A serial writer’s notebook ~ from the pen behind Lore of the Underlings, an episodic epic…
This morning while reviewing a brand new passage of the Lore, I had a sudden funny feeling, a sense of deja vu. Had I written something like that before? The words in question were these:
Taan-syr and two brethren guardsmen, namesakes of three south coast states, led a bound and mud-caked man across the crowded fare grounds.
Sure enough. A quick search through my Word files uncovered the culprit in Episode 5:
A Guard it was in sea-green armor, namesake of a south shore state.
D’OH! Thank goodness for Find! What did writers ever do in the olden days? I’m always searching through the source files of my ongoing novel to check for consistency and to look for unintended goofs such as this. There would be no Lore without it.
Anyway, in this case I pretty quickly came up with a new phrase that I like even better, all things considered:
Taan-syr and two brethren guardsmen, standard-bearers of the coast lands, led a bound and mud-caked man across the crowded fare grounds.
But I’m sad to say that Word’s grammar checker is not as clever. It’s truly blue that I refuse to change my “fare grounds” to “fair grounds”. If only it knew about puns…
