friday fun

Ah, names. Sometimes characters come to you with names neatly affixed; other times you have to sweat and curse and cudgel your brains and the dictionary, trying to pin down that elusive Perfect Name.

When I’m in the position of having to come up with a name, the first thing I do is to look at my worldbuilding notes, especially on cultural inspirations and language, for help. The Changeling is set in an alternative medieval Europe, so I went to a baby name website to look at Celtic, Gaelic and Germanic names for my characters. Often I know what sound I want the name to start with, which limits my choices. I like my names to have appropriate (or deliciously ironic) meanings, as well.

Season of Rains includes both Indian and Greek-inspired cultures, so I focused on names that sounded like they might come from those cultures (for instance, a lot of names that ended with -es). For Kai’s book I developed some rudimentary language, and made sure that my names followed the language conventions. So if the language of culture A does not have the ‘l’ sound, I cannot name their purebred queen Lamila. Similarly, if in culture B the -in suffix is feminine, my macho warrior dude cannot be Kevin.

Sometimes, though, you’re in the writing flow and cannot stop to come up with names. So you end up with placeholder names–and they end up sticking. Two brutes-for-hire in SoR are graced with the thuggish names of Thurgor and Ragor. One of the antagonists in Quartz bears the name of a smelly cheese (all hail the Marquis of Rocquefort!). Some day, I really must change his name…

How do you come up with names for your characters?

My brain is fried. Today I: schooled a kid, managed a battle campaign against the playdough crumbs all over the floor of the kids’ bedroom, helped lead an art program at the library in which over a dozen kids did this awesome space and rocket collage, drove a lot, went to my church’s small group. Agenda for this evening: blog, revise, veg (ha!).

All of you probably know I write. You might have heard me mention “homeschooling” and “driving kids around”. You may even know I take piano lessons, and love it. You may not have known that I enjoy doing art with my kids, and have made some forays into doing art with other people’s kids. Yet, these are just a few of the hats I wear. I suspect you all wear lots of hats as well (fedoras, berets, tricorns…. okay, I couldn’t resist the joke!).

In the comments, tell me about something you do that is not writing fiction. Maybe your day job is Python Handler. Maybe you collect fine china. Maybe you volunteer at a soup kitchen.

What is one of the more unusual hats you wear?

Recommended Reading: Define Yourself

Eep! I’m cutting it really close with the timing of this post. Only 3 hours left of Friday!

Nobility have them: baronets, barons, earls, dukes. So does the military: privates, corporals, sergeants, lieutenants and so on. All institutions have hierarchies. We grade gemstones and hurricanes, ski slopes and rockfaces, stars and planetary bodies. Part of being human is the insatiable desire to name, sort, classify and rank.

Why should your black-ops military group or magic order be any different? Perhaps you have a far-future military whose various types of battleships need classifying. Or you need to come up with houses for your boarding school, or breed names for the griffins that your protagonist raises.

This week’s fun is to come up with cool names for whatever it is you’re ranking. For one of my short stories, I named my ship types after birds: eagles, gulls, kestrels. My one magic ship was known as a raven. While David was working on his book Storm Rider, we brainstormed animal names for the various intensities of different types of storms (for example, the sandstorms increased in rage and vigor from scorpion, to tarantula, to asp, to cobra, and finally, phoenix). Why settle for Cat 3 and Very Bad when you can be more creative?

With Valentine’s Day coming up (and the Chinese New Year falling on the same day), I’ve been thinking about all the different celebrations I know of and sorting them into different categories.

There are beginning-of-life celebrations, such as birthdays, naming days and baptisms. There are rite of passage celebrations, like graduation, wedding showers, housewarmings and baby showers. There are end of life rituals like wakes, and days to remember the dead (Memorial Day, Day of the Dead).

There are celebrations around religious and historical figures and events (feasts of the Saints, Christmas, Eid al-Adha, Fourth of July). One of these is the English (is celebrated in other parts of the UK as well?) Guy Fawkes’ Night, which celebrates the failure of a guy to blow up Parliament by shooting off fireworks and burning him in effigy. I’ve always found that one odd and amusing.

There are seasonal celebrations, and those that mark events of agricultural importance. Winter Solstice celebrations, harvest celebrations, fertility rites all come under this. I expect hunting societies have their own share of hunting-related rituals and celebrations, though none springs to mind immediately.

My sunless world of Quartz has a moon with a funky orbit. Twice a year (their definition of year), it stays in the sky for double the “normal” time and goes around the horizon in a belt-like orbit.  The denizens call this Girddlesday and this is the time for contracts–marriages, treaties, trade agreements, and the like.. After the second Girddlesday of the year (let’s call this the Greater Girddlesday), the people mourn the disappearance of their primary celestial light source. When the moon rises again on New Year’s Day, they celebrate with performances, free food and drink, parades of large animals (very rare on that world).

If you could create a celebration, what would it be? What kind of celebrations would aliens on Jupiter have, or the folks on a colony ship that has been in space for generations? What would selkies or vampires or avian-humanoid hybrids celebrate?