Nevertheless, she persisted.
Just a couple of things, actually. So far Ransom Seaborn is brilliant. I don’t expect that to change. Wow.
I started blocking out Xia’s story. The due date is May 1. Yikes!! After Christmas I’ll start writing.
Did I mention that the official title of Magellan’s Witch is My Wicked Enemy? I’ve sent an email to my contest winner. But if I don’t hear back from him by end of December, I’ll select an alternate winner.
Going to bed.
Magellan’s Witch is off to my editor. I’m in a state of whatever right now. Just to give you-all a flavor of what it’s been like, yesterday I decided that I should listen to the nagging voice that kept saying Carolyn, why do all the villains have Latino names? Answer? Because the names sounded cool. Santiago and Magellan. Totally cool names. But, still, that’s one of those things that could be open to bad interpretations. So I decided to change one of my antagonists from Brazilian to Danish. This meant I could make my villain, Magellan, Brazilian! Brilliant! I said to myself. Now all the Portuguese lines can go to him. But that also meant I needed a Danish name.
Lucky me, my sister-in-law is Danish. So I called her up and said, hey, Christina, I need some cool Danish names. Anyone who’s been put on the spot before can guess what happened. She could hardly remember her own name let alone Danish names for men. But my brother got on the internet and we got a quick list put together with Christina’s help. Her brother, it turns out, had the absolute perfect name — Peter Nikalaj. I would have used just Nikalaj, but I couldn’t because my hero is Nikodemus. Rats!! I really liked Rasmus, but Magellan’s first name is Ragos, so that was out. And since I have some quite unusual names, I needed a Danish name that seemed Danish without being TOO Danish. Hans, for example was out. I tried Henrik. Yuk. Did not work. Then I tried Jakob, but cool though it was, it didn’t look right on the pages. So then I tried Iver and that stuck all the way until about two hours ago when I decided my Danish mage had to be Rasmus, and therefore Magellan was getting a new first name. He got Alvaro. So then when I did the search and replace for Iver 244 replacements. Wow, I thought. I had no idea I mentioned him so often. Um. No. Actually, I didn’t. I merely neglected to select Whole Word when I did the replacement which meant for a time words like shiver became shRasmus. Oops. And I didn’t even realize it at first.
Yikes!
But it wasn’t too late and an undo fixed that and Iver became Rasmus and shRasmus went back to shiver. Then I had to reassign the Portuguese lines, only three or four, to Magellan and change my descriptions of Santiago to reflect that he was now Rasmus, the Danish mage. He went from black hair to white-blond hair. And that meant that my lady-fiend, Fen, who had white-blonde hair became a red-head, and that also meant, as it turned out, that her bra became red instead of black. Who knew?
And, also last night as I was falling asleep feeling smug about being done and needing only to transfer my very last edits (right) that damned little voice said, Carolyn, how come you’re not listening when I tell you that you need to take Iskander out of Chapters 27-29 and put in your hero?
Rats. F-you little voice!
So today I also did that, but it was a really fast change and much easier, actually, than deciding on a Danish name for the mage formerly known as Santiago. But that change totally rocked. So then I spell checked everything, and made sure I didn’t have any pages with one word on them or blank and I fought the good fight with Word. Have I maybe mentioned before how much I hate Word? and sent my MS to my editor.
One last little remark — I have Word Perfect set up to convert /N to the word Nikodemus along with several other handy shortcuts, with the odd result that I can do longer spell my hero’s name. And in fact, when I am not in WP, I’ll type /n and sit there wondering why it doesn’t change to Nikodemus.
On to Scandal.
This is my 1,000th post. All the way from April 2001 to October 2007. That’s six years of blogging. Allow me to step into my Way Back Machine. I was following the always fascinating Dave Winer and he was talking about blogging like it was the best thing since sliced bread. Hmm, I said. I think he’s right. So I tried Radio UserLand, but (sorry Dave) it wasn’t as easy as I needed it to be on the crappy equipment that I had. Full time job, very young child, and I think I was in grad school then, too. Plus the writing. But Blogger (before Google) was dead easy, so I did that and Dave was right. Blogger had some growing pains, but eventually Goolge bought them out and sent all the paid subscribers a free t-shirt AND later when things were NOT smooth a free Google hoodie. And I was extremely cute in my hoodie so all was forgiven.
And now it’s today. 1000 posts later. Lots of writers blog now. Blogging is no big deal, but it’s still fun for me. I like doing it. Happy 1,000th post Writer’s Diary!
OK, reporting in. Somehow I made it through Magellan’s Witch. There were three, make the four really truly ugly chapters. I cut one, rewrote another and wanted to slit my wrists over one just this afternoon, and then there’s the one that I rewrote, and when I re-read it realized I needed to put most of it back the way it was because I’d actually made it worse not to mention totally boring. So for the first time practically ever, I went into my archives and pulled out the previous version and replaced the back 4/5ths with the old version. Today was brutal. Really. I was up until 11:00 last night, slept until 5:30 this morning(no gym, rats! but I needed the coherence of an extra hour’s sleep) then skipped the lunch hour walk for the 3rd day in a row– those poor guys I usually walk with think I hate them— to sit outside by my car to read through MW. Then home to get my son to a soccer scrimmage. I sat in the car and worked… Then my sister picked him up to take him to my brother’s for a birthday party for the twins, and I went home and worked on MW. The bit I thought was dreadful at lunchtime turned out not to be quite so bad. But I got through all the changes and have conformed everything I think. And since I told my editor I would have it to her in a week or so I decided what with discretion being the better part of valor and all, that I can email it Monday morning, thus giving me another weekend. And putting me behinder yet on Scandal. But that’s a panic for another day.
Maybe I should say no more? Still revising Magellan’s Witch. Not because it totally sucked, but because I’m only up to Chapter 19 of making everything conform to the actual revisions. Weekdays I don’t get so much done, plus revisions require that I be at the computer, so there’s really no sneaking it in during the odd seconds of time here and there. I’ve been doing that with Scandal, though. This morning at the gym, for example. I’m kind of hoping to do a paper read through of MW this weekend. And then MW has to be off my plate entirely. I have to freaking finish Scandal!
What else? Um, who the heck knows?
