Changing Christy's Voice

Yesterday was my last day on the FamilySearch mission. Today was my first day on my writing schedule. Time to finish my novel, Family Secret.

I put in six hours total -- so far -- not including the half-hour break to unpack my new Brother PQ 1500S sewing-quilting machine (I love PayPal and their six months, no interest program. I love that I was able to find a quilting machine that did not cost more than my car.). That was enough to totally distract me from my writing for the day, but I did not allow it to happen. (Major victory!)

I set aside the chapter on Carp's Vietnam experience to work on Christy's story.Christy's story I wrote from beginning to end at the start of Family Secret. Since then, I have chopped her story up into five chapters.

The other issue is, I had not found my voice in this novel at the time I started writing Family Secret. The first several chapters I wrote in both first-person and third-person in order to see how I wanted the story to flow. Since then, I have decided that Jennie's voice -- the present-day voice -- will be in third-person. My historical voices are in first-person. Today, I converted a chapter of Christy's story from third-person to first-person, plus did some heavy rewriting. I have not looked at this part of the novel for at least nine month, so it needed it.

Lesson for today:  Try to figure out what voice to use in my novels BEFORE I get too far into the writing thereof. It is a mess to try to catch all the third-person language and change it at this point in time. And, as I read over some former chapters where I already made the conversion and did the proof-reading, I can see that it will take even more heavy-duty proof-reading to catch everything before I am finished.