Thanks, Becca. I'll need it!

Dee
x

Bloody hell, Dee, that's going it some... It's a strange thought, isn't it, how much we read in terms of volume, especially when you add everyday reading like newspapers, magazines, reports, websites and the like. How much of it is retained? Very little in my case. Ho hum. sxx

Shyama, it’s scary when you think about it. The only reason I can maintain this level is because I don’t do anything else. I work full-time but every other hobby I had has been relegated to the junk room. The house is neglected, the dog doesn’t get walked – good job I don’t have any kids!

I’ve just read your comment on Jumbo’s DLD, about having the attention span of a gnat. Someone on WW (the adorable tinyclanger) once addressed me as ‘Dear fruit fly.’

Dee
x

Becca, not sure I can add anything to the comments of established site members... but what the hell. I've also made good use of Search & Replace but at the risk of tuition in egg sucking, I'd highlight some potential problems.

Firstly I find that characters rarely have one name and throughout longer pieces of work they'll be referred to by their first name, surname, combinations of the two and any number of nicknames. Obviously this isn't a problem if you remember them all but it's a good idea to make a note in your character profile of their various monikers. Of course this leads to a secondary problem that while 'Stuart' can be easily (and frequently) shortened to 'Stu' in conversation, the final name you choose for your character may not shorten as conveniently.

Secondly you may find that changing the name of a character changes the sense and structure of a sentence. For example:

'Dave stood suddenly and struck Pete across the face.'

Could be embedded in your 200,000 words somewhere but if you decide to change a couple of names...

'Stuart stood suddenly and struck Steve across the face.'

Now, you may be happy with such aliteration (and these sentences are for example only - I know they're crass!) but I'm sure you can imagine potential problems.

Finally, using Search & Replace in this way means you have to be careful about the names you choose initially (that you intend to replace). For example, I have a friend whose surname is Read - imagine the carnage if you asked Word to replace all occurences of the word Read with Brown...

J

(retiring gracefully to the background)

I'm surprised I've found this thread again, but since writing that I'd started a novel to keep me warm through the winter a dreadful thing happened, which a couple of WWs know about, and I thought if I said it here I could exorcise it and get on with writing it. I started writing in July and was going happily along until Boxing day, even then it took a week to sink in, - the central theme in this novel was a tidal wave. How bastardly is that? I've got to go right back to the beginning and change, well, most of it really. When the Tsunami hit I couldn't mention the fact that I'd been writing about a tidal wave to anybody in the darkness that followed, I even feel embarrassed talking about it now.
I did come up with another idea though which has led me in a different direction and could be a lot better anyway, so happy outcome, and it's taught me MORE THINGS about the brave business of writing novels.
Becca.

Becca, this reminds me of Jumbo's story about the plane? disaster and how spooked he was when what he'd written happened just after he'd uploaded it. I'm sure someone could produce odds to prove that coincidences of all kinds are simply random, yet somehow they touch that primitive vein of superstition that remains in many of us. I seem to remember that a year or so ago we had a coincidence thread - I wonder what happened to it? And you're right - writing novels is certainly brave - glad you didn't give up.

Nell.

Maybe we're tuned into something?? I had a novel planned out last year to be written from the POV of a girl who had been taken hostage. Then, right after that, there was Ken Bigley. Needless to say, I scrapped the novel before it even began.
S
x

Just after I joined WW someone – I think it may have been Jumbo – posted a short story about a schoolboy who had been stabbed to death by another pupil. By the time it appeared on the site, news was breaking that a boy had died after being stabbed at school… that was seriously freaky.

I think the biggest coincidence of all time was the Titanic. About two years before the event, a novel was published about a great ship called the Titan, which sank in the Atlantic on its maiden voyage.

Glad to hear you’re still working on the novel, Becca. I wonder what would have happened if it had already been finished and accepted by a publisher? Would they have gone ahead? Probably, but they might have delayed it for a year or so. A friend of mine was due to have her first novel published in December 2001 but the theme was about racial tension (in Bradford and written long before 9/11) so it was delayed until the following summer.

Dee

I'm heartened by everyone's comments, my 'disaster' has now become something much less dramatic but has the same function in the story, also I was only 200 pages in, so I shouldn't whine about it.
Nell, I was thinking of the coincidence thread the other day.

I guess this kind of thing happens a lot and the thought of the 'Titan' really is spooky. A giant plane has just been made in which it's said that the maiden flight of the Wright? Brothers could have taken place inside it, it's going to carry around 1,000 people, I thought when I heard about it that I wouldn't be in the ticket queue.
Sue maybe poets and writers do hook into some zeitgeist. The first scene in 'Enduring Love' by that famous writer xxx, is about an accident with an air balloon, a couple of years back a child had a terrible accident involving one. Ian Mckewen? Here I go again forgetting names.
Becca.