Nationality

Today the words have not flowed so easily despite the Viking. Currently he's sitting in Madde's kitchen and I'm waiting for the words to start zinging.

In the meantime I have been working over August Rock in my head. In the critique there was the comment that because Judith was American and the story was set in Cornwall I was affecting the commercial aspect of the manuscript. Could I make Judith a Brit? This would make the story more appealing to the British market. Well, I suppose I could but the much of the story's wit and joy comes from the play of the yank against the local population in the nicest of ways. It would become a totally different story and not one that I would necessarily want. The question I have is......Does a foreign protagonist put you off a book? Are you less likely to read a book with an American one or an English one or a French one? I know that being part of a multi-cultural family I happily read from both sides of the pond but I may have to pushed to read about say a Chinese protagonist and this stems from my ignorance of the cultural references. Any thoughts?

Well back to the Viking in the kitchen and hopefully reaching 1000 words today.

p.s. I'm really having fun writing this at the moment :-)

Then came a Viking

Don't ya just love it when totally unplanned characters come walking into your book? C.S. Harris, http://csharris.blogspot.com/, was blogging about twists yesterday. She was putting together a list of the most common types of twists that can happen. It had me thinking. Then Anna Lucia on her blog, http://anna-lucia.blogspot.com/, spoke about "What's hidden from view is not as dangerous as what is in plain sight."

One of the key critiques from H. Johnson on August Rock was that August Rock didn't have enough twists. The plot was to too evenly paced. So C. S.'s comments and Anna's hit the spot. I don't think this will be a problem with A Cornish House. Especially now that Gunnar the Viking was waltzed in to divert Madde. We shall see.

The words have been flowing pretty well this week. Over 3000 yesterday alone. Currently it's standing at 35,138. I may just make my goal of 40,000 by the end of February and then again I may just beat it!