Paddy Plays in Dead Mule Swamp- Chapter 15

cover design by Farah Evers

I keep wondering if these recent chapters are "working." But I let chapter 15 sit for a day, and just re-read it, and I think it's basically solid.

I have two people from my local writing group who are going to read everything I have written in sequence, and then provide feedback. This should be extremely helpful.

Don't think that I'm just being self-deprecating and uncertain of my ability to write a good book. I've recently read a couple of self-published e-books that were quite good, but both of them would have been even better, excellent, with a bit of cleaning up. I think that if the authors had taken time to get some reaction from other people those improvements would have been made. We so often have blind spots in our writing, or we only see one possible interpretation of a sequence when there could be others.

I've come a long way from the days when I thought that everything I wrote was perfect, and I didn't want anyone to "mess" with it. If you are reading this, and you knew me when... you can start cheering now.

Here's an excerpt from Chapter 15:

    “That’s helpful, at least,” Milford admitted. “Stay in groups of two, but I’ll keep the girl and the dog with me.”
    I assumed I was included with the dog. We continued straight east, while the two Sheriff deputies veered southeast. Tracy and Tom angled to the northeast. We walked silently for a few minutes, until Sunny said, “I don’t remember this place at all.”
    We had reached the edge of some open water with standing dead trees breaking from the surface and clawing at the sky. There was a small island about a hundred yards away. On the shore, practically at our feet, was a small broken rowboat, turned bottom-up.

You can buy book 1, News from Dead Mule Swamp, for only 99¢ at Smashwords, or Amazon