Change all the things

[dotsandlines]

Apparently my new hobby is overdoing things. Attacking the Aerith and Bob problem with a bazooka today, I renamed three of the five narrators and several of the side characters. I (finally?) made a list of every named character, noted the ones that annoyed me, and then brainstormed and tried things out until I had workable(?) replacements.

I knocked out all of the Bobs, and made an attempt to align characters from each country with reasonably similar-sounding names. It was an alarming hour or two with Search & Replace. Still have to go through to look for unintentional rhyming/awkwardness/alliteration and toss in nicknames when they would flow better.

Also cut off the last ~4,000 [edit] 10,000 words, which had been completely retconned by earlier plot points and would be easier to rewrite from scratch. The next stat check is going to be...interesting.

Gotta admit: it's been a strange, slow reversal. At the start I would pretty much rather die than let anyone read this story, and now I'm having more fun imagining how it would work as a published piece. IMAGINING, mind you. It's just fun to think about. My first loyalty is still to the integrity of the story (loony though it may be) and to having fun.

(As a side note, I make a lot of backups. Still.)