Hello

[Phaide Tu Blacke]

I have been editing the first chapter, using what people suggested earlier here, but I am a bit stuck on which tense to go with (a common problem, I think). Suggestions on that would be helpful.

I always do my film scripts and comic books in present tense and past tense when I write in short story format, but that is just me.

Peace.

Phaide Tu Blacke

 

[ishylynn]

Hai Ishylynn! Welcome back!

Once again, your writing is smooth like Canadian ice-covered roads: easy to start, hard to stop.

I'm not 100% sure where this excerpt is going and how it fits into the big picture, but it's an excerpt, so I'm not too surprised.

One word of advice is to be very very careful whenever you reconstruct an accent in print. It can be done well (It's not really my call whether you do well or not, I don't know that particular accent. I don't mind it here, but then I don't know the accent. Huckleberry Finn is a classic example of it being done well) but it can be a real turn-off if not. One "realism" question I might ask is, if the protaganist grew up with her father her entire life, how does she know that her father has an accent? It took me till I was about 18 to realize that my granny does not actually have "a beautiful bell-like voice" but rather a Manchester accent that makes her vowels lower and her tones ring. Up till then I thought she spoke Western Canadian english just like the rest of us.

Ah, this must be a local thing to suburban Atlanta, or maybe just suburbia in general, but I set this in the area, and this is very common here. There is a huge range of accents here, and many kids will even have different accents from their parents, or even from their siblings. For example, my brother sounds like Jacie's dad, while I sound more Midwestern. I can also consciously switch in and out of a Southern accent, and have been doing so since high school. It's also a normal topic of conversation around here. Perhaps I can add that in some way at a later point. Jacie would be very conscious of this due to her school and her best friends, and her desire to be more "Asian". It also is tied to the first paragraph of the first chapter, if you look back.

The point of this chapter is simply to introduce Jacie's family and a bit about her background. Like many novels, facts about this will be more useful as the plot goes on. One of the key concepts I wanted to start developing was how Jacie envies Kiri's "elegant" family, and Kiri envies Jacie's affectionate family, and how we tend to not see what's in front of us and take it for granted.


Thanks Phaide, I am messing with present for now, but I have a feeling I will end up switching it back to past.

 

[ishylynn]

Oops it double-posted!