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.