Finished!
5 years. 6 staged sketches. 10 drafts. Immeasurable help. First novel is ready for publication -- now to find an agent.
I did it.
At 11:49 a.m. Saturday, March 9, I finished my fifth pass-through of the 10th draft, tightening (cut 6,000 words), proofing (oodles of typos) and tweaking. It’s done. Hiram Falls, my first novel, is complete.
For now.
As I’ve mentioned, several of my beta reader-editors have encouraged me to see if an external publisher will buy the book. They think it’s that good and want to see it get a wide audience.
To do that, my first task will be to find an agent.
If any of you know of a good agent, please let me know in the comments below or via email (ggevalt (at) gmail (dot) com); I’m flying blind here.
Then we’ll try to find a publisher. I will give it a go for six months. It’s not going to be easy. Aside from all the dysfunction in the publishing industry, this book is hard to define. If you were to pick a genre it would be literary-historical-magical realism. Go figure. It could be compartmentalized as a “Vermont” book, even though it’s about any small town in America from 1918 to 1974.
So what is the book about?
A rural town with secrets — some are discovered and some shouldn’t be. It is about the space between knowing and not knowing. It is about unbending legacies, paths chosen and unchosen. It is about the humanity of a town as told through the intertwining stories of 12 characters — an auto mechanic savant with brain damage and his wife trying to cope with a man utterly changed by an accident; father and son bankers as corrupt as the day is long; father and son strong arms who assist the bankers; two young journalists who discover things but still can’t resolve how they feel about each other; a woman with lavender hair with a dark secret; a farm family devastated by fire; a woman whose isolation becomes explained; and a ghost. It is about how a town reacts.
This may be a bit much for any independent publisher who, if they were interested, would want to know whether I’m writing a sequel. (Let me get back to you about that.)
If no publisher is found, I will go with Plan A — to do it with my friends — a local printer for a paperback, a local director to cast and produce the audiobook and podcast, a local nonprofit to supply the studio and sound engineering work and to run it on radio as a serial, a designer for the paperback and the ebook, a young media savant to handle serializing it right here and to run social media. And I’ll go wherever, whenever to read, talk, sign books. And I’ll have gatherings here and elsewhere online.
My plan remains to give most of any proceeds I secure to four nonprofits I admire. If you give as well, please send me a digital copy of the receipt (sans cc numbers, etc.) so I can give you discounts and goodies when the time comes.
A few words on this last draft …
It feels strange to be done. I liken to what I felt years ago when six of us paddled for 50 days and 800 miles in the wilderness and arrived at Kuujjuag, an Inuit village at the edge of the Quebec Arctic:
I was glad to stop paddling but incredibly sad it was over.
I feel like I am mourning. The characters are no longer part of my daily life, no longer taking over my thinking — mulling over their lives (I even started dreaming about them), mannerisms, reactions, worries, wants; seeing new ideas pop into my brain for something they might do or think, or some anecdote to add to their backstories. Or answering the question: why did they do that?
I also am no longer thinking about where the book is weak and how to fix it. It’s done. It’s the best it can be right now.
And I do like it. The only time I have walked away from this 10th draft has been when I was exhausted and was losing concentration. This draft is the final draft. It works. It fulfills my goals and the goals of my reader-editors — that it be high quality, that it gives you a deep look at humanity, that it keeps your attention and emotional interest.
This was, by far, the most difficult draft to do. It differs in significant ways from the 9th draft, primarily because so much had to be changed with the new opening. It forced me to eliminate an event around which much of the second half had revolved; I had to move around a lot of material, cut a lot and create several new important, but minor, characters and anecdotes. It was grueling. And frightening.
I did it in Five Easy Pieces. I took my time. It finally came together.
I started with the new opening. I had been thinking about it for some time, so it was not that hard to write it; I drew it from an existing scene but changed it dramatically.
I then analyzed what it was changing in the second half — what sections had to be removed, what could be changed, what new scenes had to be added. I had to then do all that. And restructure quite a lot else.
Once I had that done, I made a second pass to make sure it all flowed, particularly the time sequences — did the character know that then? has that happened yet?
The third pass was to get deeper into the characters — the one constant critique of the book. (As one early reader-editor put it, “Your still writing like a fucking journalist, Gevalt. You’re on the outside looking in.”
And I had my own observation about that previous draft (9); I had cut out too much of the humanity of the book from the prior draft (8).
So I brought back a few things I’d cut, sections some of my reader-editors referred to as my “Normal Rockwell shit.” (Some of my reader-editors eat crushed glass for breakfast; hallelujah.)
And that had been another central dilemma of writing this book — it evolved from a series of sketches I wrote for “Winter Tales” put on by Vermont Stage Company. (I am deeply indebted to Cristina Alicea for presenting those stories and spawning this novel.) So the novel was built on six self-contained short stories intended to be presented in a show that aims to be sweet; my stories had the necessary bow to tie things up at the end. And, so there is no misunderstanding, I love those stories and that show. Heartwarming is OK in my book.
But maybe not in this book.
So from Draft 8 to Draft 9 I had cut most of them out. But I cut too much. So now they are back, in vignette form, to add warmth and, for those who’ve been to Winter Tales, or read or listened to them (Sketches on this site), you will have added knowledge of these characters, much like bumping into someone you met and had a great conversation with a year ago.
And I now have a good balance of what I think a small town is — sweet on the outside and, well, not so sweet underneath.
I did my third pass a little differently. I went through the entire book in its new sequence by character, one by one, until I had done all 11 of the main characters as they progressed through their lives (spoiler alert: two “die”). (The family character is done in two segments late in the book.) So that was an additional 11 passes. And, yes, a few times I darted over to fix something in another character, but for the most part, I stuck with the pattern.
This allowed me to maintain focus on each character’s mannerisms, speech, thinking and additional backstories. Some of that made it into the revision.
My fourth edit was to make sure it flowed. I did this after a two-week hiatus and came at it totally fresh and, I hoped, unemotional. Because I had some cutting to do; it had ballooned to 126,000 words.
I took a break of several days after that edit (cut 7,000 words) and then did the final edit. (Confession: I have been tracking the Global Solo Challenge race since November and after Cole Brauer rounded Cape Horn, I raced to see who could finish sooner. She won, of course, by two days.)
As I look back at that fifth edit, I realize I was almost completely unemotional and non-judgmental about it. Cool as a cucumber. No haunting insecurities. Just moving forward. Each morning I got up at 4 or 4:30 a.m. (3:15 a.m. on Saturday) and quit in the early afternoon. Or whenever I was losing concentration.
It is 6,000 additional words lighter with little of substance cut. It reads well. Tighter. I like the way it starts and ends. I like the flow. I like how some of the chapters leave you hanging. I like the small intertestices I’ve created at each chapter beginning. I love the characters. And it’s down to 113,000 words. Long for a first novel, yes, but there’s a lot to it.
So I’m done.
Now comes the squirmy part, the putting-yourself-out-there part, finding an agent (getting rejected by skads along the way), finding a publisher (ditto), or not finding a publisher and tending to all the details that will have to be tended to to get it out in the world in as many formats as possible so that as many people can read it as possible.
And, I hope, you will like it.
And a note to you …
In the coming months, I will occasionally post here and subscribers will sometimes get the post in their email (I will be kind; you won’t get many). I will also be starting a “chat” once I figure out how to do it.
Since all my posts will have an audio narration with it for those readers with sight and reading challenges (or for those who just like to listen), it might be easier for you to get the Substack phone app (it’s free, all you have to do is create a free account — and an additional benefit is that there are some extraordinary writers in this space).
I’d love you to do the following:
Please comment. Say something.
If you have a name of an agent, please pass along the name(s) to me and THANKS, in advance.
Do you want to know more about how this book was written?
If you appreciate this project, please share it with friends. As I mentioned, all proceeds beyond small expenses will go to benefit four nonprofits.
Give yourself a pat on the back for making it to the bottom of this story.
I want to read Hiram Falls especially after hearing you read us the prologue on the Charlotte Library porch in the settling sun and rising mosquitos. Junior and Him and the fire and the town raises those reader questions that beg for answers or at least a witnessing that may or may not give answers. Good for you…good for us readers ready to fall into a beguiling novel!
Bravo! I look forward to holding the final product in hand and sharing it with the world!