Thursday, May 19, 2011

ONE INCH CLOSER

Hokay Team -

It looks like Kindle is the way to go with this self-publishing thing. I just downloaded the freeware - you can do it too; that way you can read the novel as I crank it out, chapter by chapter.

The entire project is starting to come together and I might actually post the first chapter this weekend - "God willing and the river don't rise."

A question I fired out to my cabal of writer friends & family (I come from a family of writers): "Should I write my novel in the 1st person or 3d person? Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness in the 1st person; MacLean wrote Where Eagles Dare in the 3d person- which is best for my work?"


During alpine training in 10th Group we used to always kid about: "When do we train for doing the ice-axe battle on top of the cable car?


More details to follow as I get my head around the techie side of this project.

Thanks all of you for all of your support -

S.L.


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5 comments:

  1. You have the background to back it up, McLean don't...use 1st person. Although I loved "Where Eagles Dare" I think that was a testament to the writer's writing skill and not how he portrayed it or what he actually experienced. In real life he was just a torpedo man in the Royal Navy. Honorable military man but obviously not nearly your rank and caliber. And his writing was partially fictional too wasn't it? Well at least there were historical inaccuracies.

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  2. Well, if you're gonna start it, "Now this is no shit, there I was..." then yeah, first person. Otherwise third person is more flexible...

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  3. Actually I always found that first person required a great deal of effort to keep from sounding boastful. I did this and I did that. Also, in 3rd one has the freedom to write fiction free of any accusation of it being autobiographical, and this subject to charges of exageration and such.

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  4. Go with third person ... for all the reasons cited above.

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  5. 3rd person will help you keep some perspective. You can look at the character (perhaps you, perhaps the "hero") more objectively.

    If you write "so I sez to her, I sez ..." you can be fooled more easily than "and he sez to her ..."

    It is hard to call "bullshit!" on yourself. Trust me, take it from a fool who knows.

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