Slightly Off the Mark

Old and Strange Vehicle Photos

It's photo Wednesday again, or whatever day you happen to be reading and I happen to be posting. Staying on a schedule has turned out to be harder than I thought, especially since I'm editing one book and still working on the first draft of another.

The subject wasn't hard, though, because as I looked through old photos I found a number that had two things in common: old or unusual vehicles, taken at an inopportune time. In other words, snapshots. For instance, in the above photo I was taking pictures of an unusually large load that was being escorted through town at the time. Then I caught sight of this car, which I've seen drive through town many times, but never managed to capture before.

It was the same in this case. (I was stopped!) I had already brought out my phone to get the car ahead of me, when I saw an Avilla Fire truck go by and tried to get them both in the frame. Which is dumb.

(By the way, these were all taken at least a couple of years ago, so ignore the license plates.)

Elvis has stopped for Starbucks!

This truck, you'll agree, can go for hundreds of miles with that spare tank on its back.

A pretty much normal car, but as I was photographing it, it was photographing me.

I was parked right outside my job as I arrived for my shift. I didn't bother to ask the other dispatchers if anyone could afford it.

This was apparently just being used as a passenger car. I never saw the driver, so I can't tell you if it's his or hearse.

Emily and I both like camping, so I showed her this. But she said no.

In my unpublished novel We Love Trouble, a couple and their dog travel around in a huge RV towed by an equally large pickup truck. I'm thinking of going to a former fire truck as above, but the logistics of maneuvering that thing around are pretty intimidating.

You can’t find our cars here, but here are some places to find us and our books:

· Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0058CL6OO

· Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/"Mark R Hunter"

· Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4898846.Mark_R_Hunter

· Blog: https://markrhunter.blogspot.com/

· Website: http://www.markrhunter.com/

· Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ozma914/

· Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkRHunter914

· Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markrhunter/

· Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarkRHunter

· Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MarkRHunter

· Substack: https://substack.com/@markrhunter

· Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/ozma914

· Audible: https://www.audible.com/search?searchAuthor=Mark+R.+Hunter&ref_pageloadid=4C1TS2KZGoOjloaJ&pf

Remember: You can read in cars, too.

Hoosier Hysterical's 10th Anniversary, Complete With Reviews!

May 1st was the 10th anniversary of the publication of Hoosier Hysterical: How the West Became the Midwest Without Moving at All. So the theme of this blog is: no, not that, it's "reviews".

Authors often beg, and sometimes pay for, reviews of their books. (Note: I do NOT pay for reviews.) They're critically important for our success, both because they pump up our algorithms in various book seller and social media sites, and because they put the eyes of readers on your writing. Not literally. Ew.

Your review doesn't have to be as detailed as this one: A simple "I like this book", or even throwing some stars at it, helps greatly. Still, I really like this review, because, well, the reviewer thinks I'm funny. I've always said, if you can't be rich or have superpowers, be funny. Okay, I said it once.

In addition to the review, the Whatzup regional magazine also printed a 2016 article about the book's release, which you can find here:

https://whatzup.com/featured-writer-mark-r-hunter-the-writing-fireman/

Just in time for Indiana’s bicentennial comes a new history book, that compiles everything notable about our fair state through the ages into one tidy volume. Yes, it’s a book about Indiana history, but it is worth reading anyway, not just because you really should know something about the state in which you live (and in which you were probably born and raised, too) but because it’s written by Noble County native Mark R. Hunter, and he’s a pretty funny guy.

His take on Indiana history is thorough but irreverent, and even if you have to cast a skeptical eye on some of his historical claims (I honestly don’t think the prehistoric mounds in central Indiana were actually ancient outhouses), you’ll probably learn some new true facts about your state by the time you’ve finished the book.

In Hoosier Hysterical, Hunter begins almost at the very beginning of Indiana history. He doesn’t start with the Hoosier state congealing out of a mass of molten goo as the Earth’s crust solidified, but he picks up the story just a little later, when the first humans wandered into the land we know so well.

“Some of them made their way to Central America, discovered chocolate, and lived in paradise,” he writes. “Others took a wrong turn while circling Indianapolis, and boy, is that easy to do. They settled in the Midwest, imported corn from the much happier natives of Central America, and the rest is history.”

That history is the story that Hunter tells, from the settling of the eventual state by those early natives, to the later infiltration of the land by Europeans, to the centuries that the Indiana territory spent as a wilderness battleground where those Europeans fought off the natives and each other, established forts and settlements, and generally made a mess of things.

Hunter’s journey through Indiana’s history is long and detailed, but it sticks closely to the highlights you’d find in a drier, not so fun history book in school. You’ll find out about William Henry Harrison and Tecumseh and Anthony Wayne and Tippecanoe, and all those other famous names that you’ve heard about at one time or another, but can’t quite remember what it was that you were supposed to remember about them.

The book’s heavy on what happened before the state was a state, and what happened during the first hundred years that it was a state. The second hundred years, not so much. Hunter augments the history, though, with trivia—which is very closely related to history when you think about it. He gives us explanations of Indiana’s symbols (did you know Indiana has an official state rock?) and he crafts loving, if silly stories about all those Indiana things we’ve come to love by living here all our lives. He even tackles the greatest of all Hoosier mysteries, the origin of the word “Hoosier.” Of course, he doesn’t provide a convincing theory of the word’s origination (no one ever has or ever will) but at least he has fun trying.

There are also many chapters about things that make Indiana special: the Indianapolis 500, the many famous people who were born here, the movies and TV shows that were either set or filmed in Indiana, the state’s many parks and natural attractions and many other tidbits and minutiae. Did you know that the famous Coca-Cola bottle design was created in Terre Haute? Neither did I, but now we both do. These are the kinds of things that make it possible to live with even a tiny bit of pride in a state that rarely makes it to the top of the lists of really important things.

We native Hoosiers have spent our lives in a state of constant self-deprecation. We’ve had to, having been born in a state that most other Americans wouldn’t be able to find on a map.

We’ve learned how to gently mock the state of our birth while maintaining a quiet affection for a place that is actually pretty nice if you really pay attention to it. That’s a balance that Hunter holds quite well throughout Hoosier Hysterical, and the book is one more Hoosier product that we can be proud of.

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