What’s Going On?

Those of you who still keep track of my ramblings on this blog may be wondering what’s going on. I haven’t participated in a few Road Trip Wednesdays, I haven’t been posting as many articles (aside from the regular Sunday School Notes and Sunday Devotionals). Am I getting blog fatigue? What’s happening?

First, no, I’m not getting blog fatigue. In fact, one of the things I’m doing is planning for next month’s A to Z Blogging Challenge. I may not be posting a lot of articles at the moment–but wait till next month! Twenty-six articles in thirty days. Consider this a little respite before the storm.

Also, I’m trying to catch up on some reading. If you’re one of my Goodreads friends, you’ll know that I’ve read some really good books so far this month, including Stephanie Jaye Evans’s spectacular second novel, SAFE FROM HARM, and SCARLET, the second in Marissa Meyer’s “Lunar Chronicles.”

I haven’t neglected writing, either. I’m batting around my WIP–the NaNoWriMo project from last November. As I figure out what needs to be done with all those words, I find myself on the horns of an old dilemma: first or third person. I drafted the novel in first person, but as I re-read it, something’s not right about it. She’s supposed to be a teenage alien, and she sounds like a regular American high-schooler. I’ve experimented with changing her speech patterns, limiting her vocabulary… but that affects the readability of the story. I’m caught between making you believe the narrator is not of this world, and communicating the story. Think about it: I have to describe her alien kitchen in language she would use, which would not necessarily be terms or concepts that you, the reader, would understand. The usual way around this is to either give the alien a complete English vocabulary, which at my alien’s age stretches credibility and detracts from her alien-ness, or give her a friend from Earth who then becomes the first person narrator, which for this story really isn’t an option. Do you know of any books where the main character is an alien and that alien is the first person narrator–and the author succeeds in balancing alien vocabulary with readability? Perhaps that will help inspire me. Right now I’m considering re-writing in third person, which would solve a lot of these kinds of issues.

With that, and work, family, church, and life in general, that’s what’s going on with me.

So, how are you?