September 29, 2022

Passed 40K on Chaparral. A new ordinance. One of the homeless men is dead. Diggsworth is completing his barn. Willem might be Diggsworth's stable boy. Rose has not made any headway with Andre. Chaparral is turning out to be more than a sleepy bedroom town in the foothills.

The unkillable Kitty O'Kane

 I’m bowled over by irony and The Unkillable Kitty O’Kane provides strike after strike. This book provided me with a diversion from breakfast, which is analogous to reading the newspaper while crunching away. Getting away from the Liberties in Dublin provided the first irony in that Kitty took ship aboard Titanic. Since that unsinkable ship only had one partial voyage the meaning of the title became all too clear once she was at sea.

In a lifeboat as the mighty behemoth was slipping beneath the icy cold surface, the only voice to return to any other survivors was, you guessed it, Kitty O’Kane. The survivor that was plucked from the sea provided the beginning of another irony in that he, Lincoln, used his influence to get Kitty a job in New York City.

Kitty’s friend Elsie returned to marry. The irony in that situation is that her husband went off to fight in The Great War and came back so shell-shocked that he was incapable of providing for Elsie and himself.
Another delicious irony (although somewhat predictable) was that Kitty took ship to see her friend Elsie. And what ship did Kitty sail on? The Lusitania, sunk by a German torpedo.

Kitty’s adventures with the man she’d help save, Lincoln, led to a travelogue of following conflicts that Lincoln wrote about as a well-known journalist. He even encouraged her to take up that occupation and she did, but with little success.

It wasn’t until the Irish Rebellion that Kitty reached a comfortable stride when she described in an article about how difficult it was to have her lover die in her arms.

All the while that Kitty was traveling to the Middle East and Russia she experienced war at its most brutal, but it was Lincoln dying in her arms that finally brought the last irony into play.

One of the men on the Titanic that tried to seduce Kitty, Jack and his insufferable wife, came with a proposition to Kitty to save her from an Irish firing squad.

That relation ship was as ironic as one could imagine in that she escaped the firing squad only to find that her life with Jack was a Hobson’s Choice.

Threading through the story was a man who had grown up with Kitty and who finally accepts her with all the baggage from previous relationships. Tom a successful doctor soon to become a surgeon, meets Kitty just before boarding a ship to return to London and a life to be lived happily ever after.

Okay, I got my fill of irony. The story is, as other reviewers have commented, predictable. Many of the characters don’t jump off the page although some of the minor characters do remain in memory. Falconer put in many hours of research to get the ambiance of his scenes right and he deserves credit for that.

When all the analysis is complete the real reason for publishing this book becomes apparent: Falconer has a following and his publisher allowed him to escape what his followers expected. I suspect they encouraged him in this effort because they knew there would be profit in the book, from the hardback, paperback and ebook issues, although not as much as from Falconer’s usual endeavors. Knowing how much work went into this book, I can only say Bravo for the effort.

September 16, 2022

I changed the title of the new book from "Old Stuff" to "Chaparral" because it made more sense. Passed 30K words today with petty theft competing for space with the barn and horse corral. A reporter from the Ledger Dispatch newspaper in Jackson interviewed the mayor as well as Andy Goggins, the homeless tent dweller in Chaparral. The Fourth of July has come and gone but the decorations over Main Street still wave in the breeze.

September 4, 2022

Old Stuff passed 20K words today. Angus has his lumber and helpers to begin the foundation for his barn. Tommy Tiels rounds up his cattle to begin feeding them grain. James Bish is frustrated by the responses he's received from his homeless survey. The story moves along.