19 thoughts on “Rest of HWSWA Post About Revising Nita is Up”

  1. My friend has no wall for a TV, so she hung one of those pulldown projector screens above her closet and uses a home theater protector to watch TV. It wasn’t expensive, and it works great. You could hang your screen above the white board and only pull down as needed. (Or keep it down if you need a break from looking at your book.)

    1. I already have four TVs in a six room house. It’s the just big one is in the living room. No more screens.
      (Also two large Mac desktop monitors that have lovely pictures, a 12.9 iPad and a MacBook Pro. Really, no more screens.

  2. I wonder if there’s such a thing as whiteboard paint or wallpaper? [Rushes off to google] Yes, there is! My googlefu advises me that whiteboard wallpaper exists and there’s some available on Amazon right now! Who knew?!? You can wallpaper an entire wall and doodle on it to your heart’s content! Lol!!!

    1. I still need a wall, so it doesn’t really solve my problem.

      Also whiteboard paint and paper is not the same as whiteboard (been there, tried that, swore a lot). You really need that rock-hard surface; the paint and paper stain.

      1. No walls? How about a ceiling? Lol! Wait, what’s that you say about neck pain? And back ache? Ok, fine, I take your point, plus your point about wallpaper/paint just not being good enough. [Pondering further] Maybe instead of a drop down tv screen as suggested by Jen, you could have a drop down whiteboard? One that is hinged to the ceiling and is stored flat on the ceiling when not in use? (Can you tell I’ve been watching too many interior design shows with Murphy beds and other odd design solutions?)

        1. I had to laugh: My skills would mean that the drop-down board would drop down at odd moments, often on my head. My bathroom cabinet fell off the wall onto my head last month. Clearly, I need to watch anything I hang above 5’9″.

  3. Last week I read The Goblin Emperor (twice) and today I just finished the latest Murderbot. Both were wonderfully written by skilled, experienced writers and I enjoyed them very much. But both also had characters with names so similar to other characters that I had difficulty telling them apart. The climatic scene in Murderbot was so confusing I am still not sure if there were two antagonists or three.
    Isn’t that a fairly basic issue a writer should be watching for while revising? Don’t you want to make sure your reader can tell which character you’re talking about? Or am I being overly picky? (Or maybe I’m just unusually dense.)

    1. I read a book a while ago–I can’t remember what book it was, mercifully–where I counted SEVEN (7) characters whose names all began with the same letter, including both the hero and heroine and a major supporting character, and two of *those* were so similar that they were hard to tell apart on the page (I can’t remember what their names were now, but think Sammy and Sandy, or Erin and Eric). It was…a problem.

    2. In Murderbot, was it the two A named characters, the leader and the young girl? Because I had trouble with that, too, but usually the context helped out.This is Network Effect, right? I didn’t have any trouble with the ending, but I’ve read it at least a dozen times by now, no exaggeration, so I’m not a good reflection of clarity.

      I usually do an alphabetical list of characters to try to avoid any starting with the same syllable, but character names can be crucial. Right now I have a huge problem with that in Nick and Nita, both starting with “Ni” although not the same sound. That’s still too close. Nick has to be Nick because of the whole Devil-as-Old-Nick thing, but I could change Nita, except that she’s the rock I built the book on. So I think I’m going to keep both names even though I recognize the problem. Sometimes names just become the characters and you’re stuck.

      1. Yes, I had a little trouble with Arada and Amena, but, for me, the worst was targetControlSystem, targetContact, and Central, all sometimes spelled with caps and sometimes not. It was worse since I was reading fast to find out what happened, but I would think the author should account for that.

        Nick and Nita are not ideal, but I eagerly devoured all those excerpts you have posted the last few years, and I never had any trouble telling them apart.

      2. Nick and Nita don’t bother me at all, and I think (for me) it might be because one is one syllable and one is two, so they have different rhythms.

  4. I have the same problem with reading character names that start with the same letter. It can be really hard not to get characters mixed up. I also have a similar problem when an author tries to reflect an alien culture by using alien names that are really difficult to read, spell, say, or remember. A little different is fine, so we get that alien flavor. But when there are apostrophes in a name, that’s usually a warning sign. I’m sure it’s hard to find that happy medium though. With respect to Nick and Nita, I don’t see that as a problem, maybe because one is male and the other female and that’s enough to distinguish them easily.

  5. New font! That’s exciting. But I tried to like four comments, and on the first three the heart vanished instead of turning red. (Good luck, Molly.)

    And this is my second go at posting.

    1. It’s the same font, just darker. Big improvement which somebody here asked for awhile ago and Mollie just noticed was hard to read because it was so light.

      She’s stripping plug-ins out of the site now, so the attempted fix is ongoing. I think the key is Safari for some reason. There are no ads here, so it’s not that.

      1. I really appreciate the darker font, too. So many blogs have gone grey and it is terrifically hard for my eyes to read.

        1. Mollie was trying to fix the commenting problem–I’m still having trouble–and she looked at it and said, “That’s too light.” I’ll tell her you said, “Thanks.”

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