I’ve finished about three weeks’ work, redrafting The Death of Kai Kawiti.
The reason for the re-drafting is that literary agents in New Zealand are very scarce. There seems to be just one that’s actually based in New Zealand.
The novel already included two UK characters, one of whom goes to New Zealand while the other stays.
As part of the re-drafting:
• I’ve significantly boosted the role of the character who stays in Brighton, giving her more more scenes and having her be the one who discovers one important piece of knowledge.
• Another character, previously from Sydney, has become a Londoner based in Camden.
• The main character’s return to the UK is made more of, though the story still stops before he actually gets on the plane.
But re-drafting never does just one thing. I trimmed off 2,000 words, tightened chapters, and made the dialogue more naturally speakable. I also spotted some continuity errors, like one character slightly changing their last name about half-way through the book.
So it’s a much better book all round, and not just more English. Now I’m going to set it aside and let it brew while I work on Harris in Exile.
Er, Harris in Exile is the third Frank Harris novel, and includes a farcical pistols-at-dawn duel between Karl Marx and the leader, more or less, of the French anarchists. I’ve mentioned it before. I’ve spotted a major structural fault, so it’ll take a lot of work, both revising the whole, re-organising the order of events and writing the conclusion. I’ll tell more about it soon.
Anyway, I’ll come back to The Death of Kai Kawiti and Other Stories: A Novel in about three weeks. Read it one last time, make any revisions, eliminate any typos, and then start sending it to UK agents.