It's Friday the 13th. What Have I Done?

Recently, I decided to make some changes to one of my novels. The novel I wanted to change was written in the 3rd person perspective. I wanted to change it to 1st person perspective.

Was that a good move? Perhaps not, but I have completed more than 50% of the edits, and it's no time to change my mind.

It was easy to change my hero from his name, "John", to "I". "John walked to the soda machine" became "I walked to the soda machine". Find and replace works very well.

The problem was changing "he" to "I". Find and replace finds anything with "he" in it, "the", "there", "brother", "their", "shear" to name a few.

The third person point of view for my hero is "he", "him", "his", "himself". The first person for that same hero is "I", "me", "my", "mine", and "myself".

Changing the "he" was a problem. The other three, not so much. Find and replace doesn't find too many "hims", but "his" pops up "this" a lot.

So, it's Friday the 13th, and I have learned one thing. I don't think I will change any more third person perspective to first person perspective. I have also been trimming out the backstory. So far, I have five pages in a new file. I still have 178 8.5x11" pages, with 96,400 words. The average book length is 70,000-120,000 words. Unless, of course, it's War and Peace. It has 587,287 words. Now that's a Friday the 13th!