Ketchup

Nearly done with a final polish of MIND PLAGUE, I decided to change a spearcarrier's name from Ted to Jake because I also had a Tony and a Trish and that's too many T names. Normally I'd just do this manually throughout the ms., because I'm a caveman and I hate MS Word, which thinks it's smarter than you and constantly tries to enforce any number of "time savers" and mandatory formattings. Boy, do I miss WordPerfect, which was like using a typewriter, pure and easy. Alas, Microsoft rules the world. For conformity's sake I need to submit my manuscripts in MS Word, so I use it exclusively now.

I thought I'd be all non-caveman and use the Find function to swap out every "Ted" with "Jake." Think of how much I could accomplish with the minutes I'd saved! Heck, I might invent cold fusion in my spare time! Hooray!

This was a big fat mistake. I only noticed because when the Find/Replace function was done, it reported it had made nearly two hundred changes in the file, even though Ted/Jake is barely mentioned twenty times. That's weird, I'm thinking... but it turns out that anytime someone shouted in the story, they'd now done something called a shoujake, which sounds Japanese, right?

"Watch out!" Cam shoujake.

Great. So I hit Undo and proceeded to make those changes manually. The computer is *not* smarter than you are. :)

Labels: I miss WordPerfect