Saturday

25 November 2017

— the pale blue air that hovers above a heavy frost on early mornings.

Good Morning All,

Johs’s photo  in today’s Day Book is of the church in Sengeløse. I dimly recollect it was built sometime in the 1200s.

Today's good news (or bad news, depending on your perspective) is that late Thanksgiving night I got to the last page of editing the novel manuscript I completed in 1911. Back then, it was a modest 261,871 words long,  putting it about halfway between Moby Dick (206, 052 words) and Middlemarch (316,059 words), but of course far more interesting than either one of those classics, or—now I think about it—both put together.

This time through it, I’ve managed to lose 101,256 words, though exorcising each and everyone of those words was heart wrenching and about as easy and painless as self-dentistry. If the average page of a novels run around 300 words, the manuscript has gone from 872 pages to only 457. That’s practically beach-reading length.

The title had been Delina Recollected. (Delina pronounced Dee-lee-nuh.) But I do not think that will survive. Since then, it has been The Smell of the Garden after Rain, followed by Head over Hopscotch, and at the moment D. & D. Sitting in a Tree. None of them has made me say: “Yes, that’s it for sure!”

My plan now is to put it away for a month and a bit and then make a final run-through in January, in the hopes of off loading another 20,000 or 30,000 words, or enough to come in around 399 pages. At that time, I shall begin the fun of A) trying to find an agent, or B) trying to find a publisher. I am already working on the cover letter:

Dear Sir/Madam/Ms,

I am a 71 year-old fat guy living in Denmark, who got a poem published in the Christian Science Monitor around fifty years ago, but has not published much recently, other than a couple of vanity books. 

Anyway, enough about me! I have a Coming-of-Age novel about a socially awkward boy growing up in a suburb of Boston who falls in love with a girl who is basically a pain in the butt. There’s not a whole lot of action in the story, but quite a bit of adolescent angst and soul-searching, which goes on for quite some time, roughly 50% longer than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, although not as funny as that novel. 

I would like to market it in the category of Young Adult fiction, but since it takes place in the later 1950s and early 1960s it might sell better for its nostalgia value in the category of Old Adult fiction, even if many of those readers are now dropping like flies.

Family members and friends who have read it have been known to exclaim in the middle of it: “Dear Jesus, if your plan is to come get me in the next month or two, please do so now!”

I do not know what your policy is on monetary advances against publication, but I am somewhat strapped for cash at the moment, and could use, say, a number in the medium six-figure range.

Please let me know where to send the manuscript.

Yours truly,

C. R. Magwaza

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Needless to say, if you would like—after that build up—to look at the first few chapters, I’d be glad to send them. I do actually need a few readers. 

P.P.S. Two Holly snaps: the one with the postcards is of the wall between the cottage living room and kitchen. The green books are a complete set of Dickens. The cartoon is of my Uncle Norman Alberti.