Today I read book two for the first time since finishing the rough draft. I found, as I usually do big and little changes I wanted to make. For instance, when I started this book in 2004 I hadn’t decided how to spell Molly’s name. Part of the time I spelled it Molly and the rest of the time it was Mollie. At some point I decided that it was too similar to Dorie with the “ie” and since she was Carly’s sister she would most likely have the end of her name spelled like Carly’s. It seemed logical to me anyway and I’m the author so I can name them what I want. So there. 🙂 Anyway, today I kept finding “Mollie” all over the book and I decided I better just change all of them. So, I learned something new. I had heard that you could do a search and change function (I am sadly illiterate about computer workings) and I decided to try it. So I did. Without too much difficulty I found how to change them and pretty quickly 27 references to Mollie were changed to Molly. Wonderful.
A few minutes later I decided to change the RV the kids are traveling with in this book to a trailer since I had decided it would be better for the story to have a trailer. With this in mind I went to my trusty newest friend on the computer and ordered every “RV” to be changed to “trailer.” Voila! Magically, my computer informed me, 23 RV’s had been changed to trailers. I was really amazed there were that many references to a motor home but thrilled with the instantaneous change. Except…
It seems that when the word you are changing is not a real word but rather two letters every incident of those two letters is changed…. even if it is in the middle of another word. As I read through the rest of the document I occasionally dissolved into laughter at the new words I was encountering. For instance, Chad is not just hungry, he is statrailered! In addition Carly becomes a bundle of netraileres and one of the children doesn’t just notice something but obsetrailered it! A bend in the path turns into a cutrailere and the opposite of liberal becomes consetrailerative!
Oh the joys of revisions! I guess when I spell check this before posting it I’ll have a few glitches to ignore. 🙂 The problem is that I have this petrailererse desire to fix every problem…