Waking to a late April morning that felt more like it was winter than like spring, it was a morning suited for staying in pajamas and reading.

Having covered much of the New Mexico and early Comanche history I hoped to in the Gwynne book “Empire of the Summer Moon”, I read another 30 pages or so in it for the sake of finishing it at some point. I still kept pen close by and underlined important things.

This morning, I learned the Texan war on the Comanches started from San Antonio, and was largely started by adventuring young men who were migrating west, single, and looking for a good fight. Texas at this time was a republic, and not a wealthy one at that. The Indians were a terrorizing nuisance. The Europeans who moved there were vulnerable and irritated. And the Texas Rangers- an informal and motley collective of young, disorganized Indian fighters, rose up to take on that challenge.

For a while, the Comanche wiped out many of those young men in the Indian hunting parties that wandered west looking for them: the young men were too inexperienced, too poorly equipped, too poorly horsed, and too uneducated about their raiding neighbors. Many young men died questing after Comanches that they had no idea how to beat in combat. A young, wise, fearless fellow among them named John Coffee Hays changed all of that.

Hays, who came to Texas as a surveyor- a super risky occupation at that time- was an intelligent and mild-mannered guy, until he was pushed into a fight. At that time, though, his cunning and iron will took over. His credo was “the best defense is a ruthless offense”, and hays learned all he could about Comanche military ways so that he could emulate them, and use them against his enemy. Hays recruited good men with good horses, and set up a camp where they all learned to fight like the Comanches- strictly from horseback.
Hays began taking his men into Comanche strongholds and through audacity and surprise, brought shock and destruction to the groups he attacked.

In 1844, when Hays and his men got ahold of the newly-invented 5-shot Colt pistol, history in the American West changed, and the Western hero icon was born. A repeat-firing gun leveled the playing field between Hays and his men and the Comanche, whose lethality through rapid fire bow skills were, to this time, unmatched by white men with single shot guns. The pistol let the Rangers match the Comanche in speed of reload and fire.

It’s a fascinating book.

I switched gears late morning to start reading another book that feels crucial at this point in time: “Save the Cat”, by Blake Snyder.

Recommended in writing classes I’ve taken and articles I’ve read, “Save the Cat” is heralded as a great guide to writing a salable screenplay. Snyder is a Hollywood insider who wrote the book as a guide to help others write a decent screenplay, and the book got picked up and forwarded as a Bible of sorts for the enterprise.

And, of course, the first thing Snyder asks the prospective screenplay writer about his project is “What is it?”

Before writing a word of your draft, you have to be able to answer that question about your movie idea. And to answer that question, Snyder suggests you need to resolve to other items before you start actually writing your film: 1) Be able to write a log line that describes your project easily for others, and 2) Give it a title that also suggests an answer to “What is it?”

So, putting that guide down and switching back to the Anza project, I am left asking myself about it, “What is it?” What is the point of this thing? What is the one-sentence line about it that contains an irony that hooks you on wanting to see it, that lets you see the entire arc of the story within it, that clearly defines its audience and cost, and that tells you what it is?

I reckon that is the next exercise on the writing side of the project I need to do.

Off to clean up cat barf spots in the carpet.