Friday 9 September 2016

The Hidden People by Alison Littlewood

I'll make this short because I didn't get very far with this at all. The reason is simple - reading it was just too much hard work. I'm sure there are people out there who love quirky writing peppered with forgotten vocabulary to really add authenticity to the voice of a historical narrator, but I found it tough going. I tried to soldier on, and then hit the phonetic Yorkshire dialect - there was a little touch of this early on, but when the MC went up north it was used continually and the book died right there.

The problem I have with written dialects is that the written word is unfamiliar, so you have to slow down your reading in order to sound out the phonemes to decipher the word. As a reader, this shifts my focus from the story to the written word and the illusion of believable fiction is broken. So there's no point reading any further.







Writing Round-up and a Look ahead to 2024

2023 was a busy year writing-wise because I rewrote my first romcom in 1st person and relaunched it under a new title, Trust Me, I'm a L...