Can I just say that writing on Google Docs has been awesome?  There’s something tremendously useful about being able to add comments on the fly, without breaking up the flow of the narrative.

I am really prone to having an interesting idea, plugging in some vague reference to it in the story — then not being able to remember a few days, weeks [or hours…] later what the heck I was talking about.

Here’s an example.

I had a character that I was referring to as Madame XXXX.  [Name redacted, because of reasons.]

So, like many fantasy writers [I assume.] I had the thought-burst. “Why am I using a French word in my uber-creative fantasy setting? And on top of that, this character is a young female, does ‘Madame’ make her seem too old? I don’t want to call her Miss XXXX, because that just sounds gross. Am I overthinking this? Is there a better honorific, or title I could use?  WHELP, TIME TO WASTE SOME LIFE ON WIKIPEDIA.”

[I’m sure your thought-bursts are similar.]

Now, admittedly — I am a giant supporter of Who Fucking Cares?: Have a Manticore Attack school of fantasy writing. I think many genre writers get so bent out of shape justifying their world-building that it sucks all the fun out the fiction, and when in doubt I use a modern term, because it saves time for me and will be most easily understood by the audience.

But, this seemed to fall under the purview of But It Might Sound Cooler If… and WIKIPEDIA is Fun. So, I dove right in — and I came across this little snippet.

The French word evolved in turn from the Latin mea domina, meaning “my mistress (of the house)”.

-From the Wikipedia entry on Madame.

Now, I have a huge word-boner for Latin. It’s my go-to dead language for when I want a cool-sounding fantasy term. So after playing around with it for a bit, I came up with Meadoma as my new honorific. It sounds kind of Madame-y, but it more lyrical and not-French.

Success!

[Well, maybe — I’m already having second thoughts, and may shorten it to “Doma”.]

What was the point? Oh yeah, Google Docs!

So, instead of a cruddy Post-It Note or something, I made a Comment on the page about where I got the idea from, so when I come back through to edit in a month or two, there will be some sort of trail to my though process.

So, in summation: Google — send me a ChromeBook! One of the white ones, please.