{"id":532,"date":"2020-06-13T10:31:46","date_gmt":"2020-06-13T15:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/?p=532"},"modified":"2020-06-13T10:31:46","modified_gmt":"2020-06-13T15:31:46","slug":"words-words-and-word-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/06\/13\/words-words-and-word-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Words, Words, and Word Software"},"content":{"rendered":"

My traditional lament for the demise of Word*Star and spot of loathing for MS Word: o waily woe (lament) and grrrr (spot of loathing.)\u00a0\u00a0 Word*Star did not lose<\/em> files or parts of files unless you made a really stupid mistake with a dot command.\u00a0 Which I did, once.\u00a0 (Once was enough!\u00a0 That whole unversal action thing, ending a command with .* “apply to entire file.”)\u00a0\u00a0 Word…has a lenient attitude about text disappearing, especially as a file gets longer.\u00a0\u00a0 But sometimes it’s not really disappeared, though you can’t find it, and Word will (when it thinks you’ve suffered enough or hit the wrong\/right key by accident) restore it and pretend that never happened.\u00a0 Reminds me of small-child\/dog\/horse thinking.\u00a0\u00a0 (“That moment I spooked and you came off?\u00a0\u00a0 Oh, that never happened.”\u00a0\u00a0 “That time I chewed your socks?\u00a0 Nope, didn’t happen.”\u00a0\u00a0 “Broken dish?\u00a0 What broken dish?\u00a0 I don’t see any broken dish.”)\u00a0 I spent most of two weeks on that kind of problem recently.\u00a0 When it reappeared, Word batted its eyelashes and said “It’s been right there all along…” but I know it hadn’t.\u00a0 In the meantime, thinking it lost and gone forever, I’d written a replacement set of scenes.\u00a0 They didn’t sparkle with wit and delight (!) but they were workmanlike and could be polished in revision.\u00a0 I moved on and at that session the “lost” part reappeared. So a comparison has been made.<\/p>\n

A tertiary or minor character who seemed OK when I first wrote him now doesn’t please me in *either* version.\u00a0\u00a0 One of him is better than the other of him, but neither name works.\u00a0\u00a0 Finding the right name for him has meant a lot of research into names from the relevant parts of this planet and their meanings and then thinking through what his genealogy would have to be like, and future history would have to be like, for him to end up as [whatever his name turns out to be.]\u00a0\u00a0 His boss, a tertiary or possibly secondary character,\u00a0 is a difficult woman, a very difficult woman, who reminds me of my Civics teacher in HS in some ways (touchy, defensive)\u00a0 but is much, much smarter.\u00a0 Touchy defensive professor type, bristles easily, short-tempered; fact-based thinking and with that honest.\u00a0 She would like to take over every scene in which she appears and have her name in larger print but she hasn’t shown herself a great plot-generator.\u00a0\u00a0 She grabs attention, but then she doesn’t DO anything to advance the story.\u00a0 (“Not your talent, sweetie; you’re not right for the part.)\u00a0\u00a0 I’m presently working on a section in which she and the Vatta lawyer from INTO THE FIRE, an older woman,\u00a0 start out at odds and will end up not at odds, but both of them are being difficult for the writer at the moment.\u00a0 Perhaps because I’m out of “zingers” for them right now.\u00a0\u00a0 But somebody has to start looking behind the curtain for the various plot elements stored there, and since both are in professions (different professions) in which digging stuff up is a common trait, at least one of them should look in the right place soon.\u00a0 If they’ll stop sniping at each other.<\/p>\n

It’s a little over 94,000 words, with some words\u00a0 that probably need discarding down the line, just not until I’m sure which.\u00a0\u00a0 Definitely a book.\u00a0 A book in need of a title and 20-30K more words.\u00a0 I have what I think are the last paragraphs, but between “here” and “there” is a lot of plot-stuff.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Ky is adamant she is NOT going back to Miksland.\u00a0 Ever.\u00a0\u00a0 I explained to her about editor and audience expectations and she said rude things about expectations.\u00a0 “But wouldn’t you like to know…?”\u00a0 “NO.”\u00a0 “But you could at least consider….” “NO.”\u00a0\u00a0 “But maybe later?\u00a0 Another book?”\u00a0 “NO.\u00a0 And if you send my corpse or my ashes to Miksland I will rise up and haunt the book and ruin it. NO means NO.”\u00a0\u00a0 “You may change your mind.”\u00a0\u00a0 “Don’t [string of rude words] count on it.”\u00a0 “Maybe a touch of therapy…?”\u00a0 “Do you want me to walk out of this book right this minute?”\u00a0 “No, but…”\u00a0\u00a0 “NO.”\u00a0 (That was a discussion a few months ago when it became clear that the book wasn’t headed\u00a0 that direction.)<\/p>\n

As a Useful Distraction this Saturday as it’s getting hot, I’m going to try a scene with someone who’s been talked about but not onstage so far.\u00a0 He keeps wanting first names I don’t like, so\u00a0 he may have to have his scene as a pronoun, while I hope that the right name falls out of my head and onto his.\u00a0\u00a0 Aaron?\u00a0 Antony?\u00a0 Barton? Bolivar? \u00a0 Cranwood?\u00a0 (What kind of name is that??)\u00a0 Clarence?\u00a0 Daniel?\u00a0 Dunter?\u00a0 Etc.\u00a0 Back and forth through the alphabet, back and forth through lists of names.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My traditional lament for the demise of Word*Star and spot of loathing for MS Word: o waily woe (lament) and grrrr (spot of loathing.)\u00a0\u00a0 Word*Star did not lose files or parts of files unless you made a really stupid mistake with a dot command.\u00a0 Which I did, once.\u00a0 (Once was enough!\u00a0 That whole unversal action Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,5],"tags":[20,7,21],"class_list":["post-532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-progress","category-the-writing-life","category-vatta","tag-characters","tag-the-writing-life","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=532"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":533,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/532\/revisions\/533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}