls in the morning were a promise; the vultures fulfilled it; and the roadrunner confirmed it. Knowing that the birds didn't notice me and couldn't care less if I ever write a story or not doesn't change that. Meaning is a human construct.

Reference photos

Not surprisingly, the pictures from my research trip are mostly crud. I'm not a skilled photographer, and I was using a disposable camera because if I use my husband's 35 mm I always expose the film taking it out. It's one of the many talents I can count on but can't get paid for.

However, here's a picture of Polly's Chapel, with Moby in the foreground as a size reference:


Also, the front view of the old house on Cypress and 11th, from the middle of what would have been the residents's great view, came out reasonably well:



The Civil War rag doll, who doesn't have a thing to do with my story that I know of. I just like dolls.


I took a picture of the millstone mantelpiece, but it has a big black shadow in one corner. It's the only one like that on the roll, which isn't bad for me. I'm not sure why I can't get all obsessively perfectionist about photographs like I do about other things, but it saves time that I don't.

Tomorrow I take Old Castroville Road out to Medina County and go looking for the Mormon settlement, presently under Medina Lake. It turns out that the nearest approximation I can manage to the route Len and Di would have taken is complicated - Commerce, to Frio, to Old Castroville Road, which eventually peters out into Highway 90, which as near as I can make out follows the correct route, or anyway close enough for government work. Due to the efficiency with which I overprepared last week, I hardly had to do any overpreparation today; though now I think of it, I still need to print out the list of historical markers. So off I go to do that.

News! Footprints on the Ceiling

A picnicking family in Africa discovered fossil hyena footprints on the ceiling of a cave. The article, oddly, does not address the most urgent question: How did a hyena walk on the ceiling?!
Ancient Animal Tracks found near Nahoon's Bat Cave

Also, woolly mammoth blood reconstituted and found to contain genetic anti-freeze.

And some extremely interesting observational work with albatrosses in Hawai'i keeps coming against human desires for the scientists to observe what ought to happen according to whatever agenda the human has. Why is it so hard for laymen to accept that scientists are observing reality to develop and test notions of how it works, not trying to force a moral judgement onto it? The love that daren't squawk its name.

Idea Garage Sale Interlude: Clio Wants You!

The theoretical person out there in the blogosphere who's been reading all these excessively long posts and anticipating the next one probably thinks she knows what's coming today, more or less, and is wondering which of the tempting side trails I ran across in Bandera I'm going to wander down today. The romantic history of Annie Schickenden and her shawl? The action/adventure/spiritual journey of Policarpo Rodriguez? The time portal in the old house that would overlook the Medina River if the trees weren't in the way? The possibility for a thrilling detective series centering on a small-town museum docent?

Okay, that last one is close.

Tossing ideas out onto the ether for anybody to pick up if they want to is fun, but I'm under no illusion that anyone will ever use them for anything more than a writing exercise, and I thought now would be a good time to take a moment and address underlying processes for the benefit of a particular segment of the writing community.

Unless participation was limited in some way, every writing conference, class, or group I've ever attended, in person or online, has included a few examples of the tentative amateur; the person who is still wondering where ideas come from, who has a sense of a creative urge without any clear idea of what to do with it, and who has at best a vague notion of what constitutes The Writing Life, but is usually sure that there is a standard Writing Life to which they might aspire. They usually assume that they're supposed to be writing novels and that publication is the big shiny goal at the end of the road. They might be very young and experimenting with their self-image, or retired and looking to cultivate neglected talents; either way, they haven't yet grasped the amount of work involved and are usually still looking for the secret formula or the set of rules that will get them what they want.

Some of these people will become perpetual wannabes or drift away to some other hobby because they are interested in the trappings, not in writing itself. Most of the rest will knuckle down and join the mainstream of the profession - award winners, mid-list authors, bestsellers, and a strong substratum of people who, despite all the hard work, talent, dedication, and business savvy anyone could ask of them, never quite get where they want to go. Some will remain lifelong hobby writers, content to evade the agony of the publication search and write poetry for their grandchildren; some will become editors or agents or publicists instead; some will find their niche and set up shop there happily; some will die still floundering.

Of these outcomes, only perpetual wannabeism and floundering are truly bad outcomes; though those among us who produce publishable work, shop the hell out of it, and still can't land a contract may feel that I dismiss the frustration of their situation too easily. (I don't; but am defining this not as an "outcome" but as "process" - a new day may be around the corner for any of us, and that's why we keep stuff in the mail.) So the idea up for sale today is not a story idea per se, but a lifestyle one; a suggestion for those who know they have potential but don't know what it is.

History has a muse. It is as much an art as poetry or fiction; it uses many of the same mental muscles; it requires similar writing skills and benefits from similar creative talents; its roads also lead to publication; and Clio, the muse of history, works and plays well all her sisters. Her raw material is everywhere. Though the academic discipline of history dominates its expression, it has plenty of room for the avocational amateur. J. Marvin Hunter did not work out of a university, but his work is essential for anyone researching his particular area of Texas - like me - and both the museum and the Frontier Times magazine he founded made history accessible to laypeople.

The fact is that many of the urges that lead people into experimenting with writing can be satisfied by working on local history - or on geneology - or on weekend archeology - or on nature study - or on any kind of public outreach. And you stand an excellent chance of doing tangible good in the world by putting some energy into these tasks. A family historian in Germany, Ilse Wurster, found letters from a Texas branch of her family, and the book on which she collaborated with Texas relatives, Die Kettner Briefe/Die Kettner Letters turns out to contain the answers to questions concerning what happened in Fredericksburg during 1864 that I had resigned myself to never getting. Similar gaps might be filled in the history of New York City if anybody ever transcribes that diary. Consider the role played by the geneologist in the drama of Susan Taylor Brown's discovery of her father's second family - a drama which would never have begun if Susan hadn't challenged herself to write poetry in public on her blog, by the way.

You may think there's no such drama lurking in your mundane little town, or that the history of your area is thoroughly understood and has no hidden crannies; but you'd be wrong. Somewhere within fifty miles of you is an untranscribed diary; is a record that will connect two disparate people or events in a network of narrative; is an old person with memories about to be lost to the ages for lack of someone to ask questions; is an artifact or a fossil or a building that needs you to discover its importance. If you don't see these things, it's because you're not looking.

Once you've uncovered a true-life story, you have a lot of options - far more than the authors of fiction. Local history is the quintessential niche market. Depending on the nature of your material, you may see your name attached to a brochure published in association with the local newspaper or to a book with a major house. Certain small presses specialize in local-interest publications, and self-publishing should not be dismissed out of hand. Die Kettner Briefe is a Lulu.com publication, but the San Antonio Central Library has a copy for the Texana room. As a commercial venture it's a mug's game; but money is not the only way to measure success.

Maybe you're positive that this isn't enough for you. Maybe you know in your heart that "novelist" is what you need to be, what you will be - as soon as you find the story that presently eludes you. That's fine. What are you doing to hunt that idea down? Where are you looking? And what are you doing with your liesure time that will encourage it to come find you? If you're not writing anyway, why not volunteer at the old folks' home and encourage them to tell their stories? Why not take on the project the head of the local historical society can't get time for? Where do you think all those historical novels out there come from?

"Not a historical novelist!" You protest. "I want to write fantasy blockbusters!" Then you should be reading them; and you should have noticed how ubiquitous and tiresome the generic medieval fantasy world is, how exciting it feels to pick up a book like Orson Scott Card's Alvin Maker series, or Lois McMaster Bujold's Sharing Knife and see something that resembles an American historical backdrop. Maybe you've noticed how much the history and folklore of Britain have informed British fantasy. I'll tell you a secret - your neighborhood has history and folklore too!

Or maybe you want to write a modern detective series. Count up in your head the number of mysteries you've read that incorporated some specialized subculture into their background, and in particular into the character of their detective. Wouldn't an amateur historian or a geneologist make a great amateur sleuth? And how would you write convincingly about that subculture if you weren't a part of it? Isn't there a lot of potential for nitty-gritty crime novels in the sordid scandals of your city's past? What about that story you used to scare each other with in high school, the one about the unsolved murder in that dark and spooky house? Is there any truth to that?

Nobody's going to hand you The Perfect Idea. You'll have to dig for it and be ready to know it when you find it. You may as well do something useful while looking for it.

And if in the process you find that your vocation isn't for writing, but for something else - that's a win for you, too.