Not at all! The American Civil War is such a rich
topic, plus I look at the understudied area west of the Mississippi, which only
now is getting the attention it deserves. As usual with my blog, I swerved off
topic and talked about the Wild West and movies as well!
Did you learn anything new while composing your
posts?
I learned a little while researching almost every
one of my posts. That’s one of the things I love about blogging, it doubles as
research to inspire my historical fiction and nonfiction.
Which letter was your favorite?
That would have to be G for Globster. See below!
William
S. Hart was the first Western film star, back in the silent movie era of
the 1920s and 1920s. He starred in more than 70 Westerns from 1914 to 1925 and
helped establish many of the tropes still used in Westerns to this day. In The Return of Draw Egan (1916) Hart favors
a slight grimace and a cigarillo that looks like it inspired Clint Eastwood's
The Man With No Name. I wouldn't be surprised. Hart inspired many Western
actors and helped establish the genre. He was hugely successful in his day but
sadly all but forgotten now.
The Baldknobbers
were a group of vigilantes in the Missouri Ozarks in the years after the Civil
War. The Ozarks were hard hit by the war and returning Confederate soldiers
found their land had been confiscated by the government and sold Unionists for
failure to pay taxes. Some former rebels turned to lawlessness (like Jesse
James did in western Missouri) and a group of former Union soldiers formed the
Baldknobbers, so called because they’d meet on a bare hilltop (a “bald knob”)
in local parlance) so they could talk without being heard.
Gunfights and lynchings became rife, with both
sides losing many men in this replay of the Civil War.
Pterodactyls
are alive and flying over America! The old Native American legend of the Thunderbird,
a giant bird, inspired many tales in the Old West of living pterodactyls. Back
in 1890, the Tombstone Epitaph published
a story claiming that some cowboys bagged one. Several photos have popped up
since then purporting to show cowboys or Civil War soldiers proudly posing next
to dead flying dinosaurs.
Globsters
are simply the cutest, cuddliest lumps of decaying flesh you’ll ever come
across on the beach. Every now and then a large chunk of unidentifiable meat will
wash ashore, sparking rumors of strange sea beasts. I've always had a soft spot
in my heart for globsters. Perhaps it's the name, or their irresistible charm.
Perhaps it's because I always root for the underdog, and you can't get much
lower than being a rotting hunk of unidentifiable meat on the beach being
gawked at by local yokels.
If you do the Challenge next year, what themes are
you considering?
I’ve expanded beyond the Civil War and Wild West
in my blogging. While I’m keeping my blog Civil
War Horror alive for those subjects, I’ve revived my old blog Midlist
Writer in order to reflect my shift to other subjects in my fiction. Midlist Writer covers writing (a lot
about NaNo at the moment), travel, history, photography, obscure films,
globsters, and whatever else I fancy. I’m thinking the next A to Z will be a
seething mass of chaos from the fevered brain of Sean McLachlan.
Thanks, Sean!
Co-host Ninja Captain Alex is the author of CassaStar, CassaFire, and CassaStorm, and his blog can be found HERE
