Blog Admin + Louis Riel

Hey everyone!

Today’s Deconstruction Post is scheduled for this evening, but I wanted to take a moment to update everybody on how things are going here at Putting Down Uprising and what my plans are for the near future.

First off, for anyone who may be following along with the novel itself, you’re going to notice that I’m skipping over a part of Alex Gabriel’s recce of downtown Winnipeg.  Specifically the part where he’s contemplating the statue of Metis leader Louis Riel.  Part of my reasoning here is that similar scenes are going to happen later in the novel, and I want to do a Riel-centered post where I take the opinions of all the various characters and contrast them with the history of the man himself.

Another reason for this, is that a lot of my historical knowledge centres around military history.  This means that, while I got a pretty good overall grasp on the history of the Red River and North West Rebellions, I’m coming up short when it comes to the people themselves.

So the Louis Riel post is going to have to wait a bit until I can do a bit more research.

(For an example of one of the perspectives I’ve come across, one of the sources I found actually refers to this conflicts as the First and Second Metis Wars, and describes the latter of these as the 1885 Resistance.  From his perspective, the term ‘rebellion’ implied that the Canadian Government was legitimate to the region, whereas the Metis and First Nations maintain that the government’s breaking of various treaties rendered them an illegitimate invader.)

Another thing is that, having come home from another season of Reserve Summer Training (RST), I’m now trying to sort out a new work-life balance.  One nice thing about living in a cubicle on a base is that your day is pretty much regimented from start to finish, making schedules easy to create and follow.  Now that I’m back in Ottawa, the irony of having more spare time has actually made organizing myself more difficult, rather than less.  This has coincided with a couple of stressors in my personal life, and the re-occurance of an old health issue.  This has made the last month a bit of a challenge.

My original plan of one deconstruction post and 2-3 other posts per week is still the ultimate goal, but part of this is going to have to be dependent on the sheer length of the posts themselves.  As you may have noticed, the Winnipeg Map Recces all tipped the scales at over 4,000 words.  I’m hoping to whittle things down to more manageable lengths in the future, allowing for a bit more flexibility with other posts.  So hopefully there’s that to look forward to for the future.

The last thing I’d like to do is thank everyone who’s been showing up to read these ramblings of mine.  When I started this blog it was mainly to exorcise some person demons.  I honestly had no idea if I was going to attract any real attention.  One of the features that WordPress includes is a tracker that shows page views and their countries of origins, and it’s encouraging (not to mention humbling) to see people show up week after week to read my work.  Especially those who are tuning in from overseas!  I wasn’t sure that this subject would be of interest for Canadians, so it’s a hell of a thing to see regular readers in Ireland, the UK, Norway and India.  Thank you so much, everyone!

Well, that’s the update.  Thanks for bearing with me.  Now on with the show!