Left-Hand Kelly: A Long, Long Trail

This has been one slow-cooked little novella. Though shy of 40,000 words, it has taken several years from initial idea to completion. But I had no idea just how long it had been in the works until the other day, when I got out my old journals and began flipping back through them, looking for the earliest entries relating to Left-Hand Kelly. The more pages I turned back, amazement began to dawn on me. Wait, when was this? Mentions of Left-Hand Kelly as an incomplete project were sandwiched in among notes about working on the earliest stories for The Ranch Next Door and Other Stories. Way back before I’d decided to collect them, in fact, and was still unsuccessfully trying to find professional short story markets. A reference to “the first three chapters” of Left-Hand Kelly having been written some time ago predates my first published story “Disturbing the Peace” placing in a contest in December of 2010. Shortly before that is a big gap in my journal entries—I was not a good diarist back then—so I couldn’t find a mention of beginning the book, but I did have my dated first-draft manuscript in a notebook. I pulled it out and looked at it.

June 19th, 2010.

Four years ago! Almost exactly four years from first draft to publication.

It goes without saying that I was not working on it continuously all that time. I’d write a few chapters, get stuck, put it away for months, and then come back to it later. It held enough interest and promise for me that I did keep coming back. “It appeals to me because there’s a tremendous amount of emotion packed into a pretty brief plot,” I wrote in that earliest journal entry. As near as I can figure, from margin dates and journal entries, I wrote the first three chapters in the summer of 2010, chapter four and part of chapter five that December, the rest of five through seven in April and May 2012, and then finally picked it up again in late January 2013 and finished the eight remaining chapters in February. Various rounds of edits have taken place since then.

What amazes me is that around the same time I was writing those first three chapters, I was also turning out some horribly amateurish stuff that will probably never see the light of day. Yet the beginning of Left-Hand Kelly, with only reasonable editing, was good enough to keep me coming back to it and blends well with the later parts of the book. Don’t ask me how that came about. All I know is, it makes me feel a lot better about the sheaf of unfinished projects that I still believe hold promise. It may take years, but one day they’ll get there.