Last week, it was capital letters. Deciding what was a proper noun and what was not took me an entire afternoon, especially for words that were created for the world of the story.
For example, I created a flower called the Dahna. Or should it be dahna? My first draft made it a proper noun, but the rules of capitalization for flowers dictate no capital letter unless the word references some other proper noun. As the creator of the flower, I can choose to have it named after a person or place and keep the upper case. But for now, I went through all chunks of draft and switched it to lowercase.
And then there's clothing. Sunday, I spent a good hour going down the rabbit hole of "coat" vs. "cloak" vs. "cape." And of course, "cowl" entered the picture at some point. Who wears what has to be consistent, and it turns out I wasn't.
Somehow, a character who had lost everything but the clothes on her back ended up with two pairs of shoes. Nope.
Now I'm ferreting out the various money purses, wallets, and coin bags strewn throughout the story. Plus money hidden in a boot and money wadded up and tucked into the folds of a dress.
At least I didn't put a pile of money in the second pair of shoes while the character wore the wrong outer garment, one embroidered in dahna blooms. But it was a near thing.
It's good to JKW (just keep writing!). But forging ahead without ironing out details sometimes leads to more work later.
I wonder what will catch my eye next?
