While I wait for a couple of agents to decide if they like the current manuscript on submission, I know that I should get to work on a revision of an older work. If only I could get some kind of positive response on the queries that were sent out weeks ago. If only I could get another short story accepted, instead of being under consideration in the event that someone else pulls their piece and a slot opens up, only to be rejected in the end.
Eric Simonoff of Janklow & Nesbit liked the old manuscript, and back in the day when an agent had time to work with a new writer, I might have gotten representation. Those days are long gone, and I'm lucky to have gotten a bit more than a standard "Dear Author" rejection. Cutting at the front end and fleshing out the back end is needed to balance the sweeping epic.
The source material is sitting on the bookshelf. All six hundred pages. An exhaustive study of the Dublin lockout of 1913. Six hundred pages of information to be culled, to compose around fifty pages of manuscript.
That's the problem with historical fiction. You have to do research, find events that can fit into a story and then build a work of fiction on a frame of fact. The manuscript covers a multi-generational time span, and there's not enough between the Home Rule movement and the Easter Rising to make for a nice third of the total pages.
Sure there's plenty of things that happened that I can fit my characters into, but I have to sit down with a huge book and find those things that will work. I have verify that the historical people were in the place where I need them to be, interacting with my made-up people.
I'd be far more inspired if I felt that it was worth the time. If I could move out of the starting gate and make at least one lap this time around. Can I get a little positive reinforcement here?
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