Another busy week completed, well one day to go before the weekend.

Last night was our last The Year of the Novel session and was marked with family and friends coming along to hear us read from our novels.

I wrote a new piece for my family saga, Lintukoto, it was 1000 words long as we could only read for 5 minutes. Don’t ever discount the benefit of reading your work out loud. I read it out loud, a number of times until the scenes I wanted to read were only five minutes long. With each reading I found a number of editorial issues including repetition and not varying the language enough. There was also a passage that just didn’t sit right, rather than showing I was telling. After reading it through a number of times I left it, unable to change it for the better but at work yesterday I suddenly had the answer and was able to edit it which meant a number of changes in red pen on the hard copy.

I’m reading my second Lee Child’s book, however, it is the first in the series, ‘Killing Floor’. The Jack Reacher series are written in first person and after attempting to write in first person for Lintukoto, I realized how difficult it is to maintain for any length, especially trying to avoid the repetitive nature of ‘I’. So I should take back what I said about the repetitive use of words and language in the first two books, however, I still feel he does this to build a rhythm and a feeling of security in the reader, making the action scenes more striking.

This next chapter of Living in London, Chapter Thirty, has some violence against Kate. If you find violence against women disturbing, I would recommend you don’t read the second half of the chapter.

Enjoy.