Rick McBee's Writings
Explore the magic of new ideas and books to read as well as see what books I have written, my favorite photos, my opinions on may subjects, including Science, Africa, the Caribbean, the Civil War, my Book Reviews, and Much More!
Rough Enough by Richard H. McBee Jr.
Rough Enough by Richard H. McBee Jr..
Ionia Martin has done another wonderful review. Her sensitive understanding of the lives of our 19th century ancestors leaves the reader with the desire to pursue their own heritage after following Richard Clow through a number of years which can be described as “Rough Enough.”
John Stevenet Clow (Aug. 12, 1810 – Mar. 13, 1892: Father of Richard Headley Clow
Born in Haverford West, Wales in 1810, John Stevenet Clow studied art and then left Wales to emigrate to Nova Scotia. There he married Agnes Louise Redman in 1831 and lived with her at her farm for a number of years. The farm, in Schubenackedy (Shubenacadia) was sold and the family moved to Dartmouth across the harbor from Halifax. The family had a total of 8 live children, with Richard Headley Clow being the last of these, being born May 25, 1847. Two years later in 1849, Agnes died while giving birth to a 9th child.
Following Agnes’ death in 1849, the family moved to Boston. The passenger list for the Brig Belle in 1853 shows a portion of the family’s move including that of Richard Clow.
John Stevenet Clow worked for three years in a patent office copying documents and then worked in a photograph gallery coloring photographs. (An enlargement of this attending photo shows his reddened cheeks). While in Boston, John Clow married for a second time to a woman named
Sarah Ellis Leighton. There do not appear to be any children from this union.
In 1855, he left Boston with his wife and at least one daughter, Bertha, stopping in Erie, PA to see two older sons, Thomas and John Sherwin (Sher). Young Richard was left in Boston with his older sister (nearly 20 years his senior), Agnes Louise and her husband, Alexander Cruikshank.
John Stevenet Clow settled in Madison, Wis. where he had a small art gallery while his wife and daughter worked in a small shirt factory which they had started. He was naturalized in 1856 to be a US citizen and at the close of the Civil War was living in Milwaukee, Wis. with a short sojourn in McGregor, Iowa.
In the summer of 1870 he moved to Minnesota and lived with his son John Sherwin and other son Thomas for a period of time on the farms and then bought his own farm near Lyle in Mower Country. He paid 600$ for the farm. The next year he sold the farm for $1000 and moved for a short time to Austin, Minn.
In 1872 he picked up again and moved to San Francisco where he worked a coloring photographs for McMillan Bros. but was actually supported by his wife who had a dress making shop. Near the end of his life he was in a home for the aged and was supported by his children. He died in the San Francisco area in 1892.
Rain, Sleet, Snow or Shine – Tidy up your mess! That’s the writer’s lot.
Oregon can have a lot of varied weather and today in Hood River was one of those. Ice pebbles in the early morning rain almost forming an opaque screen on the windshield followed by a warm front with fifty degree rain interspersed with sunshine to brighten the usually dreary Hood River day. How I love to sit out on the porch for a few minutes with my eyes shut and just soak up the rays!
Today was clean-up day in the writing lab. I don’t know why most days my mind can be so organized on writing, editing, learning Civil War trivia, and methodically working on seashell classification yet leave behind a trail of chaotic note cards, open reference books, half read Scientific articles and open maps of Civil War Petersburg, VA. It seemed like today was when it all hit me at to what a pig-sty I had created. I guess in part it was also pointed out to me by my artist wife that she no longer had a place to put her oil paints and watercolors or to lay her picture mats because I had strewed the entire 400 square feet of room with my “stuff” to put it politely.
Three hours later, the room looked a lot better, I felt better about getting back to my writing and my spouse was humming away as she framed yet another of her massive collection of botanical watercolors. My gosh, if we sold a few she could keep me in the style of life I’ve become accustomed to living.
Seriously, at least now I can find my calendar to start planning the book events for the summer and get on with making plans to visit St. Louis in July or late August for a book talk about Richard Clow’s life. With any luck I can get up to the three events per week that my PR supervisor says will push the book up into the next category of sales. So, get your copy of “Rough Enough” now off Kindle, Nook, Google Books, Ibooks and in Paperback to suit your own proclivities. E-Books are the wave o the future but you will still need to do some marketing to get out of the riffraff and into the real market place where books sell like hotcakes. So warm up the blogs, get your Amazon Author and LinkedIn sites up and go for it!
Moving to the next level of WordPress Activity for Book Marketing
Today as I was thinking about having a web site with a shopping cart on it to market books, I happened to thumb open the Columbia Gorge Community College Catalog and there, lo and behold, was a class teaching how to do it! No I don’t mean …, I mean how to build a web site on WordPress with a shopping cart on it. So Wow! Now I’m going to spend a multitude of hours this next seven days getting myself up and running to be able to sell some of my own books, (the signed copies) right off of my home computer! You know the internet and the things it allows us to do today that we couldn’t do back in 1962 when I graduated from High School are just phenomenal! How I’d like to be able to push the Benjamin Buttons knob and spend another 50 years reversing my age and then click it into forward again to follow the next fifty there are going to be some exciting things happening in the next 100 years with computers and who knows what else. so I’m going to become a dedicated blogger and web site manager and self managing book seller, all of course which means I will probably have to dump my ten year old laptop and get something new.
When you get done reading this don’t forget to go to your search engine on Kindle, Google, Barnes and Noble, Ibooks or Kindle and put in “Rough Enough”: Richard Clow so that you can see my new Civil War book at your favorite store and get with the reading. There are some really good reviews on Amazon already and at most sites you can look inside the book. Be sure to go to Chapter 3 and read the letter written by Richard Clow while he is waiting to be transported to his new posting in Petersburg, VA. Kind of an eyeopener about how things were for the newly enlisted men in 1865. Read the book, then email me to say what you liked and disliked about the book. I’d love to hear from you.
Sometimes I could Joint the “Tea Party”
Whoa! A day that started off with a bang, exercise on the machines at the club and with the Senior Circuit semi exercise- semi gab group afterwards to get in over an hour and a half of muscle workout. Then into the computer and answered a bunch of great emails from people connecting on LinkedIn and others sending me their snail mail addresses to get review copies of the new Civil War book, “Rough Enough” before it hits the stands all over the country in 15 days!
Then the dog (Elliott) got into the ducks! Boy what a quacking mess! Jill had to catch Crazy Duck who didn’t seem to be able to find his way back through hole in the fence (I wish I’d had the video camera on for that one!). The whole troop packed off to the neighbors pond in disgust but they’ll be home tonight for food and nest boxes to lay their eggs.
Then the real fun began! TAXES! UGH!
I found that the IRS has now gotten the instructions and the forms so hard find, run off and print, let alone fill out, that we have reached the point of needing an all-out HUMAN rebellion against the Corporate Personhood of tax crap we have created.
I believe in one of our founding countries, Great Britain, where they seem to govern fairly well without a constitution, there is a rule about the laws needing to be understandable to THE MAN or WOMAN ON THE STREET!
After finding that Schedule D now requires several other forms to even complete it on the basic level (Like all I have is a bunch of losses to carry over from the Bush era stock crash and a total of 7 stock transactions and I need five forms to tell Uncle Sam that I still have a loss that will take me 20 years to deduct at $3000 per year?) Who are we kidding?
We need to get a flat tax rate for HUMANS and save all this other “crap” for the Corporate Personifications of humanity devised by lawyerhood and ratified by a Supreme Court that must have had it’s head somewhere else than on the bench when companies became people.
Time to throw the Tea back into Boston Harbor and make it easy for Cesar to get the last Sou from my pocket without me having to take antidepressants and blood pressure medicine in order to do what the man or woman on the street should be able to do easily – Pay my taxes!
Holy-Cow! What a rant! Buy the book – See how it was truly “Rough Enough” for most people back in the 1860’s!
Reader Questions for “Rough Enough: My Ideas When Desiging the Cover
What are the ideas that come to mind when you look at the cover of “Rough Enough?”
Jot them down before you go on to read what I was thinking when I gave the artist the original design.
Now look down below the picture of the book cover and check out what I was thinking as the author.
Enjoy!
The young man carrying the Union Flag represents Richard Clow. The road ahead and the setting sun to the west represents his future in the military on the frontier, his family and mining in Deadwood, SD. The ruffled pages at the borders represent the letters he wrote to his sisters and his diary; all are transcribed within the book.
A few Advance Reading copies are still available for reviewers on Amazon, in blogs and other publications. Send me your snail mail address and I’ll return copies until the last 12 copies run out. Enjoy!
Another Great Day in the PR of Civil War Book “Rough Enough”
Wow! There I was, pulling up my Author site on Amazon and there for the first time, they have let someone post a Review! James R. Holland gets the kudos for fast action and superb verbiage in writing a review that really takes your breath away.
Here is a man who initially thinks he’s going to jump to the last part of the book and read about Deadwood, South Dakota in 1876, during a time when his own ancestor was setting himself up to be shot dead and enter the realm of fable. Instead, he happens to read one of Richard Clow’s (rhymes with flow) first letters home from the Civil War and takes the hook! By the time he gets to the mining at the end and the period of Wild Bill’s demise, he has filled in a lot of details about enlisted men during the Civil War, where those men came from, and where they ended up after the war if they migrated to the frontier.
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8HIXI
Follow the link – Read the book – You’ll love it! (Also soon (March 1, 2013) to be available at Barnes and Noble and on all e-formats!)
Heron Pond: First Glass of my Viento Red
Here’s the beautiful ruby red color of my just siphoned first glass of the wine made from the old Viento Grape stock which was taken from the current site of Viento State Park, Oregon back in the 1980’s. The grapes were probably planted there in the 1940’s or thereabouts when my Grandfather, Gordon G. Brown owned a truck farm on the land that was later covered by waters as the Bonneville Dam filled that section of the Columbia River Gorge. He was going broke at the truck farming and so thanked his lucky stars that the government bought him out and he was able to start a pear orchard up in Dee, just south of Hood River, Oregon. Note the Airedale dog in the background, Elliott. Very Posh! as my wife would call this big wooly of a dog.
Battlefield Journal reviews New Book “Rough Enough”
Today was a real fun day to read Kristie Poehler’s Winter Edition of “Battlefield Journal” which has a two page spread on my new Civil and Indian War book “Rough Enough.” Check it out at <www.battlefieldjournal.com>
Kristie highlights the section of the book dealing with Richard Clow’s (rhymes with Flow) reunion with his older brother, John, near Alexandria following the Grand Review. An interesting letter and commentary on the end of the war.
Don’t miss the full book already available at Publisher Direct Bookstore and on the full market starting March1, 2013.
More on the PR for “Rough Enough” – Sites on the Web
If I were to take a moment to think on the pattern for setting up blogs, social media and book sites, I would definitely put WordPress and Amazon at the top of my list to get built up so that people have both a place to visit to see me and a place to hear what I might have to say that is worth while about my book or publishing. Then in order to make the professional links to groups who work in my field, write in my field and publish, I’d get my LinkedIn site set up. Then as the general knowledge that I’m out there spreads through the Ether, I’d go for the Facebook, Good Reads and Armchair General type of sites to keep people posted and give insight as to my likes, what I read, etc. Finally after these sites are all set up I’d go for the twitter. At the moment I am having a hard time understanding the use of the Twits since when I read the latest one liner it often has no meaning for me. Of course this is coming from a guy who had voice activated four family party line in Montana when he was growing up, (“Number Please!” says the operator, followed by “Oh, Gladys, can you get off the linea minute so the McBee’s can call the Doctor? You know how accident prone Ricky is….”) Of course you knew that Gladys and her buddies didn’t hang up, while you called, just hung in there silently and got all the scoop so that it could be all over town in the next 20 minutes – not a whole lot unlike Twitter today). Then we went through the use of words with numbers to make a 7 digit code (JUniper was our prefix to give JU6-2044 as the home phone number on our single party line with an actual dial on the phone. The biggest jump came in 1962 when we went to 10 digit numbers because lord knows nobody can memorize a ten digit number and 406-586-2044 became the new memory game. So now here we all are, back to the party line with computers. Isn’t privacy a boor! It’s so much fun to know what the neighbors are doing and saying! So now I’m getting into that theme of the Web and all it’s little idiosyncratic features. But I will say this it sure beats sitting out in the central Kalahari for nearly three months with no mail, only the BBC for radio and the only time I needed a long distance phone to have the whole grid for Ngamiland go down. So let’s use this Web stuff to the best of our advantage to sell our books now because who knows we might get a sunspot storm tomorrow and I hate to think what that would bring.
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Rick McBee's Writings 