The Sue Allen Revision

I was pleasantly surprised that I only fucked up Ed Baxter’s rank one time–He’s a captain, not a colonel. I cried at the end, which kind of surprised me, but I’m going to chalk it up to the hot weather fucking with me and not the power of the ending.

But here’s the thing–I think it’s good. Really, really good. Whatever might be wrong with it, we’re at the point where I can’t see it. It’ll need some beta readers for that.

I don’t know what happens after that. I’m gun-shy of the whole “try to find an agent” process and yet, that’s what needs to happen. I’ll just have to suck it up, I guess, and do it.

But I like it. I think it’s strange and funny and beautiful and moving. I think the way the time shifts–not just in when the story takes place, but in verb tenses–ends up working even better than I hoped to give the whole thing a real dream-like feel while still being readable.  And I think it may get me run out of town, if it ever is published, going at the myth of the Confederacy from both sides–that it sucked for the enslaved people and that the ways we remember and honor it would be seen by actual Confederates as us being ashamed of their actual project.

And there’s a lot more Nathan Bedford Forrest in there than I remembered, so he doesn’t seem like such a General ex Machina at the end. His arrival seems foreshadowed all along. That was nice.

I still am not sure of the narrative conceit, but again, I’ll look to beta readers for some ideas about whether it’s working.

So, that’s that. I guess I’ll enter corrections and then we’ll see.