Occasionally I will work on the weekend on a previous story, refining or fixing. This one My Beautiful Amador County had received a lot of work in a rewrite and then sat fallow. I picked up it just for fun and soon was lost in it. The language at the beginning was pretty rough, but once I hammered that out the rest seemed to flow. It still chokes me up at the end even though this is the slowest burning story I have ever written. Fucking Harry takes forever to get to the point, but he is eloquent. Here is is talking to Reginald Pike, who is about to seek his revenge on the richest guy in town.

“Think about it, dear Harry. How does one harm a rich man? If you punch him in the nose, you only end up in jail–for the laws and judges support men like him above all others, save perhaps the elders in the Church. If you burn down his mansions, he’ll simply build more–and if he’s insured then he’ll likely turn a tidy profit in the process. You cannot starve such a man, you cannot harm him. Perhaps you might shoot him, but where is the revenge in that? He dies with as much wealth as he had when he lived. You cannot steal from him, he simply has too much–there is no thief so expert that he could compete with his great pile of capital. No, the only way to harm such a man is to remove from him all of his wealth. But it has to be turned over voluntarily. You cannot take it from him, he has to give it to you. In essence, you have to hang him, but by a noose that he has tied himself.”

My Beautiful Amador County is a story about, high finance, revenge, found-friendships, and what “family” means to those who have been cast from their own. LGBT friendly.