The last blog post before Volume Seven goes in for a line edit! Very exciting. Anyway, here are some things I've learned, realized, or remembered while polishing the manuscript over and over and over and over again:
- That Hawaii does not have squirrels. I know I've been living on the mainland - where squirrels are a daily occurrence - for a long time now, but I can't believe I forgot this fact. It would have been really embarrassing had I not remembered.
- For whatever reason, when coming up with names of alien worlds or the aliens themselves, I like to use double consonants a lot, as in "XandothaRR" or "HyriSS." I actually spent almost an entire read-through just checking for this and changing alien names so that they wouldn't be too similar.
- Speaking of changing things, no matter how many times I read through the manuscript, I always find something I want to revise. I'm glad I set a deadline of March 7th to turn it in to my editor, otherwise the process could go on forever.
- "Kill your darlings": usually a better idea than not.
- Even after seven books, I still get confused about the use of the word "had" and also whether or not numbers above ten should be in numerical form or spelled out with letters.
- Apparently, British people tend to use feet and inches when talking about height (as in, "I'm five feet, five inches tall") but use the metric system for everything else (if I'm wrong about this, please let me know before the book comes out this summer).
And now, here's the cat haiku I promised last week:
Cute and silly cats
Wake me up at all hours
Strangely I don't mind
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