Hung up!

 I got into a muddle yesterday over which POV I was writing.

The more I thought about it, the more puzzled I got. So today I am giving myself a brief refresher -

First Person: story is told by "I"

Second Person: a narrator describes the readers' thoughts, words and actions  "You feel your heart race"

Third Person: the story is told from inside the character's head. "she remembered the day"

Third Person Multiple POV. The story is sometimes told from a secondary character's POV as well as the main character.

Omniscient Narrator: As if God tells the story, seeing into every character's deepest motives and thoughts.

Author Intrusion when the author slips personal comments into the scene. Definitely a No-No!

Mixed Viewpoint when first and third POV are both used. Useful in time slip and romance novels.

In all cases, limit information to what the POV character can know. Avoid head-hopping. Give clear signals when changing POV with a physical break or scene break. Name the POV character in the first sentence after the change.

This year so far has been very wet and the result is rampant growth of trees and shrubs. Paths are overgrown and lost, so I thought today's pic was rather appropriate.

First person POV

For me, this pic captures all the colours of high summer - blue sky, dense foliage and long dry grasses blowing in the breeze. Lovely. If only people wouldn't throw empty water and juice bottles around in such pretty places. Not to mention the crisp packets, sweetie packets, cigarette packets....have these people no appreciation for their surroundings, or are they just mindless?

Had a busy fortnight, but it has come to an end, as all things do. The back lawn, wrecked by dog pee, has been replaced by artificial grass and looks terrific - so no more mowing the lawn! It took a while to do the changeover; the best part of seven working days as the lawn was a fair size and I designed it (cough cough) with curved edges which the lads followed faithfully. In fact they evened it up a bit. All we have to do now is infill with soil around the edges and put in some little plants and settle down to some pruning, weeding and getting control of the garden again. Going to France for almost two months is fine but the garden does get out of hand while we're away.

Also it is time to work on my writing and start moving along again. I've spent the last few weeks re-writing one of my books. Viking Magic never did well and it took a while to figure out why - I wanted a heroine who would be judged by her actions, but it didn't work well.  She was misjudged, I think! Now I've re-written the whole thing, tweaking the story line into something better than it was, and now the heroine reveals her feelings right from page one. She is my first, first-person POV character and was surprisingly pleasant to write even though it limits what she knows at any given time. In some cases that actually helps the plot along. The changes have made MAGICIAN'S BRIDE a much better book than the original.