So, anyway

I have spent three hours today converting the story of Torin’s early years from first person to third person. Oh my dear lord, that’s a tedious thing to do to 184 pages, or whatever the hell it is. I’m not done yet, but it’s coming along. I can do a certain amount of "find/replace", but I can’t "replace all", because there are words in quotes that can’t be changed. So I can change "us" to "them" to a point, but I have to examine each one before I hit the button. And doing certain words (like "my" to "his") before others (like "I" to "he"), instead of going through and retyping each sentence, leaves me with very entertaining sentences, like "I lifted his head and blinked his eyes." When I start to feel borderline insane, I’ll go through a paragraph or two, retyping, editing, polishing and changing as I go, so it’s a very random kind of conversion. It also means that I’m skimming through the story over and over until I’m almost sick of it. Parts of it have been fun to read, though. Those are the ones where I’m actually stopping and redoing entire paragraphs. I get the feel of the story and the characters again. I do like Lordach very much. 

I also keep wanting to write about the Folk’s history and how they came to Torin’s world, and started legends in ours on their way through and so on and so forth, but it doesn’t flow as well as I want it to. I may have to write a series of short stories and then tie them together. That might work. I haven’t written in so long, what with life getting in the way and all, but the urge is rising up again, and I know I can discipline myself to writing a few hundred words a day, or rewriting a few hundred more, especially when I have slow work days…like today. It’s a concern, because if I don’t work, I make no money, but I trust that the busy days will outweigh the slow ones, and in the meantime, I can try to take advantage of the slow.

So right now, I’m taking a break from the forest and the boy and the Folk, and hanging out here. I think I might go have some lunch, read a little, play a game, knit four rows on the purse I’m making for my daughter, and then dive back into the conversion of Insanity.

Be well, dear friends.