I had stopped loving my father long before he died, but I did feel a complicated set of emotions when he died. I was relieved. I was sad about his lost potential. I was sad that I hadn't had a better father. I felt guilty that I was not as upset as people seemed to expect me to be, even though I'm a pretty pragmatic person. When someone dies, you can be sad that they weren't what you thought they should be. At the funeral, I just remember feeling numb and thanking a lot of people for coming. I think numbness is pretty common under those circumstances.

Someone please tell me I'm not crazy and using epithets ('the blond detective', 'the young anthropologist') instead of the characters' names in dialogue tags, etc. can be really, really annoying.

For some reason, the use of them sets my teeth on edge. If the scene is from the point of view of someone who doesn't know the characters in question, fine. Most places I see it, though, the reader already knows what the characters look like, etc. It tends to come across as adding variety because all the writing books tell you you have to add variety, if that makes any sense.

Sorry to rant, but I fear I'm about to get involved in a feedback wrangle and I want to make sure I won't sound like a total whackaloon.

Deb, was it you with the Pentagon/Cthulhu comment, and the last thing the hijacker seeing was a big tentacle coming out of the Pentagon? I laughed my ASS off at that.

Me too! That was one of the funniest things I've ever read.

It find that annoying, Anne. It's acceptable once, to establish that he's blond or tall or whatever, but after that it annoys me. My theory is that dialogue tags are just to move the story along and make it clear who's speaking, and that writers start being annoying when they start thinking "I've used 'said' too much. I've used 'John' too much. Maybe I should use 'exclaimed the young detective.'"

Anne, I will back you up on the overwhelming annoyingness of "the blond detective" being used on a guy who already has a name. That goes double when it is "the titian-haired heiress" or "the sultry rake".

so out of synch with what came to be the general consensus that I kept saying the wrong things

I stayed home (alone) all that week for this very reason. (I mean I did not say the wrong things; I just removed myself from any situation in which I might be invited to say the wrong things. Because I had a suitcase full of them.)

Yeah, I think that only works when somebody is coming in from outside. Like in one of my fics, I have Jimmy McNulty, coming in to Gee's shift for the first time, refer to Kellerman as an "Opie-looking detective,"

Deb, was it you with the Pentagon/Cthulhu comment, and the last thing the hijacker seeing was a big tentacle coming out of the Pentagon? I laughed my ASS off at that.

Yes, and the "gasp, how dare you" reactions were still showing up two years later. I also had the reaction to "Golden Gate Bridge at threat!" of not worrying about it because terrorists in a rented motorboat would never find the damned bridge, under all the fog; I figured they'd slam into Alcatraz. Also got the We Are Not Amused looks. Whatever, yo.

Jesus wept, I lost seven people I knew when WTC2 went down, including my nephew's best friend and business partner. My nephew is alive only because his New Jersey neighbourhood had a seventy minute power outage the night before, and his alarm clock turned itself off. But if the reactions aren't pure rote at times like that, society as a whole will have no trouble reminding you that, at the first sign of species trouble to hit us en masse, we scoot back into the cave and throw rocks at any different reactions.

Anne, I so completely disapprove of that method of writing that, if I see it, I won't read past the second usage. Find a way - preferably one that doesn't involve a character stopping to regard him or herself in a hallway mirror - of showing. "The blond detective" as is cheap and tell-ish a way of doing it as I can imagine.

the titian-haired

Oooh! Nancy Drew flashback!

Dude, I laughed. I'm Irish, it's what we do.(And it's holdover from my beat, in my previous life) But maybe bad example, as I still laugh about the retarded girl attempting suicide from jumping from a one-story building. Human condition, right there. Did I still feel sad? Fuck yes. My father figure was in the felons' section of the psych ward for fuck's sake. I needed something to laugh about. ETA, Wrod, Cindy, and drives me bugfuck about bad Kay!fic. Although I did say that ND also had a perfect clearance rate once. :)

Anne, I agree on the annoyingness, and I've seen quite a few writing books advise against it--it's one of the Rules that actually does work 99.9% of the time, IMO.

Thanks for the help, y'all. I think I've got some idea of how to proceed now. Unfortunately, I think I may have made a bad POV choice that will involve extensive rewriting. Right now I've got the 24 hours after Sebastian's death pretty much all as Anna. I've got her talking with her cousin Alex, who's also an officer in the same regiment and is the one who brings her the news, I've got her dealing with the smotheringly sentimental and effusive colonel's wife, I've got her at the graveside, etc. And I think it's too much. It feels counterintuitive, since she's the one who had the Big Thing happen to her, but I think I need to spend that first evening in Jack's POV, introduce his world and various important secondary characters to my readers, and go back to Anna that next morning, opening with some version of what I wrote above. I think it'll improve the pacing, and not force the reader to wallow in Anna's guilt and confusion any more than is necessary to understand who she is and what she's going through. Plus, I need more Jack in the early chapters, just for balance--besides, he's a delight to write, and so far is a hit with beta readers.

Dammit. The one thing I miss about writing is first person is I never had to do this kind of rewrite. I've really got to start thinking my POV choices through better or it's going to take me twice as long as it should to finish my first draft.