My Main Character blog hop
I’m glad to be able to participate in #MyMainCharacter Blog Hop, my first ever.
1. What is the name of your character? Is he/she fictional or a historical person?
Calvin Jester is a lieutenant in the United States Army. He is a fictional character.
2. When and where is the story set?
The story takes place primarily in the northwestern Mexican state of Sonora during the early stages of the Mexican Revolution in 1911.
3. What should we know about him/her?
Jester is the consummate lady’s man, usually more interested in a pretty face than his military duties. He is 27 years old, a West Point graduate who has spent nearly all of his military career thus far in staff jobs in the Northeast. He is competent when he has to be but takes life in a lighthearted manner, far preferring a tongue-in-cheek to a serious approach. He comes from a patrician family in South Carolina and is well-versed in great literature, from which he is fond of quoting at appropriate and inappropriate times.
4. What is the main conflict? What messes up his/her life?
Jester finds his comfortable existence upset when the needs of the army take precedence over his personal preferences. He is ordered into Mexico on a clandestine mission with a straight-laced, no-nonsense cavalry officer named C. W. Langhorne, an expert long-range marksman. Jester’s situation is aptly described by another soldier, who jokingly warns Jester that he is going into Mexico with “a religious zealot who can put a bullet through your heart at a thousand yards.” The real challenge, however, will come when he faces the wilderness of the Sierra Madre, the harsh realities of human trafficking and revolutionary justice, and not one but two pretty girls who turn the emotional tables on Jester.
5. What is the personal goal of the character?
Jester starts out wanting to experience the least possible inconvenience and the greatest possible enjoyment but finds that for the first time he will be forced to take life seriously if he wants to get out of Mexico with his self-respect—and his head—intact.
6. Is there a working title for this novel, and can we read more about it?
I’m calling it Reconnaissance in Sonora for now, but I’m not satisfied with that title. C. W. Langhorne, who shares “main character” status with Jester in a manner similar to that in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin series, has his own Facebook page on which he blogs occasionally when he’s not too busy keeping the border safe from revolutionaries. This is a prequel to my novel Marksman’s Trinity (Fireship Press, 2014).
Thanks to Jess Wells for tagging me. Next week you’ll meet Alison Green, a talented young author.