If any of you are followers of my fanfiction, you know that I pulled one of my fics and reworked it a few months back into the novel “Eight Nights At Sea.”

I thought to myself at the time, “Well, this will be a piece of cake. I just have to change some names and tweak it a little…”

Nope.

First of all, changing names is harder than you think. You can do a search in word and replace, but if you’ve got a name that carries the same letters as a common word, you’re really going to have fun. And don’t forget places where you may have bastardized the name – for instance, in one sentence I had the girl drunkenly singing the hero’s name, and therefore I hyphenated it to stretch it out for effect. Guess what I missed on the first upload and a reader caught for me. Yup!

Then there are things that are particular to your character that you might need to weed out – some because they’re just way too associated with a popular TV character (for instance, my novel pirate doesn’t have a hook replacing his hand, of course) and some you need to weed out because they don’t make a lot of sense outside the TV or Movie universe they were originally set in. Continue reading →