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Inspirational Reads

Another Quickie

January 11, 2007

Since I didn't write anything earlier in the week about my progress, I thought I'd toss a little bit more on here tonight. I'd keep pushing on, but exhaustion is taking over and Sleepy Karl just doesn't get things to fit together nearly as nicely on a page as I do when I'm at full strength. And, since it's 11:42 at night, I'm not going to make a pot of coffee. In fact, I probably should have been in bed 30 minutes ago, but instead I was writing.

I also learned something tonight. Well, it wasn't so much learned as it was corrected (relearned?), and it made me realize that I will need to more carefully reread King of Shadows and King of Thistles when I start touching on them (perhaps later this month? If not, probably later next month, for sure). I had looked up the garment worn under a shirt of mail (or hauberk, for the anal retentive out there) and thought that it was called an "akelton", like skeleton, but without the second e and the s turned into an a. Close, but no cigar. In something that I like to refer to tongue-in-cheekly as "What I learned from Wikipedia today" (for instance, I learned from Wikipedia that Chrissy Moran and I have the same birthday...both born in 1975), I learned it is actually "aketon" (taken from the Arabic word for cotton). It can also be called a "gambeson". That's your useless armor information for the day.

Anyway, I'm going to have to check carefully when I reread my other stories. I know I used the term akelton, and then added it to my dictionary. My idiocy knows no bounds.

That was a lot of crap to get through for no reason. Here are the running totals:

Word Count: 85036
Page Count: 280

Notice how close I am to 100,000 words AND 300 pages. Kickass.
I almost finished chapter 13 tonight. Hopefully, I should get it done tomorrow. It's an important chapter because it brings two of the main human characters together and leads to important things down the line. It's also important because that's one less of those half-chapters I have laying around that needs to be cleaned up and finished.

That's all for me. Just remember kids, if your basketball coach punches you in the junk and shows you porn, you probably need to work on your free-throws.

3 comments:

Ψ*Ψ said...

If you have it saved as a Word document (other programs might do this as well?), there's an option to search for a specific word and replace every instance of it with another. Try that, maybe?

Chemgeek said...

I'm curious to know if you use Word also. I wrote my MS thesis and PhD dissertation using Word and it pissed me off regularly. Formatting to meet the specific criteria was the biggest pain.

Just for comparison, I opened the ol' PhD tome today. 54,000 words and 288 pages. Of course, this is double spaced with 3 inch margins (not really, but it seems like it). 85K and 280 is sizable. Good work.

the iNDefatigable mjenks said...

Actually, yes, I do use MS Word, if only for the fact that it's one of the more common ones available (not to mention, cheap...which I've tried to outline in painful detail through posts in the past).

Searching for the word makes good sense, especially with the auto-correct option. I've done that before since several major characters have undergone serious name-changes (i.e. Roberts, Robertson, Roberson, Greyskye or Stephan, Stephanik, Chavonec). I'll probably do that to cover up my grievous errors.

Your Dissertation was 288 pages? Wow. My master's thesis was considerably shorter, but the formatting was a nightmare for that, too. I set up a table to describe all of the conditions I had tried in order to get a certain cross-metathesis to go, and every time I entered another piece of data, the table jumped or shifted the sizes of the columns I wanted and all that good stuff. I can't imagine the pain of writing 288 pages worth of chemistry that Word doesn't feel the need to format in just the way you want.