I learned a new word today: polydactyl.
Isn't it cool? Poly... dactyl...
Sounds prehistoric; a new type of dinosaur maybe? Nup. It means having more than the usual digits, like people being born with six fingers or six toes.
I like to learn a new thing every day. Yesterday, it was my first three chapters... um... prologue plus two chapters, aren't as nifty as I thought. What I learned is that just about all my first three chapters aren't as readable as the rest. And I've been torturing myself over it. I can delete the prologue and the rest is 'okay', but once I get into the fourth chapter and beyond, it reads well.
I'll have to find some literature on how to write the first three chapters effectively.
Last week, I realised why I had such a problem with the 'annoyance and inconvenience' law passed for the Catholic World Youth Day: we weren't asked.
Australians, as a whole, will bend over backwards to help out... if asked. If we're not, and assumptions are made, then we get all pissy about it. If the Government had asked us to welcome the pilgrims, we would have done so, like we did for the Olympics. But we weren't; we were told and laws put in place to ensure compliance.
This country was founded by convicts. People who had a natural resistance to authority... that hasn't changed. Not one jot. We made a hero out of the criminal Ned Kelly, after all.
I guess it just shows how blind our current government is to the Aussie way. Too bad the election is still a couple of years away.
I wonder what I'll learn tomorrow? And how can I use my new word? Polydactyl. What new things have you learned today?
2 comments:
You can't liven up your first three chapters with a polydactyl protagonist can you?
What have I learned today?
Good thing: That my children actually wouldn't sleep through a smoke alarm.
Bad thing: That having a malfunctioning smoke alarm going off intermittently most of the night makes it pretty difficult to get any sleep at all.
I also recently figured out that the opening scenes of my book aren't as good as I'd thought (finally finished the first draft of last year's Nano novel). So if you find a magic cure for that, be sure to share!
A writer - whose name I can't remember - once said to dump the first three chapters and start from the fourth, but I don't see that as an answer.
Well done on finishing Nano! Nowhere does it say you have to complete it in November - and you now have a book.
I sympathise with the alarm. Maybe you could write another book: When Alarms Go Bad....
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