Just read my first hate mail not long ago, kinda cracked me up; whoever wrote it must of been excessively bored. I wasn’t overly offended by it as I gave up a long time ago worrying about folks liking me. Yes I want my readers to enjoy my posts and books and I realize that my personality comes out in both blog posts and books but for heavens sake if one doesn’t enjoy what they are reading then move on, we live in a free country and one can read whatever they want.
If it had been some constructive criticism that would have been one thing but it started out rather bland and then turned a bit nasty. I asked my wife that if I am now receiving hate mail does that mean I have reached a certain level of success? I am mostly joking about being successful as success is measured in many ways.
Most of my stories are about my life or people I have known personally and although I don’t think that my life is exceptionally interesting I feel that if I write about it correctly I can make a good story of it and most of my posts are short stories, a few are ongoing stories as in the case of ‘The Nature of Horses’.
Take ‘The Run Away’ for instance. I was only 5 years old but I remember it vividly and the fact that I didn’t get my butt beat for scaring the dickens out of my mom was a miracle. I’m pretty sure that when she found me she would have whooped a Grizzly bear to protect me.
‘Hung up and Drug’; it wasn’t easy to write that one as I’ve always felt a bit stupid that it happened. A flighty colt and imitating something that I had seen my uncle do with horses helped create the accident. I’m not shifting the blame to anyone else, it was my actions that got me near killed but the chronic pain that has been with me throughout my life from that accident has been a challenge at times. That particular accident caused me some grief during my 3 years in the Marines. They never gave up on me though and I was able to work through it and I’ve always been grateful that they didn’t give up on me.
There’s a saying that goes something like this,’ to error is human to forgive is divine, neither is Marine Corps policy’, neither is quitting; quitting is something that my dad would never tolerate.
So how do you take what I perceive as a rather ordinary life and make it interesting and adventurous reading? It’s the people you meet and life’s experiences that make it interesting.
I have been privileged to have met some very interesting people in my life. Congressional Medal of Honor winners, Top Sergeants that had stories, true life stories, that would make a 10 year series of John Wayne War movies. Horsemen and Women that were veritable encyclopedias of knowledge on the subject of horses. Pilots and Vietnam War heroes and Veterans that could fill volumes of books on flying and Jungle Warfare.
My second year of flying professionally I had the privilege of flying with a fighter pilot from WW2. He had flown P51’s in that War, F 86’s in Korea where he flamed a couple of Mig’s. I can’t remember what he flew in Vietnam but he tried to get into the Skyraider, the same aircraft that Colonel Bernard Fisher was flying when he rescued Jump Meyers off of a North Vietnam enemy airstrip. As a matter of note I heard Colonel Fishers story from 3 different sources, the 3rd time was from Colonel Fisher his self; I have always been proud to say he was my friend.
I never started out as a writer professionally either as a blogger or an author but somewhere in the middle of what would become an 18 month legal battle with the FAA medical division over my medical I started to write what would become my first novel ‘El Diablo con Pistola’. The title is in Spanish for a reason but the book is published in English. It was good therapy for me.
I lost my fight with the FAA but continued to write, it awakened a whole new adventure and passion and as of last count I have over a dozen books outlined to write. Most of my time spent writing is on my blog but I haven’t given up on my books. I need to finish one that will be the 3rd and last in what I refer to as the ‘Jacob Walker’ trilogy. There’s a good chance that I will supersede it with another project that I have been researching but a road trip is in the making to do research for that book as it is the journey of a young woman of over a thousand miles alone in the American West around 1801. I want to walk and drive her footsteps to get a better feel for her story. It’s never been told to my knowledge and it is only vaguely referred to anywhere in history.
So in the end haters are welcome; I’m okay with that.
I’m going to follow this post with a short story, it is fiction but as all of my stories are wrapped around true events you the reader can use your imagination as to what is true and what I have changed. I am a story teller and not a liar so as usual hope you enjoy.
Brian Spaulding