R.E. Thomas's Blog, page 5

Whiskey and Civil War Crossover

Sometimes it happens that my whiskey writing crosses path with my Civil War interests, as was the case with the story of Charles Weller, brother of whiskey legend W.L. Weller. Today, I have another such intersection. I published an article about Paul Caldwell and his company, Confederate Stills of Alabama. His company is named as [...]

Western Tanks of the 1960s and 70s

M-60 vs. Leopard 1 vs. Chieftain vs. AMX-30 Like anyone who is both my age and the author of military fiction, I took a keen interest in the very modern military affairs of the Reagan era. Quite by chance, I learned just how wrong the open source material of that period could be. Back in [...]

Fake Amazon Reviews

Fake reviews on Amazon are nothing new. They are so commonplace, in fact, that they have attracted attention from Forbes, Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Amazon cracked down on companies using dozens or hundreds of fake profiles to sell fake reviews, but fakes are still posted every day. Going to a faker company [...]

The Artillery Charge in the Civil War, Part II

~Jump Back to Part I~ Field Guns vs. Muskets The idea that the increased range of the minie ball-firing rifle musket made the artillery charge obsolete has a somewhat sound basis, since both a field gun firing canister and a rifle musket are usually quoted as having the same maximum effective range of 400 yards. [...]

The Artillery Charge in the Civil War, Part I

Perhaps the biggest point of dispute in modern Civil War historiography is how much impact the rifled musket actually had. Paddy Griffith fired the first volley in this conflict in 2001 with his Battle Tactics of the Civil War, which was followed up by Brent Nosworthy’s The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat [...]

Word Count, Book Layout, and Page Count Tricks

Some folks have commented that Stonewall Goes West is a short novel, and it is a little on the short side. It is, but not for the reason some people think. Word Count Is the Way In publishing, the length of a work is determined by its word count, not its page length. That is [...]

Bristoe Station Becomes Second Kettle Run

Following the dictum of opening with a bang, I started Stonewall Goes West with the fictitious Second Battle of Kettle Run. My opinion is that any good alternate history (or at least any good one that isn’t about time travel) follows the rule of starting with a small, plausible change at first, and then widening [...]

The Things One Finds While Scouting Locations…

One of the things I decided when I embarked on researching and writing the Stonewall Goes West trilogy was that while it was inevitable that some reader or critic somewhere would say “that place wasn’t really like that,” they would not be able to say it for want of my trying to make it so. [...]

Civil War Librarian “Reviews” SGW

I’ve adopted the rule of not responding to reviews of my work, either by readers or professionals. Most authors follow this line, and I think that is a wise policy. Even if an author produces a good work, taste is taste, not everyone will like it, and it’s better to grow a thicker skin that [...]

There Stands Jackson, Sucking On A Lemon

Few conflicts caused as many rich personalities to be put into the historical spotlight as the American Civil War, and arguably the most eccentric among them was that of Stonewall Jackson. He was the devout Presbyterian who frequently fell asleep during services, and worse, was a snorer to boot; his passion for fruit in general [...]