Dialogue tags in Kidnapped

I've been adding bits and pieces to the website over the last few weeks (and have made a 'Latest additions' section for the front page, for handy navigation thereof), and here's a new meta piece—which I shall experiment with posting there and linking here with a few more informal notes.

The language of Kidnapped: Dialogue tags (with a comparison to Flight of the Heron)

This was an interesting investigation! I started by basically just repeating the same things I'd done for FotH, and ended up finding some illustrations of what I think are the general differences between Broster's and Stevenson's writing styles. Further comparison of more general features of the two books—perhaps looking at things like sentence and paragraph length, proportion of dialogue, punctuation and vocabulary—would be very much worth doing to throw further light on this.

Only two of my four Kidnapped fics are in canon-style first person (well, one of the others is in first person but it barely has any dialogue). I see I do use Stevenson's favourite 'Dialogue,' said pronoun construction, though I don't manage such a strong bias towards it as Stevenson has. And I've never tried to use present-tense dialogue tags in an otherwise past-tense fic; given the commonness of errors in tense use as mistakes in fic I feel it's a risky move to try doing it deliberately, but perhaps I will try for a better canon pastiche the next time I want to write a really exciting first-person adventure fic. :D