I just finished what’s hopefully the last of the major rewrite of Blackjack Davy. It’s not ready to go, but almost.

This was the first “real” story I put any time into once I started writing. It’s based on the folk song of the same name and, in the original version, it sailed very close to the lyrics. I always thought it was pretty good, it received a couple of nice rejections to the few places I sent it, and it got me into Clarion. It happened to be the first story critiqued at Clarion and, overall, it was well received. I took a lot of notes on what people said and I talked about some more with Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Andy Duncan, and Jeff Ford. Most of the advice was regarding straightening out the timeline–the original begins with a flashback and then it jumps around in time quite a bit–and there were a few things here and there people mentioned.

Nina hammered it for not having enough detail so I did some research on late 19th century Montana (the best resource, believe it or not, comes from Teddy Roosevelt’s The Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail, from when he was rough riding all over Montana. But Jeff’s comments influenced me the most. I gave a strong shot of the surreal and now it’s hard to tell where the truth lies and what actually happens.

I decided to tackle it again a few months ago and, while rereading it, I couldn’t believe how bad it was. Way too many do-nothing attributions, skipping timeline, ugh. One person (who shall go unnamed) said it was far too long for what actually happens. Well, that’s one piece of advice I ignored completely: it went from 6700 words to 9300. That’s nearly a 30% growth! But before I think it felt long because of the wasted words. Now the story is really about stasis, boredom, and how perceptions warp over time. The goal, of course, is to suggest incremental changes over a long period of time without boring the shit out of the reader.

So it needs another combing over and out it goes. It’s going to Scifi.com first, I’ve decided.