Truth is sexier than fiction

[elfs]

So, I was doing research for my characters, trying to come up with names. And I learned that toward the end of the 16th century there was a brief fad in Southern France for giving upper class children American Indian names.

It's right in my revised timeline too. I was struck, briefly, with the idea of giving my noblewoman the name "Marquise Cheyenne de Chamonix", but I don't think my audience would buy the Cheyenne part.

---

Sometimes, the old ways are best. The first fifty pages of the Journal Entries were written on paper, with a pencil. Well, I've graduated to a pen (Jetstream Uniball) and a notebook (Moleskin, of course), but I've written the opening scene down to Moon, Sun, Dragons, and I actually think I know where I'm going with this. Neal Stephenson is right-- the word processor lets you write faster than you think. A pen is humane speed.

I tried reading the scene aloud, and it works okay. My litmus test is this: if I can't imagine Steven Pacey, the actor who played Tarrant on Blake's Seven, reading it aloud, it's not a good scene. Why Pacey? Because he's been the reader for two audiobooks that I think were better read by him than when I read them myself: Dunnet's Niccolo Rising and Harris's Pompeii. Although for the love scenes I might imagine Jeremey Irons reading it.

Oddly enough, as far as I can tell, I have no love scenes planned for Moon, Sun, Dragons. I wonder if that could hurt sales?

Comments

[solarbird]

Neal Stephenson is right-- the word processor lets you write faster than you think. A pen is humane speed.
...wow.

I can't write out anything longer than a note without a keyboard. Handwriting is intolerably slow - it totally screws up my brain, because all the words start overlapping in the queue, and then fall together, merge and turn into echoing mush.

Seriously.

Weird.

[fallenpegasus]

The entire handwritten manuscript to The Baroque Cycle is on display at the Seattle Science Fiction Museum, along with the several dozen empty ink cartridges he used.

It's a stack of paper over a meter high, and it looks like he wrote about twenty lines per page.

[kengr]

Neal Stephenson is right-- the word processor lets you write faster than you think. A pen is humane speed.

There speaks someone who is a fast typist and who does *not* run into acute pain after doing a couple of pages of text by hand (printed, as my handwriting is illegible to *me*).

I only do about 30 wpm. And that's one handed (I discovered long ago that I could type one-handed as fast as I could touch type, and that having one hand free let me do things like follow the program listing or whatever that I might be working from).

I can also type (one handed) almost as well with my left hand. And I've been obsderved worked on two keyboards at once. :-)

But I think faster than I can type, unless I'm trying to type something that isn't clear in my head yet. And I hate (actually loathe might be better) having to type in stuff I've written by hand. Or that I've done on an incompatible system and have to transfer.

Worse, I can't "recreate" lost text worth a darn.

So I work directly opn the computer (or my handheld) and transfer stuff to the "main" system as soon as is practical. Where it gets *multiply* backed up (to to other systems!)

I lost too much stuff to a system crash once.