For those of you who have taken the time to read my shared work 'Bless Me Father', I would gratly appreciate a totally honest answer on whether my style of writing - which is the story told in rhyme form, is actually something you would buy, or run a mile (or more) from.
I also humbly ask those who haven't read it, if you have a spare 10 mins and would like to give it a go and answer my above question I would be so grateful.
The story currently stands at approx 50,000 words and counting.
At the moment I have someone working on fixing the punctuation, which I am really bad at! It will definatly make a huge difference to how the story reads :-)
And please, if anyone responds to this, please be totally honest as 'being kind' for the sake of it will be doing me no favours :-)
Thank you so much Dor, again much appreciated honest feedback. The only thing I will defend myself on is the bad punctuation.
I am so aware of how bad that in the intro I did mention this, I am totally hopeless at it and currently have someone who is going to put it right for me. I'm sure once this is done properly it will flow a lot better. You have made me chuckle at you 'wet kipper' remark. Love it, nothing like a bit of straight to the point talking :-)
Total honesty? Well, I don't read much poetry but a story told in Rhyme is not something I would automatically run away from.
Honestly: I don't think this one is there yet.
Every exclamation mark is like being slapped in the face with a wet haddock by somebody in clown make-up.
The structure is too repetitive to maintain for 50,000 words. You are *forcing* it to rhyme and the rhythm gets sacrificed to that.
I wonder if you'd do better to have separate poems which tell each moment of the story, like a collection of vignettes. The Lovers Dictionary by David Levithan is, to quote its subtitle, a story told in 187 definitions. It's excellent. Also look at Pam Ayres and how she tells stories with her poetry. I think yours could work as a cross between those two things.
Hope this helps.
Laura, how encouraging you are too. You give so much great feedback to members on here!
It is the openess of your feedback that gives me both a reality check that 'maybe' it isn't a saleable book... but on the other hand your feedback is encouraging me to push on with it!
I suppose the one upside of the whole story is that it's not one that has to be read page after page to follow the story. The true life scenarios in it are not in any order of when they took place. This means that a reader could choose to read any given 'chapter'. Between Adrian, Damien and yourself, I have some research and thinking to do. Thank you all!