Brain Dump:
Writing About Writing…
Every time I think I have successfully refocused my brain to work on a given story, Basil leans on my shoulder all, Yeah proud of you, but how ’bout this one? But he doesn’t usually have any sort of useful inspiration to offer for working on that one, but it’s enough of a distraction to derail what focus I had on the other one and the cycle begins anew.
I started writing this story back in 2013…which I just realized was ten years ago WTF? Anyway. I dumped a lot of words on a page, decided to make sweeping changes to characters, plot, location, a whole lot of details, and then proceeded to fight with it off and on for about two years before overhauling the character list again and made more changes to the plot.
It was a typical guy incessantly pursues woman who wants nothing to do with him (OMG SUCH ROMANCE) and there were a lot of things that I just did not like about the whole thing, but especially the douche bag tendencies of the love interest. It was code-named Spoiled Brat because said douche bag had way too much money and used it to aggressively pursue the things (and women) he wanted.
I hate reading books with characters like that, I don’t know why I thought it was a good idea to try to write one. (It was because my main character largely did not put up with that shit and made him change his ways. You know, very realistic. Ugh.) I eventually shoved it into the stalled folder and moved on to other ideas, but Basil would periodically drag it back to the forefront and make me mull it over, trying to figure out what was wrong with it—aside from the fact that the guy was a putz.
Somewhere in the post Nightmare Summer of 2019 deluge Basil created, that story got dragged to the surface again and I decided to try another character overhaul. I didn’t really have a whole lot of hope it would work, but I did start to like the new characters, especially when I started throwing out more and more of the personality traits of the insufferable dude. He still had way too much money, but he wasn’t so much a d-bag, but awkward as all get out behind forced bravado, and suddenly I started making progress on it again. A lot of it was rewriting (or removing altogether) the parts that I hated. It had gone from a disaster with no real direction to a disaster with a feasible plot. The end point is still kind of hazy, and there is still some residue from the reformed douche bag, but it is at least heading in a good direction.
And then I decided I needed to change the name of the main character. Forty-some-thousand words is a great time to rename the main character. She was already on her third name after all those character overhauls, what’s one more? I started going through line by line to make changes to accommodate the variations of name/full name/nickname and didn’t last long before I just did a find/replace of the different iterations. Then I sat down to read through the whole thing to make sure my changes made sense.
They did not.
Well, most of them did, but there were some that just did not and created some amusing problems.
Alex (short for Alexa) is very strict about who is allowed to call her by her full name and when her pursuer keeps calling her Alexa, she does not hesitate to correct him. (See also: Juliette vs Jules and Olivia vs Liv)
“Good morning, Alexa.”
“It’s Alex,” she muttered, sitting down, “how long have you been sitting here waiting for me to show up?”
“Alex,” he corrected, “And what makes you think I was waiting for you?” the smirk never left his lips as he sat across from her.
“The lecherous grin tells me all I need to know.”
Then Alex became Savannah. While most people in her life call her Sav or Savvy she does not take the same issue with people using her full name. It just…doesn’t make any sense when she corrects them for it.
He stared at her, still running his finger along her chin, his expression conflicted. He drew in a deep breath, letting it out slowly, dark eyes almost pained, “The idea of being forced to wait doesn’t sit well with me, Savannah. But there’s still that something about you that won’t let go of me.”
“Funny. There’s something that won’t let go of me either,” she jabbed him in the stomach with her index finger, “And it’s Savannah,” she jabbed him again, then a third time for good measure.
He jolted, coughing, but didn’t let her go.
There were probably half a dozen similar exchanges where he calls her Savannah and she snaps at him to call her Savannah. I found it way funnier than it should have been and kind of didn’t want to change it, but nobody else would get the joke so I had to fix it. (Because so many people are going to read this thing.) Also that particular scene still needs some overhaul because getting manhandled at her place of business by some dude who showed up looking for a date is gross.
Anyway.
Then I found the line:
“Not a problem, my schedule is fSavible.”
I stared at it for a solid twenty seconds trying to figure out what the hell that word was.
FLEXIBLE
My schedule is FLEXIBLE.
And I realized my mistake. When I did a find/replace to change uses of Lex to Sav I forgot to check find whole words only and match case so any word with the letters lex was going to get Sav swapped into it. I think it was only the one instance, but I laughed too much over it and then again when I told Bob about my name change adventures.
I am easily amused.
It’s funny—and by funny, I mean annoying—that you can read something dozens of times and not notice dumb mistakes because there are no obvious spelling or grammar errors and then somehow several dozen rereads later you suddenly pick up on what’s wrong.
“How old are you anyway?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“Seriously?”
He frowned, surprised by her reaction, “Yeah. Why?”
“You’re seven years younger than me,” she muttered, shaking her head.
“Seven?” he echoed, “You’re thirty-five?”
“This surprises you?”
What surprises me, is that you are both apparently bad at math.
Though to be fair, I might be able to blame that one on the fact that his age changed with every overhaul of the story, so at some point he might have been seven years younger.
Or I’m the one who’s bad at math.
Little of column A, little of column dumb.
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