No, I haven’t been lost in the wilderness with no access to the internet. No, I haven’t given up my pursuit of the Civil war and all things cavalry. I’ve simply been learning a ton of things in the process of preparing my first manuscript for publishing which will make a wonderful series of posts AFTER it is delivered by the 31st of this month.

But I’m back. Mostly. As times permits between now and the end of the month, then “full time” once again.

So what’s been happening while I was gone?

Retiring. Again. Finished up my retiree recall with the Army on Tuesday, with all of the administrative joy and loss of productive time that one might suspect. It was an amazing ride, and I’m truly grateful to all of those who helped along the way.

Finishing the manuscript. One teaser from the upcoming Getting Published series of posts – plan for success. We were incredibly fortunate to have our (my partner, Jim Jones and I, there’s no royal plural here) first query accepted by a publisher instead of searching for months for an interested publisher. An acceptance letter and one complete chapter leave you a LONG way to go in the process. Enough said.

Maps. We have not one, not two, but 14 maps for the book, by two very talented cartographers. After the much-lamented Blake Magner’s passing, Steven Stanley was kind enough to step in on very short notice and provide the maps for the Beverly Ford and Brandy Station chapters.

Back soon, manuscript to finish, syllabi for spring semester to post….

A hearty if belated congratulations to fellow blogger Mannie Gentile of A Year of Living Rangerously (see list to the left). Mannie was recently picked up as a full time NPS Ranger at Antietam National Battlefield. Congratulations, Mannie!

Yes, it’s a new year, and a great deal of progress is being made, not that one could tell from looking at this blog. My professional organizer wife has informed me that January is national “GO” month (GO= Get Organized), which given the disarray my historical files are in, seemed like an excellent deal. The bad news is that it feels like it’s taking forever. The good news is that I’m turning up all sorts of material that I’ve been meaning to post, so there should be a great deal of traffic here shortly.

The manuscript on the 6th Cavalry, where I spent most of my time over the holidays, continues to grow at an alarming rate. We should have the last few sources in place by the end of March, then the great whittling project begins to reduce it to something resembling publishing size. Unfortunately, Jim just left for New York to resume flying, so we’re down to mail and email collaboration, but we still hope to start querying publishers by the end of the summer.

We’re putting together a Little Big Horn staff ride at work, so I’ve been doing a good bit of background bio on some of the officers, nearly every one of which served in the Civil War, so it’s likely relevant odds and ends from that project will show up here as well.

No grand posting of topics for the new year, as that panned out rather dismally last year. My production was terrible, so most of those topics still need to be covered. I will simply say that this year I’ll do better.

Home network issues have been resolved, computer issues have been fixed or replaced, the semester’s over, and the office has been moved, so hopefully things are finally getting back to normal here as well as elsewhere in my life. Keep your fingers crossed and don’t pull me off the blogroll just yet.

Wow! I had no idea it had been nearly three weeks since my last post. I will refrain from making any comments about being back in the saddle, since the post of the same name is still drawing daily comments from some Asian-language porn site.

I’m back, and finally willing and able to post again. The master’s degree is at long last complete, papers and classes complete, and attention can be turned to family and more enjoyable things than school. I still hope to complete a second master’s in history, but plan to take a few months in the interim to relax a bit.

My efforts to elicit commentary from anyone from or related to Norwich have been unsuccessful, so I suppose AMU wins that discussion by default….

Book draft two finally continues updates and editing. Several new sources popped up in the interim thanks to Dr. Rick Sauers, so more research is required. And I’m still working on a few things like the rest of the brief 3rd Cavalry history started before everything went awry a few months back. I’ve also been poking around a bit about Benjamin S. Roberts and William P. Sanders, and should have posts on them here in the near future. Not to mention the Kelly’s Ford blog I’ve so neglected in the interim.

I haven’t had a great deal of time for leisure reading, but am in the midst of two interesting books related to the war. The first is Jeffry Wert’s excellent Cavalryman of the Lost Cause (found on Amazon here), which will likely prove the definitive biography on Jeb Stuart for years to come. Indeed, it was an anecdote from this book that lead me back to studying Sanders. The second book is The War Department in 1861 – A Study in Mobilization and Administration by A. Howard Meneely. A reprint of a book originally published in 1928, this has been a very informative work. Meneely provides a very even-handed look at the War Department at the beginning of the war, maintaining an objective view of the people and the situation without jumping to conclusions to demonize or seek scapegoats.

More posts soon!

Some weeks are longer than others, apparently, as it’s been rather more than 7 days since my last post. At any rate….

Thank you very much to those who sent their condolences here and elsewhere on the passing of my mother. I took your thoughts and prayers to heart during this difficult time. There are a lot of great folks in the blogosphere, and it shows during difficult times.

What I’m reading: 1861: A Study in Unpreparedness (or something similar, I don’t have it in front of me). Very interesting, though I haven’t had much time to devote to it.

You wouldn’t think there would be a Civil War link to a small town in the far northwest of California, but I managed. Camp Lincoln was established on June 13, 1862 near Crescent City, California by Company G, 2nd Regiment, California Volunteers. It wasn’t intended to defend against Confederates, of course, but was established to protect settlers from Indians because all of the regulars had been sent east to fight in the Civil War. It was abandoned in 1869.

Not that I’ve been posting more than once or twice a week anyway, but I have just been informed that I will be making an unscheduled trip starting this weekend and ending in late July that will leave me without internet access. Expect no further posts here until July 22nd.