SPOILER WARNING: THE BELOW TEXT MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS



Chapter 8 is named, of course, for the doomed ship Sultana which Flynn spies in the previous chapter and on which they spend most of this chapter and the next.

This portion of the book actually took the longest for me to flesh out in the outlining stage. I had the story pretty much thought up mostly in its current form up to the end of the last chapter but it really took me a long time to figure out what to do with their journey from Cairo to St. Louis.

I can’t remember exactly what caused me to connect the Sultana story – which has always fascinated me – to this one. I think I didn’t consider it initially because the timeline of the actual Sultana disaster doesn’t fit at all with this story. But when I looked into it I saw that the steamboat was in service on the same route during the time of my story, and although I knew I couldn’t use the actual explosion as a story point (which, in retrospect, I think would have been a mistake anyway) I thought that there must be some way to use it in the narrative.

Eventually I decided to use the steamboat as more of a backdrop, focusing more on the character of the ship’s captain, James Cass Mason.

James Cass Mason is the only unambiguously evil character in the book. This story doesn’t really have a central antagonist, at least not any single character, but if there was one then Captain Mason would fit the bill. Sgt. Thayer wasn’t evil, he was trying to do what he thought was his duty as a soldier. He posed a threat to Calvin and Flynn, but ultimately he was inept at his task. Captain Mason is meant to be an entirely different kind of threat: devious, cunning, heartless, and above all greedy, which proves to be his undoing.

James Cass Mason was the captain of the real Sultana in real life, of course, and so the character is the only character in the book that is based on a real person. Normally I’d have an issue casting a real person in the kind of overwhelmingly negative tone Captain Mason is portrayed as in the book, but I’ve always felt that James Cass Mason, in real life, is one of the greatest villains in American history, despite how little known he is. In real life it was his greed that caused 1,500 men to die, men that had been through years of hell on earth surviving Confederate prison camps – freed and happy that the war was finally over and hopeful for a future that would never come. I dunno, I’m not gonna retell that whole story, but the more you learn about it the angrier you get, and that’s a feat for something that happened 160 years ago. Such a senseless, selfish, preventable tragedy. But yeah, the real James Cass Mason gets absolutely no sympathy from me, and I had no qualms about portraying him as a monster in this book.

Anyway, back to the story! I spent a little time with them parting ways with the foxes and the ferryman, partially to reinforce that they’d grown close to Jonathan and Emily. Another slight anachronism here is that during the Civil War there was a fort at the convergence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in Cairo, but in the story it’s the nondescript sandy embankment which is there today. I felt that was all right, since there’s a lot of disagreement today about where the fort was or if it was even really much of a fort at all.

Them going into town to get new clothes is meant to set up several things besides just transitioning from the relative safety of the flatboat back into the danger of the wider world. Mainly it sets up the drama that occurs later in the chapter on the steamboat, but I also wanted to make Flynn’s love for clothing and interest in tailoring very clear. It was there in the first chapter in the way he carefully folded his clothes before going swimming instead of just tossing them aside, and of course with the blue coat he loved to wear, and it’s also kind of referenced in a couple other places, but I didn’t want what happens in chapter 10 and where they end up in the epilogue to come out of nowhere. I also figured that it would help to explain why he was so on-board with dressing as a woman to disguise themselves.

Anyway, from the tailor’s shop they head to Sultana, and of course that’s where they encounter Captain Mason for the first time. I introduced him looking at his watch and enumerating the various schemes he used to bilk passengers to get the reader to kind of get the picture of who this guy was and what he was about very early: selfish and greedy, but also cunning and devious. A dangerous person for Flynn and Calvin.

From the start he tried to goad Calvin into a violent reaction because he knows that this would justify being able to arrest him on the spot. He doesn’t initially know he’s a deserter for sure but he senses that something is up. He also sees the expensive clothing Calvin and Flynn are wearing and he’s jealous of him because he thinks his “wife” is knockout gorgeous and wants that, too. Ultimately it’s this insatiable greed that lets Calvin and Flynn escape; if he had arrested them as soon as he found out for sure Calvin was a deserter they would have been done for. If he’d done it without trying to steal the cigar case full of money or trying to seduce his “wife” that would also have been game over. But he wanted everything, he wouldn’t be satisfied if he didn’t have it all, and because of that Calvin and Flynn were able to escape. I dunno, that’s what I was going for with this character, and I hope that chain was clear to the reader.

Ah, I also wanted to make sure I included that he would habitually make up for lost time by overheating the Sultana’s boilers, did that at the beginning and also as the punctuation at the end. Again, I didn’t assume the reader would have knowledge of the actual Sultana disaster, but I wanted to include those things.

The scene where they get back to the room is mostly to show that they are panicking and caught off-guard, but before they can think of anything they are interrupted. I had to condense the time a bit here and I’m not happy about it or totally satisfied with how it ended up, but I didn’t want for Calvin and Flynn to have a chance to think of a plan, I wanted the tense encounter with Mason to happen quickly. So they are interrupted by the bear, Sgt. Granger, and made to leave.

Of course I also wanted to give Granger a bit of a personality; I didn’t want the men in the room with Mason to be cartoony nameless henchmen. I never really elucidate on what Mason’s actual scheme is, and I think it’s better in a sense that the reader doesn’t really know what he’s up to.

To that end, I wanted it to be clear that even the other folks in that room may not have been aware of what Mason’s plan was, at least not in its entirety. Granger thought it was solely to get them out of the room so someone could sneak in and steal the money, which was part of it, but there was more. The ox was clearly a bit of a dullard and was clueless, and it’s unclear how much the horses or the Major know.

Honestly, I myself never formulated what Mason’s entire plan was for the ruse. Sometimes if you want to write a mysterious or cunning or devious character, I think it’s best to leave things there. There is no right answer, just as there is no right answer about Cletus’ true nature. It’s whatever the reader envisions.

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I feel like that’s a pretty good segueway into something else I wanted to talk about in the writing notes for this chapter. I’ve always felt that when an artist creates a painting or a musician creates a song or a writer creates a book, once they’ve completed it then it exists apart from them. It doesn’t really belong to them any more – if it ever did – it belongs to the people who gaze at the painting or listen to the music or read the book. Like, I could have a definitive answer for what Mason’s plan was, but if it isn’t in the book then my view as an author isn’t any more valid than any reader’s. That’s my thought on authorial intent, anyway, the “death of the author” idea that a work exists independently of its creator and shouldn’t require familiarity with the creator to divine meaning. To me there is no right way or wrong way to read a book or look at a piece of art or listen to music since art is such a personal thing.

So where am I going with this tangent?

At some point in these writing notes I wanted to acknowledge the influence music had on me both for formulating the story and for actually writing it. I started each chapter with lyrics, which I realize is a kind of hallmark of shitty fan fiction and disqualifying for publication, but at the same time this story is personal to me and I wanted to share a little bit of that with the reader. Not to impart any specific message, since my hope was that the book might also feel personal to the reader and it’s up to them to decide what’s important – mostly just for me.

A lot of the lyrics/music I chose kind of reinforce or echo what’s happening in the story if they didn’t directly inspire it; that was something I actively tried for and it inspired a lot of things I don’t think I would have considered otherwise. The songs for four of the first five chapters all are very specific to the Civil War. Gregory Alan Isakov’s “Stable Song” directly inspired a decent portion of chapter 10. For the scene in chapter 5 where Flynn and Calvin make love for the first time next to the stream, the song “Meet me in the Woods” by Lord Huron pretty much directly inspired it, so I wanted to include it. There’s a couple other examples.

To that end, the album “Strange Trails” inspired a couple other things, like the scene where Flynn is in the water searching for Calvin in chapter 9. I dunno, I listened to that album for the first time right as I was starting this project in earnest and it kind of felt like it went with what I was trying for in a weird way. Sometimes the lyrics link up, sometimes they don’t, but it had a feel that felt like it fit. Here’s a link to it if you’d like to give it a listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiwWgN5O3WQ

Following this tangent even further, while the songs that I used for the chapter openings were meant to echo the story they are not what I listened to when actually writing. I’ve always listened to music when writing, and I find relaxing music with no lyrics the easiest for me to get into the zone.

As I started writing the book I found myself listening to a lot of post-rock. Just a few days into the writing I discovered an artist, a Hungarian guitarist named Czarnogurszky István who was making collaborative albums under the name “Black Hill.” As I kept writing I kept listening, and after a month or two I really found that I had developed a strong association with this guy’s music and my own story, Blue and Gray.

I legitimately can’t overstate that association, or really even do it justice here. I’d say 95% of Blue and Gray was written while I was listening to three albums, over and over again, for what had to have been hundreds and hundreds of hours.

These three:

Black Hill and Silent Island – Tales of the Night Forest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTLunRuCGQQ

Black Hill and heklAa – Rivers and Shores: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTvJUa6Vg78

Black Hill and heklAa – Mother of All Trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTwuNaSlq4I

Looping back to what I said earlier, as I said I feel that once someone creates a piece of art it’s no longer theirs, not really. It belongs to the viewer, the reader, the listener. I don’t know Czarnogurszky István, I wouldn’t recognize him if I passed him on the street, and he has no clue who I am or what his music has meant for me. Likewise, someone reading Blue and Gray wouldn’t have any clue of the strong association I personally have between his music and this story. He created the music, but I as a listener ascribed my own meaning to it, and that’s something I’ll always carry with me.

That’s how I feel about art. Deep down I think I hope that someday, something I write will be felt the same way to someone else even if I never know who they are – my story becomes their story.

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Tangent over! Where was I? Ah yeah, Flynn and Calvin in the lion’s den!

As I mentioned I wanted it to be ambiguous what the totality of Captain Mason’s scheme was, who was in on it, who knew what. Going back to music, I wanted to tie in the song “Lorena” from chapter 1 into this section. This was a real song that would have been well-known to soldiers on both sides during the Civil War and has its own history, check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorena_(song)

I also wanted to contrast it with the much more elegant and beautiful music that Lt. Granger played initially, Bach’s Allegro Assai from his concerto for violin in A minor, which kind of transported Flynn away from the moment and the danger briefly. I guess that was kind of an homage from me personally to the role music had in the writing of this book.

Once Granger began playing Lorena and Mason forced Flynn to dance with him I wanted to reinforce how much of a scummy dude Mason was. That and, more importantly, I wanted to created a rising tenseness that eventually came to a crescendo. The more nasty things he said in Flynn’s ear and the more he groped him (thinking he was a woman) the more incensed Calvin became, which was exactly the reaction Mason was hoping for. Meanwhile the lion character, the Major, notices Calvin has his hand on a gun and is ready to shoot him down if he makes a move.

I don’t really have a lot of experience writing scenes like that so I’m not sure if it totally achieved the effect I was hoping for. Based on the feedback I’ve gotten I think I did all right but I still feel like I could have done a little better, especially the portion at the end. I wanted the reader to feel like the danger of Calvin shooting the captain and then getting shot himself was real even though, of course, Calvin and Flynn aren’t going to get killed in this story. I feel like that can be an issue in most stories; you know the protagonists aren’t going to die, but you still want the dangerous moments to feel dangerous, you know? I think that’s where previous events help create the notion that these things are possible. Edward was a major character and he died, Flynn got shot earlier and Calvin killed an enemy soldier, so clearly this is a universe where actions have consequences and danger is real, right? That’s what you hope the reader thinks when you’re writing something like this even though you as the author know how things turn out and that you were never really going to let your protagonists die. Hopefully readers felt that the tension in the room was real!

Also, I really, really didn’t want Calvin to kill anyone here or anywhere in the book after he killed the badger because that would totally undermine one of his central arcs in an unforgivable way, in my opinion. He came close and he was on the edge, but just like before if he had fought he would have died. The Major would have killed him. The only way forward was to stop fighting.

That’s true for him, anyway. Flynn saves him indirectly like he does a few other times in the book by making a scene and slapping Captain Mason silly, providing them both the chance to escape. I realize that I portrayed Flynn as small and physically weak compared to Calvin throughout the book, but Calvin is meant to be exceptionally strong. At the end of the day Flynn is still a man, so his slap was a lot more powerful than Mason had ever been slapped by a woman.

The end of the chapter is meant to very strongly suggest that the Major and Lt. Granger are both gay and that this might be the beginning of a closer relationship between them. That’s their story though, not Calvin and Flynn’s, and we’re not following that thread. We have to leave them and their possibilities behind when our protagonists rush out of the room.