Daily Archives: October 30, 2008

Eureka!

I’ve been sporadically working on the novel I blogged about here. One of the characters was not working for me. I’m not sure if I didn’t develop her enough or what. She’s a minor character, however, since I don’t find her presence really working, it affected the way I portrayed one of the main characters (if that makes any sense).

So, I’ve discovered what I needed to do to make the story work.
In Southern Comfort, the story I’m working on now, I removed the character whom wasn’t really working for me. I changed the story and had the heroine to be grieving for said character at the beginning of the story. This creates more conflict and is helping me to write this manuscript.

I kind of did the same thing in my story, Milk Money, when it wasn’t working. In Milk Money, Emily’s mother wasn’t really working for me, either. However, I don’t remove Emily’s mother completely. Instead, I have her away on a trip. With her gone, it was easier for me to write the story for some reason. I have her mother to come back about mid-way in the story, but I have her to leave again…two times! When I was going through the content edits for the story, the editor stated that Emily’s relationship with her mother was strange and kind of hard to follow. So during the content-edit stage, I changed the mother’s role from mother to stepmother, giving an explanation for their distant and strange relationship.

Have any of you ever had a character, either major or minor, who just was not working for your story at all? If so, what did you do to correct it? Did you delete the character (through death, or just pretend they didn’t exist at all?). Or did you re-develop the character so that he/she would work within the context of your story? Or, did you do something else to make your story flow?

~Cecelia Dowdy~

Diamond Duo

Diamond Duo by Marcia Gruver

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Barbour Publishing, Inc (October 1, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1602602050
ISBN-13: 978-1602602052
From the back cover:
Bertha Biddle is desperately in love with Thaddeus Bloom….
Trouble is, she’s not sure he returns her affection.
When a stranger named Annie Monroe comes to Jefferson, charming every man in town, Bertha is determined to learn her beguiling secrets. But just how far will she go to win Thad’s heart?
Thad is more than smitten with Bertha. But his father plans to send him away to military school. Will Thad follow his father’s dream at the cost of losing Bertha’s love forever?
When Annie’s unsavory companion enters the scene, foul deeds are afoot, testing faith and hearts. Will a murder provoke a startling twist of fate—in this world and the next?

This was a good story with well-developed characters. The story was intriguing, and, from reading the back cover, I knew a murder was going to happen to one of the characters, and I tensed whenever something happened, wondering if the murder had taken place.

I also thought Marcia did a great job with how she portrayed Sarah and Henry, an African-American couple in the story. Sarah misses her home, and Henry wonders if he’s made a mistake, bringing Sarah so far away from her loved ones. The couple deals with problems faced by a number of marriages, including infertility.

I loved the way the author showed the attraction between Bertha and Thad. I know this is sometimes hard to do, and still keep the story sweet and tender.

Also, as you see Annie suffer from the abuse of her male companion, your heart aches for her, and you’ll find yourself hoping the woman will learn to lean on Jesus to help with her pain.

This story was a love story, and a story of friendships, it is also a story of how we need to embrace God’s grace, especially during times of hardship.

I’d also like to point out that this post is just one part of Marcia Gruver’s blog tour. If interested, here are the rest of the participants of the tour! Be sure to check out their blogs to see what they had to say about Diamond Duo:

A Latte and Some Words

A Little Bit of Sunlight

Anne Greene

Be a Barnabas

Book Splurge

BookingIt

Cara’s Musings

Dawn Michelle Michals at ShoutLife

Erica at ShoutLife

Fictionary

God With Us – Finding Joy

Horizontal Yo-Yo

Janice Olsen

Lighthouse Academy

Marthawrites

Mary Connealy – real life

My Christian Fiction Blog

Net’s Notes

On The Write Path

Pam Krumpe

Patti’s Porch

Readin N Writin

Relz Reviewz

Simple Living Christian Style

Tamara Lynn Kraft

Terri Tiffany

The Friendly Book Nook

The Writer’s Tool

Writing by Faith

~Cecelia Dowdy~