The Wild Blog in the West

I gave my novel draft over to be critiqued by a professional editor, as I said I would do i n my last update .  While she had a lot of positive things to say about the story and characters, she had one major criticism: she did not like my female protagonist. I've gone into my novel and its characters in previous posts .  Suffice it to say, my character, Isabella, has a lot of issues.  She is young, angry, scared, and overwhelmed.  She responds by lashing out at those who don't deserve it, with some pretty terrible consequences.  As a result, she bears a life-long scar.  Though she reforms, by the end of the novel, her reformation is not complete.  And, to be perfectly honest, it will probably never be. Isabella is not my first "challenging" female protagonist.  For a pilot script I wrote some years ago, my female protagonist was also angry.  She had just lost her job and ended a relationship.  She finally bonded with her teenage niece, only to learn that that n

This is just a brief update.  Work has been grueling of late, I've been trying to write my one page per night, and damn those seasonal allergies.  Anyway, I thought it worth mentioning that I've put aside Bleak House  for now.  I was into it for a short while, but somewhere around the time the heroine met Mr. Jarndyce, or whatever his name, I stopped caring.  I'm not sure how many pages I am into the book... my Kindle tells me 8%.  I'll try again, really. Some observations: Dickens uses a mixture of styles that I had considered to be "modern" and hadn't really seen in other Victorian novels (though my catalogue is far from complete).  The first chapter begins almost like free-verse poetry, written by someone on crack: "As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill." Bo