Well, I won't be needing an excuse note today, because I did some minor but oddly significant work on my novel this morning. I changed the gender of one of the characters. Not a significant character, mind you. But it occurred to me that the exposition this character provides could be just as easily be delivered by a woman as by a man and that having another woman in the room when the heroine discovers her destiny might not be a bad thing to have. So Raymond Capello is now Diana Capello. Interestingly, I see her a bit more clearly than I saw her as Raymond--when I dug through what I'd written so far I noticed that I skipped the physical description because I couldn't come up with anything compelling and decided to fix that problem in the rewrite. The only things I had to change in what I've done so far were names, pronouns and a "sir" to a "ma'am". I'm trying an experiment for working on my current novel, now that I have a full-tim