StanleyWheeler

  Chained to a rock at last. Fortunately, I don't see any eagles descending--at least not until the lender demands the monthly pound of flesh. We moved up (i.e., escaped) from the rental apartment, where the neighbors allow their dogs do their duty near the doorway, in the doorway, or on the stairs, to an almost-country manor. The wide open space begins on the other side of my back fence. The yard is small and the neighbors are too close, but they're not directly below my feet nor cheek by jowl with only paper-thin walls in between. We were already seeking a new abode (following the sale of the chateau) but the new roommates added to the joint below and the loud video games thundering on to three in the morning beneath our bedroom goaded us into accelerating the move.  We had hoped to move two weeks earlier, but the repetitive demands from the lender and waiting on the seller and third parties to assemble their waterfowl into linear formation hindered our haste, shackled our s...

Wellington confirmed that the French cavalry was the strongest on the European continent during the Napoleonic era. The heavy cavalry mounted frontal charges during battle to break enemy infantry or route their cavalry. The medium cavalry performed charges like the heavy cavalry and also acted as ‘mounted infantry.’ (See the picture below, Detaile's "Charging French Dragoons"). The light cavalry conducted reconnaissance before battle and pursuit of the routed enemy after battle. -- Napoleon's Cavalry, Artillery, and Technical Corps 1799-1815 by Gabriele Esposito Why these bland tidbits of Napoleonic tactics that are well known to every student of the era? I'm glad you asked. I'm assembling facts and details for a short story featuring my three favorite fictional cavalry officers of La Grande Armee : Beaujeu the dragoon, Pichon the chasseur-a-cheval , and Gavrel the hussar. These three sprang to life in a story I wrote set in Egypt. Although that story remain...

I've got Accidental Pirates on my mind because I dropped in on  Les Freres Corses this week. They're not bookworms by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think they've ever even read a chapter book from beginning to end. Accidental Pirates has changed that. When I stopped in for a short visit. Chris, the brother upon whom the character telling the story in the book is based, immediately grabbed the book and showed me that he was reading it, pointing out that he only had one chapter to go. "They should make this into a movie!" he exclaimed. That response makes all the time I spent writing Accidental Pirates a complete success. Getting even one boy to read is a victory. Most of the boys I know--arguably, not that many--don't read much at all. Many boys do read, but young male readership has dropped off steadily over the last decade or two. In fact, some report (by which I mean the standard search engine) that reading for pleasure among 11-16 year old...

  The sequel to Accidental Pirates has been sent to the publisher for consideration. Chris and Kenny are thrown into a kingdom in turmoil facing treachery within and enemies without. Chris has been drafted to replace the blood mage - and he finds the job has a serious downside. Kenny wields enchanted steel against a host of enemies. Together they are the kingdom's only hope against a new evil. I've been doing a lot of reading about Enoch - Genesis 6, Moses 7 & 8, as well as The Book of Enoch , a long with A Brief History of Time and an Alan Dean Foster novel. I may post about these at some point, but at I haven't yet finished any of the books, so I'll post a fun fact from something I did finish - or at least I think I did. This is condensed from chapter 11 of  Crusaders by Dan Jones: Fun Fact: During an expedition to Egypt, King Baldwin I died after eating a breakfast of fresh fish. His body was salted, spiced, and transported back to Jerusalem to be buried beside...