A week left for voting in the Fresh Blood contest

My Missouri Civil War horror novel A Fine Likeness is still in the running for a publishing contract. It's a finalist in Dorchester Publishing's Fresh Blood Contest. After making it through the slush pile, I and the other eight finalists had our first chapters analyzed by the judges. Only five made it over that hurdle, and now it's up to the public to decide.

For this round the public is judging cover copy, often called the back cover blurb. The judges were pretty positive with mine, although they made some fair criticisms. Drop on by the contest website and check it out. If you like my stuff you can vote by sending an email to freshblood (at) chizinepub (dot) com with the subject line "Fresh Blood Vote: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan". You should get a confirmation that you voted. Voting ends April 14.

I've put a lot of work and research into this novel, which inserts supernatural horror into real history. Jesse James even gets a bit part. I'd love to see it get into print!

You can also check out the book's fanpage here.

Voting has started in the Fresh Blood contest

Well, it's finally started. I and the other eight finalists in Dorchester Publishing's Fresh Blood Contest had our first chapters analyzed by the judges and now public voting has begun. My Missouri Civil War horror novel A Fine Likeness got off without too many slings and arrows. The chapters, judges' comments, and voting information are up on ChiZine's website.

You know, I wasn't nervous about this contest at all, even though a publishing contract is the grand prize. Perhaps organizing my trip to Ethiopia kept my mind off it, but now that voting has started I'm getting a wee bit obsessed.

You can vote by sending an email to freshblood (at) chizinepub (dot) com with the subject line "Fresh Blood Vote: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan". You can insert a different title and author, of course. If you do, feel free not to tell me about it. :-P

You can also check out the book's fanpage here.

The oldest book I ever held

I just got back from five weeks of research in Missouri, where I was working on a couple of articles and my next Civil War book. I also did some research for Handgonnes: The First Black Powder Infantry Weapons, a book I'm doing for for Osprey Publishing. In the process of doing that I delved into the rare books owned by the University of Missouri library, including some reproductions of 15th century Swiss chronicles with drawings of early handgonners.

A librarian at the Rare Book room asked if I had looked at the Nuremburg Chronicle, published in 1493 and a masterpiece of early printing filled with woodcuts.

"That's OK," I said. "I don't think there are any images of guns in there."

A slow smile crept across the librarian's face.

"We have an original, not a facsimile edition," she said.

"Oh, in that case I'll look at it!" I said.

One bibliophile can sense another.

So she brings out a heavy tome and I open it up, and am immediately caught up by the detailed illustrations of saints, cities, and historic episodes. The book is a seven-part history from Creation to Armageddon, with a history of the world in between. My Latin is pretty rusty and the Gothic script was hard to read but I struggled through a couple of pages just for the thrill of it. Many of the pages had marginal notes and even doodles written by a few different hands.

Getting to hold a 500 year-old book was an amazing experience. It is almost a century older than the second oldest book I've ever held, The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589. To read passages that had been read by people in the Renaissance gave a real connection with the past and a sense of how different their thinking could be. I liked how the author left a few pages blank between the end of history and the description of Armageddon, allowing later writers to fill in the details. He only left eight pages so I guess he didn't think the world had much time left!
A couple of hours later I was even rewarded with something practical--what is perhaps the earliest example of someone shooting at a target. I could have easily missed it, a tiny little figure on the lower right hand corner of a vast cityscape. There isn't much detail, but it's clear he's firing an arquebus, the first gun to resemble a modern rifle, although still at a primitive stage of development. The target is seven of his body lengths away, so perhaps 35 feet, not a bad range for such an early gun. A lucky and perhaps important find from an unlikely source. It was the only image of a gun in the whole chronicle, and I wouldn't have found it if it wasn't for a fellow book lover. You'll see the image in my book once it gets published late next year.

What have I been doing?

OK, so I spend six months in Oxford and I barely blog about it. Sorry folks, but I got a bit distracted by the real ales, beautiful countryside, and watching my kid become bilingual.

I did get a fair amount done, however, and most of my experiences ended up on Gadling. As you can see from this picture, I hiked the length of Hadrian's Wall. I started out the day after my 40th birthday as sort of a midlife crisis. I figured walking 84 miles across England would be a nice way of celebrating my imminent decrepitude. I wrote a whole series about it for Gadling.

I also visited Avebury, which got written up, along with a friend's photos, as my 101st post for Gadling. I've also ranted about Americans hiding behind the Canadian flag, studying at Oxford, medieval churches and lost villages, and Alien Big Cats. Plus a whole bunch more. So yeah, I've been busy on the blogosphere.

So what's coming up in the next month on Gadling? A tour of Jesse James sights in Missouri, and a weekend in St. Louis. What's coming up on this blog? More musings about life in Oxford and what it's like to divide your time between three different countries. Stay tuned.

Missouri history book wins award

Earlier this year I blogged about an interesting new book on Missouri history, Mystery of the Irish Wilderness, by Leland and Crystal Payton of Lens and Pen Press. This is a fascinating account of an Irish Catholic community founded in the Ozarks that mysteriously disappeared during the Civil War. It's solidly researched and filled with the beautiful photos for which the Pyatons have become well known in Missouri.

Well, their hard work has finally paid off, and they've won a gold medal at the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards for Best Regional Non-Fiction.

Congratulations Leland and Crystal. You deserved it!

Dowsing for graves

In the course of my research I come across some strange stuff. I've been invited to Cass County, Missouri, to present one of my history books and while searching around their historical society website I discovered an article on dowsing for graves. Apparantly two volunteers who have been participating in recording local cemeteries use a rather unorthodox technique to find them, and have published their methods in case you want to try it out for yourself.

First you need to practice on a marked cemetery to get the hang of it, and then you can venture off into likely spots to find unmarked graves. The technique is so accurate you can even tell the height and sex of the body by how the dowsing rods move.

While you're probably getting skeptical by this point (I know I am) the author claims she has actually tested this method by using it on a family plot and found three unmarked graves. When the funeral home checked two of the spots, they found coffins.

Hmmm. When I go to Cass County for the reading, I think I'll ask to see this in practice.

Outlaw Tales of Missouri Is Published!

This week TwoDot Press, a subsidiary of Globe Pequot Press, released my latest book, Outlaw Tales of Missouri. The last in what I call my "Missouri trilogy" of state history books, it covers the famous and not-so-famous characters that gave Missouri the nickname of "The Outlaw State".

I've dredged the files of the State Historical Society of Missouri to find forgotten stories and little-known facts, like the tale of the Yocum brothers, who made their own silver currency in the Ozarks that was valued more than money issued by the federal government. I've also looked at familiar tales from new angles. No book on Missouri outlaws would be complete without a chapter on the James brothers, but rather than focus on Jesse, I concentrate on his older brother Frank, who got into outlawry earlier and got out sooner. Unlike Jesse, he managed to die a peaceful death.

It's a fun read, if I do say so myself, and fans of Missouri history and the Wild West will find a lot here they like. Civil War buffs will like it too, since there are chapters on the notorious William Quantrill and a lesser-known rogue who went under the alias "Harry Truman" but who was definitely NOT related to the president from Missouri!

The book is available here. My other Missouri history books include Missouri: An Illustrated History and It Happened in Missouri.

First Battlefield Of A Black American Regiment Preserved

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has recently aquired the site of the Battle of Island Mound and plans to preserve it as a state park. About fifty miles south of Kansas City, it was here on 29 October 1862 that the First Kansas Colored Volunteers defeated a large Confederate guerrilla force in what was the first engagement of an American black regiment.

The First Kansas had been organized by Jim Lane, a radical abolitionist senator from Kansas. The regiment was, in fact, illegal, as Abraham Lincoln had expressly forbidden him from arming blacks. Senator Lane was convinced that the only way the North would win the fight on the frontier was if it armed the black population. The First Kansas was made up of runaway slaves from Missouri and Arkansas, free blacks from Kansas, and mixed black/Indian volunteers from the Indian Territory.

The Department of Natural Resoucres plans to have the site fully open to the public in time for the Civil War Sesquicentennial in 2011.

I wrote about this battle for an issue of Missouri Life magazine several years ago and am currently pitching a book proposal on the regiment, so this comes as great news to me. Another researcher, Chris Tabor, has made an excellent website on the battle. He has also written a short monograph on the topic titled The Skirmish at Island Mound, now sadly out of print.

Getting Interviewed On Radio

If you're in the St. Louis area, you can hear me on "John Brown's Mindset" at about 1:30 p.m. local time Tuesday, January 27, on KTRS 550 AM, St. Louis. I'll be talking about Missouri history, writing, and my latest book, It Happened In Missouri. Hope you'll tune in!

Interesting New Book On Missouri History

I've written three books on Missouri history and I'm still amazed at how many interesting stories there are still to be told about this state's fascinating past. One of them is the tale of a dedicated Irish priest who set up a colony for Irish immigrants in the rough hill country of the Ozarks. Mystery of the Irish Wilderness by Leland and Crystal Payton is the latest release from Lens & Pen Press. The Paytons are well known for their beautiful photographs of the Ozark region, and like their earlier books this volume is filled with them. The text is interesting too, telling of Father John Joseph Hogan's efforts to develop and serve two different colonies in widely separated regions of Missouri, one in the northern prairie, and the other in the Ozarks near the southern edge of the state. The first colony prospered, but the other disappeared during the chaos of the Civil War.


The Paytons meticulously reconstruct what could have happened to the colonists, and found that at least some seemed to have returned to the region after the fighting stopped. Most, however, moved away to parts unknown, so an enduring air of mystery still surrounds Hogan's Ozark colony. To complete the story, the book covers Hogan's rise to become the first bishop of Kansas City and St. Joseph's, and the successful fight by twentieth century preservationists to get the "Irish Wilderness" declared National Forest.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Missouri, Irish-American, or Catholic history. I also enjoyed the Paytons' book See the Ozarks, also from Lens & Pen Press, about the development and reinvention of the rural region into a major holiday center. It's full of images of vintage postcards, a hobby of mine, so it was an easy sell for me!

Back in Madrid

Whew! I´m finally back in Spain after far too many flights. Missouri was fun and I got all the research done for my next book, but rainstorms on the last two weekends I was there kept me from camping. Ah well, hopefully I´ll get up into the mountains near Madrid soon. There are several routes near the old Roman highway I hiked a while back that I´d like to try.

London was fun too, but I was there for only two days, just long enough to celebrate Oktoberfest in a fake German beer hall with real German waitresses and to visit the amazing Highgate cemetery, which I´ll post on later. Tonight I´m back to my usual writer´s group, something every writer needs.