Waiting on Pins and Needles

April twenty-seventh.

Not that I'm counting or anything. It's the date that the semifinalists from the ABNA are announced. They'll post a list, and chances are one of my friends will send me an email saying, 'OMG, you made it!' or, 'You had a great run.'

For me, it's either vindication, or liberation. Vindication that I wrote a pretty decent story worthy of being in the top 50 of 2,500 writers in my category (and get a full manuscript review from Publishers Weekly). Or liberation, I can move forward with a pretty dramatic rewrite and sculpt my creation into what I think it's worthy of becoming.

So, this week's gun bit. A friend asked if I knew anything about loading a pre-1860 Adams percussion revolver, particular how to reload the weapon. A little Googling and I was able to find out. Here's the Adams revolver:


I'll keep it simple. Like any black powder revolver, the powder and lead ball is loaded into the cylinder. Then the cylinder is rotated, and one by one, each round is pressed by the ram on the left side of the pistol. It's a slow process and requires patience, but as evidenced by the success of the Adams percussion revolver on the battlefield, worth the effort.

The Adams is unique because it was the first successful double-action pistol (Wikipedia), meaning the trigger is required to cock and fire the trigger in one motion. As a matter of fact, this particular pistol cannot be manually cocked and fired single action. Guess you better have a real steady trigger pull.

A great wiki on how to reload a typical cap and ball pistol can be found here.