I was determined to keep on schedule as much as possible before husband’s surgery, so my goal for this week was to make it to 120,000 words.\u00a0 Which I did.\u00a0\u00a0 Today I went back to an unfinished chapter (it had stopped in a sort of lurch awhile back) and it took off a bit.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A certain teary widow has pulled up her socks and had an idea I certainly had not anticipated when I quit on that chapter.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’m impressed.\u00a0 Kieri’s impressed.<\/p>\n
I’d done a bit of poking around in a few other chapters as well,\u00a0 probably not more than 50 words\u00a0 in each, and discovered that I’d misspelled a character’s name in a way that made it a real word, so no little pink underline to warn me.\u00a0\u00a0 But it leapt off the screen at me, screaming NOT MY NAME!\u00a0\u00a0 Helped that the correct name was visible on the same screen.\u00a0\u00a0 Even so, why hadn’t I noticed that before?<\/p>\n
The name file (in which I store names of characters, towns, etc.) saved me again today when I couldn’t remember the widow’s husband’s first name.\u00a0\u00a0 Some of you have even commented that there are a lot of names in these books.\u00a0 Big books, big cast, and…lots of names.\u00a0 I can’t remember them all. (Who is Marshal of Seameadow Grange, a name from the original Paks books that I might need to reference?\u00a0 Um…it’s in the name file, thank goodness. )<\/p>\n
Besides being a convenience for the writer, copy editors appreciate having a name file, even in books where the people have ordinary names with ordinary spelling, but more in those where the names are exotic.\u00a0 Otherwise they won’t know that Regar and Regal are not <\/em>two different people, but that Regal is a typo.<\/p>\n It can be difficult to impossible, when writing flat out, to put all the new names into the name file. \u00a0 Sometimes I can’t come up with\u00a0 a new name when I need one.\u00a0\u00a0 I often use square brackets for notes to myself during writing–including things like [childname], [needaname], [2ndthiefname] as well as [check timing for day king can learn this.]\u00a0\u00a0 It’s easy to do a “find” on square brackets, and anyway, they catch my eye when I’m re-reading.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If I’ve made up new names during a writing session and haven’t stopped to put them in,\u00a0 I’ll spend some time going back over the day’s work and putting them in that day.\u00a0 Otherwise…otherwise I forget to.\u00a0 And then, if I need the name of some obscure person in a later chapter, I have to go hunting through the manuscript for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I was determined to keep on schedule as much as possible before husband’s surgery, so my goal for this week was to make it to 120,000 words.\u00a0 Which I did.\u00a0\u00a0 Today I went back to an unfinished chapter (it had stopped in a sort of lurch awhile back) and it took off a bit.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,61,5],"tags":[22,106,20,107],"class_list":["post-1280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-characters","tag-contents","tag-progress-report","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1280"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1281,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1280\/revisions\/1281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}