I’ve run into a problem. My very minor secondary character has morphed into a major player in my proposal and that means she needs a name. I’ve mentioned before that I never get to name the characters with big roles. They pretty much come in and either tell me what they’re called outright or they give me the starting letter and let me look through baby name books until I find the right one.
So anyway, my minor character needs a name before I can proceed with the synopsis. About now some people are probably thinking: why don’t I just give her any old moniker and change it when I find the right one? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way for me. I have to have the correct name or I can’t move forward, which is what I’m dealing with.
She hasn’t given me much to work on. I have a sense that her name begins with an N. Or maybe a T. 
I’ve looked through pretty much every baby name book I own. I’ve combed through almost every name website that I have bookmarked. I’m not finding anything under N or T that made her say, “That’s me!” So I’m wondering if maybe her name starts with some other letter. After all, if I’ve gone through the number of names that I have and haven’t hit the right one, it must be because I’m looking in the wrong places.
I don’t know much about her yet. She’s quirky, changeable, and torn between loyalties. She’s a little on the passive side, but I think it’s because she’s been surrounded by such forceful personalities all her life. This woman is Shona’s (the heroine) best friend.
So that was my night. No productive synopsis work, but hours and hours spent looking through those darn name books. Finally, about 8:15 last night, I had enough. I wasn’t ready to go to bed (although I should have since I was exhausted!) and I decided to install my super cool new Silhouette cutter. For those who missed the original rhapsody about my online shopping binge, the Silhouette is a tool for scrapbooking or paper crafting. It’s hooked up to the computer and can cut out any true type font that’s loaded in a huge variety of sizes. It arrived yesterday and I figured I could install the software, plug in the machine, do a sample cutout, and be in bed by 9pm. I was wrong.
The software didn’t take too long to load, but installation on my dinosaur computer wasn’t as quick as I would have liked. Still not too bad, though. Then I had to download some program from Microsoft for the thing to run. With high speed, that took minutes. Again, it was installation that slowed me down. Then I was warned to download any new security patches. This is where the night started to go to hell.
First, I had to update the software that Microsoft uses to determine which updates the computer needs, then after that was installed, it scanned and determined I needed three patches. They downloaded in probably a minute.
And took 45 minutes to install!!!
OMG! I was getting so antsy. I have a patience problem anyway, but when it was 9:45 and it’s still installing, I really became frustrated. By 10pm I was swearing at the computer to hurry up, using the language I normally save for my commute to and from the EDJ (Evil Day Job). 
By the time I was able to get to bed, it was 10:20, almost an hour and a half later than I’d planned.
The storm rolled through at 2:45, waking me from a sound sleep. I got up, checked out the window and then crawled back into bed and fell immediately back to sleep. I didn’t hear the alarm.
No time for coffee, but I figured, I could skip coffee one day, and really, I should cut the caffeine out all together. I lasted about an hour at the EDJ, then I made a jumbo cup of coffee. Only now do I feel alert enough to blog–and that’s iffy. Guess I won’t be giving up my morning java any time soon.
