Midlist Writer: My thoughts on my page 99

Friday, 1 October 2010

My thoughts on my page 99

As I mentioned in my post on What the Blogger Stats Page tells You about your Blog, I like to check out the data relating to Midlist Writer. In my last post I presented page 99 of my novel and asked for input. More than fifty of you read the thing but only one person left a comment. That just goes to show how many lurkers there are on the average blog! I'd really be curious to know what my readers in Colombia and Latvia think of my writing.

Anyway, thanks for the input, Sioux.

This scene shows our young band of Confederate bushwhackers riding through the woods of mid-Missouri after killing a Unionist civilian. They had never killed a civilian before but did it because they were told he was a spy who had gotten a local secessionist hanged. There's more to this, of course, and the ramifications of their actions power the rest of the novel. It's interesting that this page shows Jimmy, one of the two protagonists besides Union Captain Richard Addison, in an entirely passive role. He's usually in charge of the bushwhacker gang but he's so stunned at what they've done that he's momentarily given up trying. He will be given another chance to step back and wash his hands later in the book, and his choice will determine the ending.

So is this a good page? Well, it does have tension, and gives a bit of insight into some of the characters, but I'm not entirely happy with the Southern dialect. That's a tricky thing to get right, especially the Missouri dialect. Plus I have to put it back into the 1860s. It's something I'm still working on.

So. . .if any of you lurkers out there want to post page 99 of your novel on your blog, feel free to put the link in my comments section. I'll be sure to read it and give my two cents' worth.

1 comment:

Sioux Roslawski said...: I guess I don't have a decent ear (or a decent eye) because the dialogue sounded authentic. I guess I was focusing more on the rhythm of the conversation?

(Lots of us---me included---avoid dialect because of its difficulty.); 1 October 2010 at 14:07

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