This and That

No, I'm not delivering a lesson on overused words as the title of this post might imply. It's just an indication of scattered subject matter.

My manuscript for "The Janus Rule" is up to 100 pages and almost 20,000 words. An important connection is the conspiracy case has just been revealed, and the killer/stalker has resorted to extreme measures. Good progress, although Microsoft provided an obstacle in its inimitable way yesterday. I typed the following line of dialog, contained in quotes: "Ahh, Denton's old alma mater." After that, I started to supply a description of the speaker's reaction. When I typed, outside of quotes, She appeared to . . . all three words came out with a red underscore, signifying they were misspelled. Apparently, Microsoft Word decided based on the words "alma mater" that I wished to proceed in Spanish. It took a while to search through the Help function as well as some other resources to find out how to (a) make it stop doing that, and (b) make not do that ever again. I found I had to select the entire document and then change the language back to English. Then I had to go into the Options settings and turn off the feature that automatically detects a change of language based on what is typed. It seems the more I work with Word, the more automatic features I find I must turn off because they just cause problems.

Naturally, I'm already thinking about what I'll write after "Janus" is completed. I have ideas for both a third Windsong Lake book as well as a revamp of an older manuscript that will re-situate it in the not-too-far future. It's fun thinking up features of the future. In some cases, I'm merely extrapolating on technology and social behaviors I see every day. Occasionally, a news story about something just announced or projected gets my attention and provides another idea. For the Windsong Lake story, I have in mind some compelling scenes and a good handle on the situation of the mystery at hand.

I guess I'll have to decide which one I want to work on once I reach that point. Perhaps more inspirations and ideas will come along in the meantime and tip the scales of indecision.