Is there any sentence or word you edited “a fuckload” or an “abnormal” amount of times?
I edited the last sentence of the 2nd-to-last paragraph of the book maybe 50 times. I edited all the instances where Haley Joel Osment’s thoughts are revealed in a “verbatim” manner many times. Why did you name the main characters Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning? I didn’t have concrete reasons when I first find-and-replace’d the names with Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning. It was sudden and intuitive; maybe 10-18 months into writing I said “I should name the characters Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning” to someone in Gmail chat and they encouraged me. Some times in the next 10-20 months I felt uncertain about it. I thought things like “I think it will be funny and desirable to me if people focus on the names of the characters, because I like when people aren’t focused, in interviews, on ‘themes’ or ‘literary’ things” and “It seems like I want to avoid, for autobiographical things, using names like Michelle or Dan or something, and I also want to avoid using my own name, bec
