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Sunday, March 3rd, 2013 10:00 am

I have to find and replace a word that has been bothering me from the beginning, which I have used maybe hundreds of times . . .

There's a particular wooded wetland that is central to the early part of the story, and another one which is central to the last part of the story. The English word for this type of wetland, which is an upland forest only seasonally flooded, is "carr:" but people don't really know that word, so it doesn't add anything to comprehension to use it, so I'm not attached to it though I have been using it for 165 thousand words worth of story. But it's been bothering me more and more because it doesn't conform to my orthography rules for place names. I have eliminated the letter C and the letter J because they are too confusing in my context, and replaced them wherever they show up with less unruly letters, because fantasy novel readers can be heavily distracted by questions like this (witness my discomfort with this word, for example).


I thought of spelling it Karr instead of Carr but I decided that wasn't really accomplishing anything except making it look German, which is not a tragedy but not at all useful. So I had a flash of genius and asked the Prague contingent for a word, and now I have one (luh), and now I have to at least eventually change the many many occurrences of Carr to Luh.

This is not the first time I have had to do this, but the other times I wasn't so deep into the book.

At least I'm having fun again, now that Yanek is Discovering His Real Heritage and so on.

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