Horrible Harvest

I tend to reveal too much at times… all the time. So, I probably shouldn’t write this blog post, but I also rarely take my own sound advice… I never take my own sound advice, but let us move on. Traffic for this blog has been shit. For many different factors. No one knows who the fuck I am. It’s about a niche topic… super niche if you break it down all the way to a relatively unknown author’s book in progress about the Civil War, racism, sexual identity, and opium addiction. Plus, I learned on Reddit while writing this blog that my books fall under the GritLit genre. I didn’t know GritLit was a thing until I googled my name (I’m not above it) and learned someone had asked for GritLit recommendations and one of my books was on a commenter’s list. So, that’s cool. Not cool enough to pay the rent, but cool enough to placate the ego for about an hour and twenty minutes.

But I didn’t create the blog to find readers. That would be great, and I would’ve been pleased had that been the case. I created the blog to force myself to complete what I am calling the final draft. I started this book in 2020. I finished the first draft four-ish years later, and it was a bloated 375,000 words. When I reached out to my agent to let him know it was available to read, he said, and I’m misquoting him here, “Fuck off! I’m not reading a fucking manuscript that is 375,000 words!”

I was, of course, angry. How could he not recognize how fucking brilliant I am – How sorely needed this book is? I’ve created a masterpiece! I set the manuscript aside while I reached out for new representation, and after getting zero interest from even close family about the book. I re-read it, and it was a honking piece of shit. Beyond it being entirely too long, I’d chosen to write it in a style that mirrored the tone and vocabulary of letters written by Union and Confederate officers. It was just pretentious garbage.

Still the framework of a story was there, so I couldn’t give up on it. I changed direction. I told myself to simplify the language, and I cut out one character’s side story completely. In fact, I cut her out altogether. A couple of other side characters got booted, and I was off on a rewrite.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I challenged myself to shorten the length of sentences. I got a bit too self-indulgent in the first draft and wrote flowery sentences that were a paragraph long. My new mantra was the shorter the better. In fact, try one-word sentences, I told myself. Crazy? Yes, that’s insane. I got two-thirds of the rewrite done before I decided I was the biggest idiot on the planet. It ain’t working, I told myself.

That word used in reflection of my talentless, wayward conduct – Ain’t – it reconnected me with my Tennessee/Kentucky roots. I am a Southerner. I grew up in a small-as-shit town. I raised hell and ran wild in my teens and early twenties. In short, I got into some shit, and that’s what Horrible Harvest is about at its core.

The obliterating, destructive nature of hate is the main theme of the book, and I decided the word “hate” had to be included in the opening line. Thus, “Sumbitch hated me” was born, and once that was written I truly knew who Augustus Tennyson was. I’d spent five-plus years with him up to that point, and I knew his background, his family, his secrets, and his anger, but I didn’t know him. I didn’t allow him to be him. I told him how to say things to sound respected and proper. I held him back. I fucked him over. He was speaking for a generation of boys and men lied to by the plantation class (we would call them the Epstein class today), and I had the audacity to stifle his true nature in order to serve my own expectations of how to tell his story.

Disillusionment and futility started catching up with me as I ran frantically through the first few chapters of the third rewrite, and I toyed with the idea of giving up. It sounded much easier than reliving the vile and grinding days of the Antebellum South/Lost Cause era. I don’t know if you are aware, and you may instinctively reject this reality, but my people – aka White People – we have a long history of being fucking horrible. It’s so historically engrained in us that there is an entire political party in this country dedicated to carrying on that tradition of our horribleness in contemporary times. They carry the water for today’s plantation class – aka the Epstein class. As the saying goes, shit don’t change.

But, as the cliché goes, I digress. To combat my inclination to give up, I decided to go “public” with the book by starting this blog. My theory was if I re-wrote it in real time I would be forced to see it through, and I am surprised as anyone to tell you that I was right. Committing to regularly contributing to the blog forced me to finish the final draft… Almost final draft. I have a few tweaks here and there to address, but other than that, I’m ready for the next step, whatever that may be.

While I cut it from 375,000 words to about 220,000 words, that’s still a behemoth book, and I much fear my agent will once again tell me to put a whole lota fuck in my off. BTW – I should clarify he literally didn’t say fuck off. He told me nicely that a book of that size by an author of my caliber wasn’t worth his time. That’s how I took it anyway. Technically, he just said no. The two books he sold to a publisher for me were 90,000 words long. That’s his tolerance level based on my track record, and I totally get it.

I say all that to say this. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know if I even care at this point. I set out to do what I promised Augustus I would do. I told his story. The end.