Zachary Taylor's Army of Occupation, Corpus Christi, Texas 1845-46
SEEKING AGENT AND PUBLISHER
The first novel in my historical trilogy is titled
BLOOD BROTHERS - GRANT'S HORSES. I'm looking for an agent and/or publisher.
Imagine Huck Finn if he’d been a frontier bookworm, and you’ll get a sense of
BLOOD BROTHERS - GRANT'S HORSES. Set in 1845-46 on the disputed southern border of the Republic of Texas, this first book chronicles the arrival of the U.S. Army to provoke Mexico into a war. Yearning to become a valiant soldier, 12-year-old J.P. McBean, youngest son of the local preacher, decides that the diffident young Ulysses Grant is the perfect mentor. In doing so, he instinctively perceives a quiet heroic potential that no one else does, not even Grant himself.
BLOOD BROTHERS - GRANT'S HORSES will appeal to a broad audience that ranges from history buffs to general readers.
Synopsis
Copyright 2012
“The most murderous, thieving, God-forsaken hole in the Lone Star State or out of it,” complains one U.S. Army officer of the seaside smugglers’ hamlet known as Kinney’s Rancho, perched on the Mexico side of the disputed Republic of Texas border.
But the 12-year-old local bookworm, Jesus Paine McBean, has a more delighted outlook. To this preacher’s son, a wise innocent weaned on chivalrous tales of King Arthur and on the adventures of the Arabian Nights, when the U.S. Army wades ashore in August of 1845, it signals the transformation of his home village into “a Bagdad of marvels.” Indeed, the roguish “Colonel” Kinney’s frontier trading post mushrooms into a rollicking Gulf of Mexico boomtown called Corpus Christi, teeming with world-class scholars and bowling alleys; newspaper men and all-night oyster bars; Apaches and state-of-the-art theaters; cutthroat outlaws and photography studios; as well as the big, buxom powerhouse of a businesswoman and bordello madam known as The Great Western, who steps up to home plate to take her turn at bat during a baseball game between soldiers and townfolk.
Despite the fact that he can scarcely shoot or stay in the saddle, deficiencies that make him the butt of pranks, J.P. yearns to become a heroic man of arms and thus win the approval of his older brother Chance, who’s a Texas ranger. To that end, J.P. adopts a beardless young lieutenant named Ulysses Grant as his military mentor.
Things don’t go quite the way J.P. imagines they will. While Chance is brave and funny and heroic, J.P. becomes troubled by the fact that his big brother, unlike either their father or Lt. Grant, believes slavery is just. Furthermore, Chance rides with the sadistic Texas Ranger Mayberry “Mustang” Gray, who tortures animals and murders Mexican peasants. Scarier still, without meaning to, J.P. always seems to irritate the menacing Gray. Grant, on the other hand, turns out to be a terrible disappointment, scarcely a real soldier at all, despite his crisp, fine uniform.
Nicknamed “Little Beauty” by his fellows, Ulysses won’t shoot animals for food and he’s downright lovesick for his fiancée. Although J.P. comes to believe, as Ulysses does, that the U.S. mission to provoke Mexico is unjust, Ulysses sorely disillusions J.P. when he decides to quit the army to become a math professor. Worst of all, despite speaking out against slavery, Ulysses has a black servant that everyone, including J.P., assumes is a slave.
Sixteen years before the American Civil War, the tensions that will one day pit brother against brother already simmer as J.P. finds himself swept up in the whirlwind of history, torn between his love for his pro-slavery brother Chance and his abiding affinity for the decent and gentle Ulysses Grant. As events march toward war, J.P. struggles to reconcile his moral upbringing and sense of honor with the slavery, jingoism, and hatred of Mexicans in the culture around him. Ultimately the confused boy inadvertently helps the untested Ulysses choose to see himself as a soldier bound to do his duty. Thus, at the end of the novel, U.S. Grant rides off to his destiny, to fight in an unjust imperial war against Mexico, where he will ironically gain the experience and develop the prowess needed to eventually become the general who wins the war that ends slavery in the United States.
Meticulously researched,
BLOOD BROTHERS - GRANT'S HORSES presents vivid period details that will surprise readers, bringing to life a little known, but pivotal corner of history, where decisions made and roads chosen altered the course of the world’s history.
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Fierce Backbone is a a 501c3 not-for-profit theater company that I helped co-found.
Visit the
Fierce Backbone Theater Co. website for more information.
The name is derived from a comment by Virginia Woolf that "the art of writing has for backbone some fierce attachment to an idea."
This spring and summer I will be rehearsing the stage version of
THE ROCK OF ABANDON, a murder mystery set in 415 BCE Athens, with the notorious playwright Euripides as the detective.
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PICKMAN'S MODEL is for sale on DVD. Based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story, I co-wrote the screenplay for this half-hour 16mm film back in 1981 with Kelly Greene (director of the acclaimed
ATTACK OF THE BAT MONSTERS!) and director Cathy Welch. Cut to the present. Decades later Cathy has finally got the short distributed. Let's hear it for the internet.
The
PICKMAN'S MODEL DVD boasts several versions of the same short story, with the 60-minute Chilean version being the feature. The disk is nicely packaged and the transfers are excellent.
"Cathy Welch’s adaptation of
Pickman’s Model... essentially tells the same story as the other versions, but there are some notable differences. The cast is exceptionally good here, and of the three versions this one definitely features the best acting. Welch ups the gore factor a fair bit and ties Pickman’s interests into some pretty twisted stuff and as such it’s a little more frightening than the other films – which is a good thing. Set design is strong, the ending is freakishly interesting, and this one works really, really well." —DVDManiacs.net
Available through
Lurker Films or at
Amazon.com
Meanwhile, I'm supposed to be sending out queries to publishers in an effort to interest them in my novel, which used to be titled JESUS PAINE McBEAN: THE TEXIAN, but which I have retitled (actually, have gone back to an earlier title): GRANT'S HORSES. Grant's Horses reveals the unheralded events leading up to the war against Mexico, when a frontier boy’s friendship with an untried officer alters the course of history.
August, 1845. The passions that will one day pit brother against brother in the Civil War are already churning. War against Mexico looms when the U.S. Army garrisons Kinney’s Rancho, a coastal smuggler’s cove south of the disputed Texas-Mexican border. Twelve-year-old Jesus Paine (J.P.) McBean, the daydreaming, bookish son of the settlement’s preacher, befriends handsome 2d Lt. Ulysses Grant, 23. This doesn’t sit well with Chance, J.P.’s big brother, who is one of “Colonel” Kinney’s ranging company of gunmen.
J.P. is “as stuffed as poor old Don Quixote's with marvelous notions of derring-do and legends of noble battles and romance” gleaned from books and Chance’s tall tales. In "Ulyss" J.P. sees his martial beau idéal.
But Grant isn’t who J.P. expects: nicknamed “Beauty” by his fellow officers, he’s untested in battle, a reluctant soldier who paints watercolor landscapes, yearns for his fiancée, and can’t bear to hunt game. Worst of all, the West Pointer appears to be a hypocrite -- he speaks against slavery, yet has the French-speaking Negro youth Valère as a "body servant." Furthermore, he confesses that he believes the coming war against Mexico is unjust, and he plans to resign his commission to become a math professor.
Written in first person, GRANT'S HORSES portrays a boy steeped in the ballyhoo of war and heroism. Torn between his love for his heroic but pro-slavery brother, Chance, and an abiding affinity for the perplexing Grant, J.P. struggles to reconcile with his moral upbringing and sense of honor the jingoism, slavery and hatred of Mexicans he sees around him.
He learns the motives for war are not always as advertised and that emotionally he has more in common with Ulysses than with his racist brother. As the seaside trading post mushrooms into a rollicking boom town named Corpus Christi, J.P. gets a job as an apprentice at a Daguerreotype photography studio. There, his encounters with a colorful cross-section of humanity, including the murderous Texas Ranger “Mustang” Gray, and the baseball playing businesswoman and bowling alley owner known as “The Great Western,” open his eyes to a range of human folly, including his own.
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• The February issue of Handball magazine, "the Official Voice fo the United States Handball Association," features an interview I did with Ben Agajanian. Agajanian, in addition to being a pro-football kicker and coach, was an avid handball player into his 80s. In the interview he recalls playing handball with baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, football great Mike Ditka, and the Apollo I astronauts.
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• I've completed BOOTIN' BEN, a feature screenplay about the life of Ben Agajanian, who had his toes crushed off in a work accident during college, but overcame the injury to become pro football's first kicking specialist, booting field goals 14 different professional teams in the the 1940s, 50s and 60s, including the 1956 World Champion New York Giants. After retiring from the field, he was the Dallas Cowboys kicking coach for 20 years. The script is being written for Bow Tie Productions.
• The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences selected me as a Semifinalist in its prestigious Nicholl Fellowship Screenwriting Competition. My feature script, THE ROCK OF ABANDON, placed in the top 2.25% out of 4,889 entries from all over the world. THE ROCK OF ABANDON is an edgy murder mystery set in ancient Athens as the "Cradle of Democracy" prepares to launch a pre-emptive war against Syracuse on the island of Sicily. The notorious playwright Euripides hunts the killer of a courtesan he once loved.
The Nicholl version is a rewrite and polish of the same story with which I won top honors in the 11th Annual Fade In magazine Writers Network Screenplay and Fiction Competition.
Biography
Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, Stephen Blackburn grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas. He graduated as a Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas at Austin, earning his MA in Radio-TV-Film. He was an endowed James Michener Fellow in screenwriting and fiction 1995-1997, earning an MFA — yet again from the University of Texas.
He has worked in Kansas City, Missouri, as a staff feature writer and movie columnist ("Notes From the Flyover") for Pitch, a weekly now owned by New Times. AlterNet syndicated his articles about the near impossibility of living on minimum wage and about male contraceptives, both of which were reprinted nationally by several publications. The Utne Reader republished the minimum wage article. Blackburn's commentary contrasting George W. Bush to the heroic president in the television series 24 was published on AlterNet.org in May 2003.
From interviews and collaboration with noted national homeless organizer and activist Ron Casanova, Blackburn wrote Each One Teach One: Up and Out of Poverty — Memoirs of a Street Activist (Curbstone Press, 1996), which Kirkus Reviews lauded as “A valuable firsthand account of a street survivor’s harrowing experiences.”
On January 15, 2002, Blackburn was the featured author of PEN International's winter lecture series in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. He read from his book The Extinction of Rhinos in Mexico: 9 Tales of Life and Death (Xlibris, 2001).
In 2004, his original feature script FATTY & BUSTER was a Semifinalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s second annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. The story chronicles the enduring friendship between silent film comedians Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton after Arbuckle is unjustly banished from making movies.
Blackburn lives with his wife Consuelo Flores in Los Angeles.
