Complex feelings on the cusp of completing a third novel
I started this substack serial fiction blog after submitting THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA, the first completed manuscript in the Bassanda corpus, to around 175 literary agents between March 2019 and January 2021, specifically selected because their #MSWL (“manuscript wish list”) criteria fit the GTR premise: spec fiction, alternate history, and so on. I did my homework and authored the cover materials carefully and according to available best practices, and maybe 22 of those agents asked to see additional pages. Perhaps 12 of them expressed positive opinions about aspects of the materials—especially the “quality of the writing”—and I learned a great deal about querying, how to do it, and maybe even some things not to do. However, no agent offered representation—which is, so I learned, the only way toward a publisher (mad props to those who go the self-publishing route, but I concluded—accurately, I think—that I don’t have time or brain-space, outside my academic teaching and publishing obligations, to do it myself).
One of those best practices’ dicta was, “Unless they explicitly request it, don’t resend a MS that an agent has already seen, no matter how much you have revised it.” Instead, the conventional—and, I think, sound—wisdom is “write another full MS, revise your querying materials, and target more closely with the new book, perhaps beginning with that 22 (or so) agents who had asked to see additional pages of the first one.”
It’s a tough lesson, because, regardless of your convictions regarding the quality and readability of your work, there comes a point where you have to stop advocating for the current manuscript, and start working on the next one: that’s how you reboot the cycle for the next round of querying. Even though it’s very, very challenging to realize “they don’t want to hear from me unless or until there is a new full-length manuscript.” Even though it’s a test of will, or maybe of commitment.
At any rate, along about mid-January of 2021, I decided that I was going to have to get with the above program, and start MS #2. But, like lots of authors—especially late-blooming or new-pastures ones, as I didn’t start writing SFF fiction until I was in my 50s—I was reluctant to just “trunk” (e.g., stick away in an old steamer trunk in an attic somewhere) the first one, the GREAT TRAIN RIDE. Not least because, dammit, I think it’s a good one.
Along about Thanksgiving of 2021, I was talking with Brother Chipper Thompson—a figure who looms large, as “The Colonel,” in the Bassanda Correspondence, and who is a long-time and self-motivated author of various kinds of genre fiction—and he mentioned a friend in Chicago who was reviving the idea of the old 1920s-40s pulps that serialized SFF, and which were the launch for a lot of the writers we both admired. For various reasons outside the editorial ones, it didn’t work out for me to get with Chip’s Chicago friend, but it did pique my thinking about serial fiction, and what the serial format might mean in terms of productivity. I had followed a very rigorous schedule of blogging (see coyotebanjo.blogspot.com) between around 2005-2019, first precipitated by my absolute rage at the criminal racist negligence of the Bush II response to Hurricane Katrina, and had continued that schedule as a daily writing warmup, a la John Steinbeck’s described practice, through the writing of two academic monographs: 2013’s THE CREOLIZATION OF AMERICAN CULTURE and 2019’s DANCING REVOLUTION.
So the idea of a regular writing practice was not unfamiliar—but maybe one that was not quite so bound to the rigor, scholarly literature, and critical apparatus of the academic monograph. With the rebirth of what is essentially email-distributed blogging, as a replacement for the fundamental toxicity and slow-motion demise of social media, regular non-scholarly writing practice beckoned again. And my esteemed friend, Rich Remsberg, had said “Just put the shit out there yourself,” because of course the most important thing is not actually the ego-gratification of being repped by an agent and being able to post those very, very tried Xitter and Facebook “I am thrilled to announce that I am now represented by…” posts.
I began looking at the platforms being used by serial fiction folks, and settled on Substack. Of course there is a wealth of razzle-dazzle “how to make money on substack!” content on that self-same social media—especially YouTube—but I didn’t ever really think smithscribe.substack.com would be a money-maker (which same it definitely is not). It was more a tool for personal accountability, of getting the shit out there, as Rich said, and, most importantly, of getting it out there in a form that others could read.
I followed the same sort of self-help guidelines which I previously employed in seeking agent representation—to which idea I am still open, I hasten to say!—in thinking about the Substack schedule, guiderails, parameters, framing, and so forth. I set a schedule of a twice-weekly drop, Thursdays and Sundays 3am (to catch the “read it Friday before leaving work” and “read it Monday as a way of easing into the work week” readerships) and put things in place.
I launched Chapter 1 of THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE FOR BASSANDA, “an epic cross-continental adventure in Edwardian Europe,” on January 10 2022, a little over a week after my 63rd birthday. I’ve maintained that twice-weekly publishing schedule. THE GREAT TRAIN RIDE (87,800 words) concluded with Ch. 56 on July 17 2022. Then, after a one-week breather, I resumed with BASSANDA AND THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION, a wartime novel of resistance in the Antipodes and Southeastern Europe in 1915-1919. BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION (103,334 words) concluded with Ch. 51 on Feb 16 2023.
Ten days later, on Feb 26 2023, I began NEW WORLD A-COMING—the progressive 1930s and 1960s in North America and Eastern Europe (projected ~98,000 words)—and I’m closing in on that third novel’s conclusion: the final chapter (Ch. 68) will probably drop on Oct 8 or 12 2023. The next novel after that in the Bassanda corpus, WRESTLING THE DRAGON (from the Spanish Civil War to the Berlin Airlift) is already planned, and I have a rough plot outline. I expect it will launch just before Thanksgiving 2023—two years after the Rev. Col. Thompson and Brother Remsberg said, “just get that shit out there.”
I’m not sure whether I’ve learned any macro lessons here, about writing, or discipline, or language, or storytelling. I’ve learned some micro lessons, for sure—mostly craft-based ones: that I’m good with scenes and scene closers: stuff that would translate to screenplays, for instance, except that I much prefer the autonomy and economy of prose fiction to the necessarily-insane levels of organization and discipline, and the sheer size, cost, and complexity of TV and film production. That I’m good with writing action and violence. That I can handle continuity. That I’m improving at contrasting character identities (especially non-normative ones). That I love world-building—indeed, that’s where the Bassanda corpus began. That, in contrast, I struggle endlessly with plotting and narrative through-line.
But I think there’s one other lesson that I’ve learned, or am learning, or will learn, and that has to do with intention and goal. Why am I writing this body of material, which—leaving aside the roughly 300,000 words of the existing novels—extends to probably another 200K words of characters, scenes, events, and other “world bible” materials (hey, I said I love world-building)? Why am I so focused on this alternate history, with these tinges of fantasy or SF, in these particular locales and time periods?
I’ve realized that what I’m actually engaged in doing is authoring—or, “world-building”—an alternate history of the Euro-American Long Twentieth Century, which is the same era that I teach in some of my day-gig musicology classes and seminars, and in which my own experience, like it or not, is grounded (in the year of my birth: Castro's new government, Buddy's death, Alaska, Hawaiian statehood, Kruschev/Nixon kitchen debate, and Kind of Blue). I know that era, those events, those locales, and—even more importantly—I have a professional expertise in the contingencies: why some things almost didn’t happen, some things almost did, and the people and places that got left out of the grand narratives.
This is not an idealized or fantasy history though. My great model for writing historical fiction is George MacDonald Fraser, who wrote what I think are the absolute best of the genre, despite his own late-Empire racism, sexism, and misogyny. When, at the age of 15, I read Flashman at the Charge (Crimean War and Central Asia in the 1850s), it brought me to the realization that, in fact, the greatest stories of all are the true ones. And that set me on a lifelong path as a historian and a storyteller and—almost fifty years later—an arc back toward the same historical fiction practice that Fraser followed. But darker, more ambivalent, more fluid, more vernacular; in short, more radical.
The Bassanda Manifesto (see elsewhere in the Correspondence) talks about “laughing and talking and singing and drinking and, together, imagining into existence a better world.”
That’s the attempt and intention: a better world.