Old-Fashioned Fruitcake
Yes! It is at last that exciting time again, when I have done to the Work In Progress about all I can do for it at present, short of remembering all the Oxford commas and/or setting it on fire.
I am therefore preparing to send it out to a select group of dauntless volunteers who will do their level best to read it and then tell me (ideally uniting civility and truth) what they think of it. Or, failing that, upon what page the book lost the ceaseless battle with that struggle we call Life.
One of my favourite fictional detectives in my youth was Detective Inspector Napoleon Bonaparte. Being mixed-race, he has one foot in the Aboriginal world and one in the white world, without ever fully belonging in either. It was something I related to as a TCK (although I’m not mixed-race – unless you count English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish as mixed race – just mixed-up).
The author of the “Bony” novels was Arthur Upfield, and in the late 1920s, while working as a boundary rider on the Rabbit-Proof Fence, he thought he’d try writing a mystery where the detective is hampered by the absence of a body. (The victim’s body, that is. Incorporeal detectives, as far as I know, didn’t come along until some four decades later, with Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).)
Continue & CommentI am deep in the entrails of The Wound of Words Draft Three, and I have come to a crossroads. Care to help me decide which way to go?
Now, some people love prologues, some people hate them, and some, for reasons I am unclear on, just skip them. Some part of my mind insists that a short double prologue is just what is needed, so I wrote one. But what do you think?
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