Marshal Law (NiaD 2015)

Literature & Writing Novel in a Day
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MarshalLaw_med.jpg
September 1867. Marshal Ben Wright is forced to take extreme measures to take back control of Flintwood, AZ, a mining town overrun by rowdy frontiersmen and outlaws in the long shadow of the Civil War.

This book was written as a Novel-in-a-Day on October 17th, 2015.

Get a free copy of all three versions here:
– epub (Blue)
– mobi (Blue)
– PDF (Blue)

– epub (Red)
– mobi (Red)
– PDF (Red)

– epub (Yellow)
– mobi (Yellow)
– PDF (Yellow)

All of the versions were compiled using the Mac version of Scrivener. The Scrivener Project file used to develop and run the event can be downloaded here. and Compile (meta-data probably set for ‘Blue’) settings can be downloaded here.

Three versions were produced (one called ‘Blue’, one called ‘Red, and one called ‘Yellow’’) each written in just 24 hours by 22 authors.

BLUE WRITTEN BY:
Alyssa Judson, Julia Pierce, Rebecca Schuster
Hyla Maddalena, Adela Torres, Michael Roberts
Chris Lozac’h, Jaysen O’Dell, Sue Cowling
Linda Weeks, B. Morris Allen, Keith Blount
Lazey Winde, Heather Lovelace-Gilpin, Tim Edwards-Hart
Mike Devitt, Charlie Novak, S.R. Martin, J.A. Bell
J.D. Salt, B. Michelle Morris, Claire Woodier

RED WRITTEN BY:
Mark Rothwell, Nick Calvert, Michael Bywater
Liz Carmel, Alana Warlick, David Johnson
Barry Lynch, Ian Philpot, Rita Catching
Niles Cordes, N.D. Robitaille, Corinne Morier
Coral Russell, Greg Ray, Jake Bennie, R. Dale Guthrie
Eric Christiansen, Waleed Ovase, Pete Becker
J.D. Salt, Ioa Petra’ka, Montrée Whiles

YELLOW WRITTEN BY:
Mark Rothwell, Ryker Hayes, Kimberlee Gerstma
Liz Carmel, M. Peyton Culbertson, David Johnson
Chris Lozac’h, Jaysen O’Dell, Sue Cowling
Linda Weeks, N.D. Robitaille, Raymond Xander
Coral Russell, Heather Lovelace-Gilpin, Ron Ward
Stila Webb , Eric Christiansen, Waleed Ovase, Dave Scheffler
J.D. Salt, Ioa Petra’ka, Wolf Baginski

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Great touch adding comments from the participants at the beginning. I like what I’ve skimmed over so far. Looking forward to a thorough reading.

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Yes! published in two version! suck you single-versioned maggots!

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meanie

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Congratulations to everyone involved and of course Pigfender for his work - I’m just about to start the Yellow version. I was pretty sure my part was comfortably in the middle somewhere and that seems to be the case. Just wish I had an extra couple of hours to lengthen my chapter a little.

As it stood, though, I was delighted to be able to squeeze in some idiot talking about the far future and living on the Moon in a Western… :smiley:

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Congratulations to everyone, and as usual, our Pigfender has done an amazing job.

I don’t know why he thought my chapter deserved to be in two versions, since the other version of the chapter was so much better. It just convinced me further that I have no pretensions about being able to write a novel.

I shall read them all as time permits.

:slight_smile:

Mr X

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[size=150]HEARTY CONGATS! NIADers[/size]
[size=150]BRILLIANT JOB ONCE AGAIN, ROG, WELL DONE MATE![/size]

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Haha. Sorry to disabuse you of your respective presumptions of victory and defeat, but it’s purely* random!
(* - save that if your chapter was submitted very late you might have been bumped for one that was ready to go)

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Your a true star Pigfender love this day in the year so much, thank you again for all your hard work :smiley:

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Yer welcome, pardner!

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uh… no. just … no. Stick to farm yard… :stuck_out_tongue:

(It would be more “yur”. Think the ur sound in turn
and no e in pardner … pardn’r the letters just run together. I think it’s due more to the tobacco juices but… )

My understanding is that the accent would have been more likely to an Irish/British than what we think of southwestern. For whites that is. Irish labor was heavy in the railroad construction and mining towns. The predominant language would have been Spanish and would have been more “glue language” between the various communities.

At least that’s what some smart folks who do language research here said (I was inquiring about the origins of a local subset of people and the “silliness of westerns” was brought up by them).

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I have my badges wearing with pride and big smile thank you :slight_smile:

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Interesting…You’d think that we’d know far better about these accents, as it was only a half-dozen generations ago…Old folks today would have heard the accents from their grandparents or great grandparents (My Grandmother’s father was born during the US Civil War, for example).

As well, I always wondered how the US South got its variant accents and how they evolved from the British accents 80 years previous.

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The classic pirate accent is essentially the English of the Bristol area, and caught on because of Robert Newton’s accent when playing John Silver in the 1950 film.

This wasn’t entirely wrong. Bristol was one of the major ports for the English trade across the Atlantic. But there were a lot of other accents. Of course, that general SW England accent goes back to people such as Drake and Hawkins, and writers were using it.

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The same way as any accents and dialects arise, through mishearings, misanalysis of underlying structure, etc. by successive generations of children acquiring the language, and through marking yourself as belonging to a certain community or stratum of society.

My first year working for Xiamen TV — Those were the days, my friends, I thought they’d never end … … ! — I had two colleagues. Our technical assistant was a young man born and brought up on Xiamen Island itself; then, for four months, we had an intern who had just finished her second year studying international journalism at Shanghai International Studies University, but who was born and brought up in Tong’an, a town 30 Km from the Island on the mainland but under Xiamen Municipal Government jurisdiction. Minnanhua (Hokkienese) is the native language throughout South Fujian, but it has three major dialects — Xiamen, Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects — each with local variations.

Although they both spoke Minnanhua, they spoke Standard Chinese (Mandarin) as well, and when talking to each other they used Standard Chinese. One day I asked Qiuying why they spoke SC together when they were both from Greater Xiamen and they were both Xiamen Minnanhua speakers. She said, “It makes it easier to understand each other; he’s from Xiamen and I’m from Tong’an and we speak different versions of Minnanhua!”

Mr X

Edited once to make a correction.

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Another thing I really like is the inclusion of comments from participants about previous NIAD efforts.

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I’m always thrilled to read people’s reactions to the books, and I sometimes hear about people compiling their own versions with cherry-picked chapters from the different versions.

My favourite re-compilation so far, though, comes from the mighty gr! See this link for a really cool way to read Marshal Law online, which is about as easy a way to compare the different versions of each of the chapters that I’ve seen or heard about!

Huge thanks to gr for producing this! Hope you all like it too!