Big Ledge is now truly done. 
95 000 words and out of my hands.  In fact query letters and a fifty pages of manuscript are in the mail and on their way to four different BC publishers.  (None, I regret to say, accept email submissions, unlike an increasingly larger number of American publishers).

It am in a good place psychologically.  Now I can move on to other things.  I have several short stories I’m anxious to start.  And best do it before I forget how.



Then there is the marketing of Eta Carinae still to consider. I’m hoping to get a few people to review the novella, thereby—I hope—creating more interest.  And perhaps I will offer to send people the audio version of the story (for free) with an online purchase.

Maybe I can even arrange a local book launch?  And I am even considering the option of advertising on Facebook.  Does this make me sound desperate?

Big Ledge is in its final stages of editing (that is, until some outside editor has a go at it.) Next on the agenda is a visit to the Provincial Court House to read through the trial transcripts, both Sproule’s murder trial, and the Kootenay Mining Appeal of 1884.

A reader might ask why I’ve waited till now to read those documents.  There are two reasons:
1) I didn’t want to be overly-constrained by ‘facts’ as I mapped out the plot of my story and
2) The “British Daily Colonist”, one of Victoria’s daily newspapers of the day, covered Sproule’s murder trial at length, often including verbatim quotations from key witnesses.

Still who knows what juicy tidbits might lie within those documents?

This does sound like a recipe for INCREASING the length of my manuscript, doesn't it?

I’d better come armed with a necklace of garlic and a crucifix…

The second pass on Big Ledge is complete and the manuscript is six thousand words lighter.  Most of the typos, repetitions and questionable grammar are gone, and my dialogue is quite drenched in ‘cowboy vocabulary’.

I did some careful checking into factual details.  I also did my best to tighten up the consistency of behaviour for certain characters, trying to avoid having the attributes of one character bleed into another. 

My third pass of Big Ledge will be the most brutal. Next I will try to eliminate whole passages, perhaps chapters, which an impartial, unsympathetic eye would deem non-essential to the story.

I will, in other words, dismember the work… Then try to put it back together.

Horror.

Whether the Frankenstein version of the novel which remains will be worth animating or not is an open question.

Igor, to the lab at once!

Since the finish of the first draft about two weeks ago, I have read through the manuscript twice and reduced its length from 104 thousand words to 99 thousand. Gone, I hope, is the needless repetition and unnecessary wordiness.  Wordiness may continue to be an issue however.  My central character, Sproule, is obsessed with words and tries to use the most high falutin’ ones he can come up with, just to startle people.  There are a few legal prigs in the story as well. They have been known to be ‘wordy’ at times.  Due to forces beyond my control (that's my story, and I'm sticking to it), the entire novel may be infected with a certain verbal garishness throughout, so I will need to continue to be on my guard.

It probably does not help that I have been reading The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy over the last several weeks—a great novel, but hardly an antidote to wordiness.

Besides the constant goal of looking for places to cut content, my main goal in the second pass was to beef up my 19th century vocabulary.  To check on the legitimacy of expressions I had my characters use and to insert some new ones where needed.

This was done with the help of some good online sources and also with my own personal compilation of colourful words and phrases from Tom Sawyer.  The vast majority of these words and expressions were familiar, if quaint, but a few gems came as total surprises.

Here are a few of my favourites, most of which have made their way into the book:

 

Cock robin (a soft easy fellow)

Off one’s chump (crazy)

The cat’s uncle (one who grins without reason)

Fancy Dan (flashy dude)

High-toned (fancy)

Vexation (annoyance)

Bunch of fives (fist)

Like enough (probably)

Month of Sundays (long period)

Ruination (downfall)

Damaging revealments (scandalous secrets)

Devilment (mischief)

Hornswoggle (to cheat)

Fimble-famble (lame excuse)

Risibility (sense of humour)

Vittles (human food)

Sit-upons (trousers)

 

And my two very favourites: cold coffee (misfortune)

and… pixilated (bewildered)


 

I keep seeing Festus from the television series Gunsmoke, limping into the jailhouse and crying out: “Golly, Marshal! That high-toned fancy Dan’s gonna be the ruination of us all!” or words to that effect.