nope, not a character hijack.

So that character that turned up and threatened to do terrible things to my protagonist and my story? It turns out he's just foreshadowing. What a relief.

And . . . I know what to do with the rest of the chapter. And the next chapter is all about the turning point thing that the story has been leading up to till this point. And the chapter after that is when I have to suck it up and write one or two battlefield scenes, and somehow get across a bunch of stuff that has to happen offscreen since my intention to write omniscient fell by the way and I seem to be writing from only Yanek's point of view and more or less in tightish third (though the grip loosens now and then). Originally, when I had this planned out in omniscient, it would have been very easy to follow the Duke and the little Duke and the sister around while they had their various adventures. Now I need to save some of that for later revelations, and figure out how to hint at other parts of it indirectly, or how to have Yanek hear about some of it (but since most of it is stuff that he really can't know about until later and still preserve the integrity of the story, that last category is very small).

I think I caught all the missed letters, by the way, but the notable thing about this laptop handed down from Frank is that it does not register every tap on the keyboard, especially certain keys, so if you see a bit of garble that doesn't have enough letters in it to make sense, that's just because I didn't catch it and beat the keyboard into submission. The letters most likely to go missing are a, i, l, s, n, and t. Not all the most common letters, but they are all very common ones.

On another front -- had my first parent conference in this job that wasn't with a teen parent. It went well.

And also -- I'm riding the bike to work, like I said I would, not every day, but some days. And some days I walk, and some days I drive there and walk back. And yesterday because I came home at lunch to print out some stuff, I drove to work, walked back, and rode my bike there and back. I still need a wider seat and higher handlebars, but the distance is so small that it's not a fatal problem.

I don't see how we can go much longer without rain and not call it a drought.

One of those requests -- d'you know any Slavic or other Eastern European languages?

I don't need this right away but sometime in the next three months I would like to have a word with somebody who can help me make my fictional vaguely-Slavic personal and place names be not stupid. I am envisioning a place where there's a lot of small ethnic groups living close together, so I don't need everything to be extremely consistent. What I need is a feels-real chaos of linguistic miscegenation, and what I wanmt to avoid is stupid hodgepodge that fails to capture the feel of the way this stuff happens in the world. Since the way it happens in the world is capable of producing really dumb combinations and extremely awkward expressions, you can see how it would be easy to fall into a trap and make bad choices in this.

I'm definitely not trying to: replicate real-world languages, or invent a language for the book (for one thing I'd have to invent at least seven! And I'm not going to). What I am trying to do is to create a linguistic landscape that you could walk around in and feel that it is a richly observed world and not a felt-marker-drawn backdrop for a puppet play (not that such a thing couldn't be perfectly fine in its time and place, anyway).

Ideal, of course, would be someone who has a bit of familiarity with more than one from the real-world region. I don't mind too much whether it's Eastern, Western, or Southern SLavic, or Old Slavonic, and I would be tickled pink if the person also knew some other non-Slavic regional language or two or three, like Romanian or Hungarian or some weird dialect of German.

What I'd be asking the person to do is to read the draft when it's ready, or if that's too much, to read excerpts, and to mark where the names and so on seem rightish or wrongish and hopefully to meditate on why they seem that way and what might make them better.