NOVEL IN PROGRESS–AUSTIN MEETINGS WILL BE CONDUCTED ONLINE VIA ZOOM UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
NIP-Austin Online will next meet for Roundtable on Sunday, December 8th, 2024 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
We will critique pages from Comancheria by Darrell Bryant.
Darrell’s self-described “rough and overly-wordy attempt to answer the Premise question for Comancheria:” “In the year 1859, two years before the onset of the Civil War, with Texas still a frontier State of around half a million people . . . constantly pushing westward toward the Comancheria, a territory controlled by the eleven bands of a stone-age imperial power, referred to in history as “The Lords of the Plains” the Comanche tribes, in 1859, were in control of an area of around 250,000 square miles (and 37,000 square miles larger than France). And as a stone-age imperial power, in constant conflict with their modern imperial advisory, the United States, who would ultimately defeat and replace them. Based on stories old men shared with me as a curious why, why, why youngster and, much later in life, inspired by the writings of James Fenimore Cooper, Alan LeMay and Larry McMurtry (a novelist with whom I shared a conversation on writing several years prior to his death) I sat down and within 120 days wrote an 800-page first draft of Comancheria, which, after being turned down by several literary agents, I set aside. But as my own clock enters its eleventh hour, I decided to readdress the novel, backed up by what I’ve learned over the years from my fellow NIP-pers. Comancheria is likely to be classified as a “captivity” novel, in line with James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel, The Last of the Mohicans, but in my view will fall more in line with Gone With the Wind, although with less of its romance novel overtones, and scant hope of Emily Shagan being near so powerful a literary icon as Scarlett O’Hara. Big hopes out of a much younger would-be novelist.”
If you’re a writer looking for a venue dedicated to collaborative exploration of the craft, email us at mail@novelinprogressaustin.com for the meeting handouts and Zoom Invitation. We promise to offer you a sincere welcome, and you can rest assured that . . .
I am quite interested in this group! I just discovered it tonight and was thrilled. I’m Nan McCann, a retired university professor, a Texan, an avid reader and writer of mysteries. I have an agent and my manuscript is about to be shopped at publishing houses in February. Fingers crossed. My degrees are MA in linguistics and my PhD in International Comparative Education. Thus my protagonist, Peter Churchill, is a blue-blooded forensic linguist at the University of London who has three weeks to decode a historical document to prevent a murderer and Russian agent for becoming the next PM of the UK. I’m at work in what I hope will be the second in the series of THE LziNGUIST.