Last Call To Change Central

So, looking back on the second draft of Blast, book two in the Merry Hell series, I pondered about several changes that I made. Namely, (pun intended) changing some new character names, a couple of place names and the names of two ships that feature in the story.  That’s the beauty of a second draft. You get to read your manuscript back as a reader and see what sticks out. Oh, there are the usual forests of spelling mistakes, bad punctuation and down-right confusing sentence structures but these all get the ‘treatment’ and hopefully disappear with no-one the wiser.  

But the names are a different matter.  Firstly, for the last several months you have been calling a character by a certain name and you kind of get used to it.  It’s the same with place names. Now comes draft two and for some reason or other you decide to change things up a little.  Now comes the second problem, ‘find and replace’.  Sounds easy doesn’t it? Just open the spell checker, switch to find and replace and Bob’s your favourite uncle!  Or is it? Now’s the time for paranoia to set in.  Did the checker get all the instances? Did I abbreviate the name at some point and confuse the checker? Did I just muddle everything and muck up the whole story?  Probably not, you say to yourself as you take a break and pour your tenth cup of tea. But then, when you return to your text, you come across a wrong name. Somehow an old name has survived, glaring at you from the white expanse of the page. (Or in my case sepia. I like it better as it’s more relaxing on the eyes - Thank you Mr. Scrivener.) Now paranoia turns into dread. How am I going to make sure that I correctly changed every instance without re-reading the entire manuscript?  To be honest, there really isn’t any true way to be sure.  Best bet is to cross your fingers and hope that it will get picked up in edit.

But, finally, you decide that you have done everything you can to the second draft.  As you sit back and bask in the glow of your accomplishment, knowing that now it is time to send the finished piece off to your editor, you ask yourself that time honoured question - ‘Was I right to change those names in the first place? Do they work better this way round or was it better to have left them untouched?’ Of course you will never know.  Those previous names will remain forever locked in your mind, where future readers have no access.  To them, the names will always be the ones printed between the covers.  To them, the thought that they could be called anything else, wont even enter their minds. I find it strange how a flash of a neuron in my brain makes me want to change a name to this one or that, and, therefore, will forever be locked away in the heart of the British Library, becoming canon and immovable fact for all eternity.

And what of the original name that squats in the dark recesses of the writers brain? That dissolves slowly over time until the writer can no longer remember the original name or, for that matter, that they changed it in the first place.

‘The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name’ - Confucius