I’ve decided to take a little time off of my constant doomscrolling obligation to do some actual writing. Well, not writing in a literal sense, but actually editing something I had written a while back, with a thought towards publishing. Initially, I had thought that the story wasn’t really good enough to publish. Now, with the perspective of some more experience, I realize that hardly anybody’s going to read the damn thing, so what the hell. Why not?
The latest project(s) started out as a novel manuscript that I began in 2008. It was about a fictional town in Pennsylvania called Lester. The gag was that the town founders were trying to follow the style of naming towns after ones in England. This town was to be named after Leicester, but the town founders got the spelling wrong. Then I found out that there actually is a Lester, PA. From what I can tell, it’s little more than a collection of industrial warehouses at the end of the Philadelphia airport runway, but it sort of spoiled the name. SO I changed the name of my town to Fester, which actually works a little better as far as gag town names go.
The first draft of Fester topped out at around 160,000 words, which is paltry if you’re George R.R. Martin or Neal Stephenson, but pretty big for a debut novel. Even pleading the case of world-building to boost the word count, it’s still excessive. So I chopped and chopped.
One of the things I chopped was a story arc about a witchcraft murder, similar to one that occurred near my hometown of York, PA back in 1928. I thought that it might be able to function as a standalone short story, but I was more focused on getting the Fester MS down to a more manageable size. I was shooting for 100,000 words, but I ended up settling for 110,000.
I made some attempts to interest some agents in Fester, but they were unsuccessful and I got distracted by the early stages of Jackrabbit. Pretty soon, I was up to my eyebrows in Dillingeriana, and I had forgotten about the doings in Fester, Pennsylvania.
There were a few more small writing projects last year, and then I got started on another novel MS, about stand-up comedians (working title: Laughingstock). As the first few chapters began to coalesce, it became apparent that this was going to be a long-term project. To have something to talk about besides my glacial writing process, I dusted off Fester. I decided to have a pro do the editing, since it seemed to work well for Jackrabbit. At the moment, I’m shopping around for editors.
While that’s going on, I went back to the first draft and began reassembling the story arc about the witchcraft murder. It was clear that it was going to need a lot of TLC. It was also apparent that it was going to be a bit longer than a short story. At 15,000 words, it inhabits that uncomfortable literary gray zone called “novella” or “novelette.” I’m sure there’s a technical difference, but to me it’s academic.
I’m hitting the keys on the witchcraft story, which has a working name of Powwows. Not sure if I will publish it as an e-book, publish it in its entirety here, or both. Regardless, readers will soon be able to get a glimpse into the strange little town in the Allegheny foothills that I call Fester.
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