You knew it was going too smoothly, right? Or did you also see what needed to be fixed?
I stopped working on Fains I for about two weeks. I got up to chapter 12 and realized the arc I created wouldn’t get me to some key plot points in the story.
Okay, fair enough. Is what I’ve written salvagable?
Fortunately yes, and only with rewriting.
Heads up, some characters have changed. The names are the same, the characterizations are different.
And while I’m here, let me share an interesting experience I had during a recent critiquing session.
I meet with three other authors once a month. Each of us puts something forward for review/critique/analysis, and I’ve been putting through the Fains I chapters I’ve shared here.
In case you weren’t aware, these chapters are raw. I’ve not edited them and am presenting them “fresh from the garden” as it were. I know they need work and put them through the critique group to learn if the story itself interested readers.
Well, a) yes it does.
Yippee for me, huh?
But then I got Yippee #2; the folks in the critique group considered these chapters ready to go, to be sent out, publication-ready.
Whoa, huh?
They were genuinely surprised when I said I considered these far from publishable, only rough drafts, not even first draftish.
Whoa, huh?
What do you think of them so far?
And now on to it…
Fains I (A John Chance Mystery) Chapter 1 -The Good Earth
Stacey Knox kneeled in the cool, dark, freshly tilled earth with a bag of wooden garden stakes, ten or so packets of seeds – tomato, cucumber, lettuce, mostly vegetables with a some marigolds, echinacia, and purple cone flowers thrown in to draw the pollinators – a ball of gardener’s twine, and Frank Sinatra placed in logical order by her side.
Frank kept meowing and moving, some times pawing a bag of seeds out of the way so he could stretch out in the sun, destroying Stacey’s logical order.
One blue eye winked at the ball of twine before closing and starting what Stacey called his “sleepy-cat purr.”
She ran a hand over his soft, gray fur.”Too much work going after the string, Frank?”
He responded with a slightly louder purr.
“Don’t kittens love going after string?”
Purr.
“You’re telling the court all the documented evidence is false, Mr. Sinatra?”
Stretch, purr.
“So much for book learning, huh?”
She and her brother, Tom, were raised in Ithaca, New York, in the shadow of Colgate University. Both parents were academics and emphasized desk-based scholarship over real-world exploration since early childhood.
She tied her long brown hair in a bun but one strand kept misbehaving and dropping in front of her left eye. Each time she blew it out of the way rather than take off her soil-covered gardening gloves to pin the strand back. Each time it came back to taunt her.
Farming, she decided, could be damn annoying.
Frank opened his eyes and focused on nothing at all. A moment later she heard a car come up her dirt driveway followed by the engine stopping and a door opening and closing.
Frank stood up and arched his back.
Stacey leaned back with hands on her thighs like an aikido player waiting their turn on the mat. “I’m out back.”
Sheriff Vince Quarrals waved as he came around her house. It was Stacey’s first time seeing her new home town’s lawman and she gave herself a moment to take him in: tall and farmer-strong with a slight paunch over his belt, his khaki uniform complete with vertical black stripe on the outside of each pantleg, state-trooper hat and wrap-around Raybans did a good job of giving him a professional look if you got past his Knapp workman’s shoes and open collar with a white tshirt barely hiding a tuft of salt&pepper hair.
He removed his sunglasses and hat as he approached and Stacey added mid- to late-fifties, close-cropped gray hair matching his chest tuft, and a slight limp on his right side.
You’re evaluating him as if he were a witness about to testify, Knox. Stop it. You’re not a lawyer anymore and this isn’t a high-stakes litigation. You’re a farmer now, remember?
Although no longer a lawyer, Stacey had increasing difficulty shutting off what friends and foes in the courtroom called her “Spidey-sense” – a keen, seemingly intuitive awareness of when people were lying and not, when fabrication were deliberate versus unintentional mistakes of memory. Hank Ingram, well-known competitive poker player and senior partner at Stacey’s old firm of Osborne, Nash, and Vogel, and son-in-law of the firm’s founder, Edgar Nash, publicly said, “I’d never play a game with you, Stacey. You cheat, I can’t figure out how you do it, and worse, you won’t teach me how to do it.”
Everybody laughed. She nodded and winked and laughed along with everyone. But she knew it wasn’t reliable. Sometimes it was there, sometimes it wasn’t. Biblically accurate when it was, frustrating silent when it was not. She told her brother, Tom, about it once when they were kids.
“It’s your guardian angel, Sis, keeping you out of trouble, telling you who to believe and who not to.”
She told him sometimes the angel took a form, a shape, coalesced into a cloud-like almost human body. Tom, five years her senior, pulled her close and stared into her eyes. “Did some campus asshole give you something, Sis? You’d tell me, right?”
“Nobody did and I’m okay.”
Tom nodded slowly, hesitantly, with eyes narrowed. “Yeah. Okay.”