First Draft in the...Box

Missed a Sunday Post but that day was the start of the between-drafts period. In-house readers reading, self-review due, next draft, polish, rewrite then final polish to come. Stand by.

Working on History Girl contribution,which will partly double as submission synopsis. H-Girl site is Jersey-centric, though HG says it is tri-state. That  fits, since Shot Tower, the Novel is Philly-centric - at start - and journeys to some elsewheres. One of which is a district in New Jersey known as Pavonia (now known as Cramer Hill.) And for Delaware, strong mentions and a major historic player appears. You'll just have to read it.

The Black Jacks and Star of the West.

Google Books has an e-book preview of this Black Jacks book. The Black Jacks appear in the historical  novel Shot Tower.

And the Star of the West cotton trading clipper out of Liverpool is in there. Mobile was a port of call. Was Savannah?  Not certain but it will be in Shot Tower.. Mobile Bay itself, if all goes as planned, is projected to appear as a setting in Shot Tower Book III.

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Note Websearchers who may have landed on this pase as a reult of some randow searcg,Shot Tower, The Novel is not published at the time of this posting. check the rest of this site, for instance the Front Page for news of its avaiability. Or heck, check Amazon.com.

Historical Personages in SHOT TOWER, The Novel

Here are some of the historical personalities who appear with the fictional characters in Shot Tower.

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Admiral Samuel Francis DuPont. Commander of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron, assembled the largest fleet of U.S. Navy ships ever seen up to that time for the assault on Port Royal Sound.

Col. George Henry Sharpe. Chief of the Bureau of Military Information, first USA intelligence service. Organized to replace the Pinkerton Detective Agency as collectors of Military intelligence. CIA predecessor.

Father J. Patrick  Dunn, Pastor of St. Philip Neri Parish, arranged for arms to defend his church in the Southwark Nativist Riot and faced off against public officials armed with pistols.

Gen. George Cadwalader by Thomas Eakins

Gen. George Cadwalader led the Pennsylvania Militia during the Southwark Nativist Riot. It was the first U.S. military unit to ever fire on private citizens. 

Joseph Wood, became the first Philadelphia Chief of Detectives in 1859 and originated the Rogues Gallery.

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Charlotte Forten, sister of Margretta

Margaretta  Forten, Abolistionist, teacher and daughter of prosperous sail maker James Forten.

Henrietta Bower Duterte. first Black Female undertaker in Pennsylvania, smuggled Underground Railroad passengers (escaped slaves) in her caskets.

Historical Fiction Influences; SHOT TOWER Update

Here's a brief sketch of some of the historical fiction I've read in the past, all of which I can say I enjoyed and that made me want to read more of it, and write some of it.

Here's a pretty comprehensive site about a wide-ranging genre: historicalnovels.info.

Earliest I remember -- which doesn't mean it was the earliest I read -- was Julian by Gore Vidal, about a Roman Emperor who tries to reestablish the old Roman religion after Christianity was well-established.

Vidal's Burr is called "snotty" by a politician and strangely enough, upon thinking about all this the last few days for this post, the one "insight" by Vidal that I've retained all these years is that the renegade criminal Burr considered George Washington a pompous half-wit who had a big butt. Kind of snotty. If you look at full-size portraits of Washington you see where Vidal might have gotten the big butt part. But pompous half-wit or not, if that's what it takes to defeat an Empire and launch liberty, so be it.

Then there was I, Claudius, The Name of the Rose,  August 1914, Little Big Man.

Of course The Aubrey-Maturin novels by Patrick O'Brian are excellent. Be sure to read them in order. I'm still only about half-way through.

These three Roman epics I read individually way back. Then a few years ago I decided to reread them all one after another, a kind of reading Roman orgy. I forget the order but that was worth doing: Quo Vadis, The Robe,  Ben-Hur.
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Then there's Allen Furst's World War II espionage novels You'll want to read them all. They can be read in any order but I recommend reading Night Soldiers first, or last. It's different. A bit more epic in scope.

Update on Shot Tower. By any measure more than half done this official First draft. Moving in on Chapter 20 of 30 tonight. So by that measure it's about two-thirds done. No promises but I'm pushing to nail down this official first draft next weekend in Philadelphia, home of the Shot Tower. The fast-moving action-packed last 10 chapters of the rough draft make that a possibility. Maybe I'll do the last page edit and save in the shadow of the tower or something nutty like that. Stay tuned.