To boldly go… onto the page. Journals and computers. Which is better? I get that question a lot from writers, as to which one to use. Both are useful. That’s almost always my answer. Use whatever gets you onto the page.
…
Yup, it really is that simple.
Nicknames have been around probably for as long as naming. Depending on the culture of origin, the tradition varies. Sometimes it’s the use-name that a person has with everyone. Other times it’s something private, only used by close family and intimates. Maybe it’s a pet name from a lover or a parent. Whatever the source, nicknames are a very personal gift from one person to another.
My own nickname came about online when I was in a forum. I was new to the forum and forum culture, and learning my way around. I went by A. Catherine Noon, and assumed people would just call me Catherine. I should point out here that I type 120 words a minute.
You probably know where this is going. The nickname “Cat” came up, which doesn’t fit me at all. I wondered why I couldn’t just be called Catherine, and someone said, what about Nooner?
Yeah, no.
(In case you don’t get the slang reference, a “nooner” in American slang is going home on one’s lunch hour to have sex.)
Someone else suggested, Noony, and here’s where Rachel comes in. She liked it, along with some of the other folks, and poof. The name stuck.
That might have been the end of it, but then Rachel and I met up outside of the forum. We met other members too, and now meet every year to have a writing retreat and friends weekend. Because of that, I started answering to Noony in real life, and now it’s as much my name as my, well, name.
I know, it’s an “m” and it would be a lot more fun to look at mancandy. Sadly, the two guys we cast as Mitch and Lupe are models, and we don’t have permission to use their photos. Someday, when we’re big and famous, we’ll hire our own models and have lovely photographs. In the meantime, you’ll just have to do what you do best, Dear Reader: use your imagination.
After all, exercise is good for us, right?
All kidding aside, Cat’s Cradle will be out this summer and since it’s about Mitch and Lupe, I figured I’d take today to share a little bit about character development. There’s a lot of stuff out there about the subject of character, and a lot of good stuff from role playing games, not just writers. But in some ways, all that wealth of information is too much and can overload a person just trying to figure out how to write a character – one character, one simple person to wander onto the page of story and be the vehicle for it.
Here’s one way I do it:
I like to work from image, so I’ll go onto Google and either look for a specific actor that caught my eye (and it’s embarrassing how many of them can do that, isn’t it? Good thing there’s no such thing as mental police, or they’d find all sorts of stuff in there) or ask Google for a specific “type” – such as, male black hair. I refine from there, finding images of people that interest me and drilling down until I find something that speaks to me.
When writing, one needs a plausible reason for one’s plot. If there’s a culture that does something particular, maybe reveres kittens for example, one needs to have a reason for such kitten reverence. It needs to be convincing enough that the reader doesn’t question it, but instead thinks, why, yes, of course they revere kittens because that’s what you do in Kittenlandia. Maybe a beloved child-queen Myleigh adored kittens but died of childhood leukemia and her last wish was that kittens would be sacred from that day forth. Or, maybe the goddess Nephreini decreed that her sacred animal was the kitten and you could tell her devotees by their scratches. Whatever the reason, the fact that kittens are revered becomes as obvious as the fact that the sky is blue and just as unquestioned.
When Rachel and I wrote Sealed by Fire, we needed a plausible reason why male relationships would be common and accepted in the subculture we created. Rachel settled on the lamia myth, which is about a half-woman, half-snake creature. There are no myths of male lamiae that we could find, so we decided that lamiae had to come from somewhere; what if male lamiae weren’t half-and-half creatures but all one, and all the other? Meaning, they were either snake, or man; never both. Only the women had the snake-person form. Furthermore, the two groups kept separate from one another except at breeding time, so they lived in gender-segregated communities by tradition.
Ka-what? Kashaynu. Yes, I know, what a name. He’s a Seeker in our Persis Chronicles series and I adore names, especially ones that sound good rolling off the tongue but that aren’t familiar. Kashaynu, Zeteya, Bakraynu… Rachel jokes that you can always tell the characters she named, because they have names like Brock, or Jon. I do rush to point out that I named Teeka and Quill, and those are very simple names, but I don’t think I’ve won the argument. Not with Kashaynu kicking up his heels in the corners.
He does have a nickname: Kasha, which is Russian for buckwheat and is a type of breakfast cereal or side dish (i.e. grains, like we have in the book). Only problem is, only his brother and mother call him Kasha, so we’re back to where we started with a long name. I just like them. The fun thing about Kashaynu is he’s a Seeker, which is like a cross between an F.B.I. Agent and a street judge. He’s authorized to carry lethal force in the form of a sword and other weaponry and he investigates serious crime. His brother is the very fastidious and flowery Zeteya, the Contract Keeper for Emerald Keep. Their mother is Healer Meeryn, a lovely lady who works with the Keep as well as the workers down on the strand below the Keep.
Jon. He’s a cop with a psychology degree. He left Chicago’s serial crimes division and came to Madison, Wisconsin, to work with their magical crimes division.
And did I mention, he’s pure catnip for Brock Gary, priest of one of the Gary Covens?
But Jon has a secret, and he doesn’t want Brock to find out. Only problem is, Brock’s sister Belinda is a cop, and Jon’s new partner.
What could possibly go wrong?
Find out in our serialized free read, New World Order.
The main character in Sealed by Fire is Ivan Demidov, but he goes by Vanya. I love using Russian naming conventions because they’re so different than the ones that I grew up with in my culture of origin.
In the old days, in Russia, one would have three names. The first is the public, formal name. It was the first name, what’s called a “patronymic,” and the family name, or what we call in the States the “last name.” So, Ivan Mikhailovich Demidov. The “ov” or “ev” at the end of the family name generally means “of,” and the rest of the name refers to something – perhaps an ancestor, or a river, or something else.
The patronymic refers to the father: “patro” for father, “nymic” for name. It’s literally the father’s name. Boys take the suffix “ich” and girls “ovna,” so Vanya is Mikhailovich and his sisters are Mikhailovna.
And finally, we come to Ivan: it is “John,” in Russian, and the use-name, or short-name, or nickname, is Vanya. In the old days, no one would call him by that name except family and very intimate friends. There are suffixes to indicate endearments; yuchka to indicate beloved, which would be used by a wife or close, older, family members; and yuckenka, which means “little beloved one,” which would be used by much older relatives like grandparents. So, Vanyuchka or Vanyushka, and then Vanyuchenka.
Clear as mud, eh?
Emerald Keep is now available! Very exciting. You can find it at Torquere Press, here. In celebration, I thought I’d share a little bit about our world and one of the jobs in it, that of Hunter.
First, we decided that jobs all have capital letters. There are jobs that are obvious like Healer and Driver, and less obvious like Seeker, or lawman, and Hunter, or miner. We settled pretty early on in the writing process on the convention of using “er” at the end of all our job descriptions; I don’t recall the reason for it but it became a “rule.” It’s interesting to have to fit within that structure when coming up with new positions.
Hunters originally were the ones who went out and found animals for food, but in the process, they discovered the stones that are native on Persis. One of the rarest is used to power electrical systems of all kinds, and there is a gold-colored stone called simply “goldstone.” There is also a type of stone that, when a catalyst is applied, provides liquid water, called a “waterstone.”
At night, the stones glow various colors. When there is a patch of them in an area, they look like multi-colored fox fire. They are found typically in dry, sandy patches or near stands of local vegetation, and one of the points of the first book is that our main character figures out a more reliable way to find them.
They say you can always tell a reader by how they talk. They have large vocabularies, but mispronounce things – sometimes with comical results. I remember once asking my father about “Pur-gate-ory”. He couldn’t understand. I repeated it, getting more and more frustrating. He has a B.A. in Theology and was raised Irish Catholic, for heaven’s sake. His eyes got really wide and he asked, “Do you mean Purgatory?”
Shaddup, you.
My coauthor and I both do this ourselves a lot. We, for example, have discussed the word “genre” at length. There is no “d” in “genre.” Maybe there should be, but there isn’t.
I’m really proud of this series, and that we are able to bring out book two this Wednesday. Since today is “F,” I figured I’d feature the book that started it all.
When Rachel and I set out to write Emerald Fire, we had a specific idea in mind. We were exploring the idea of romance tropes, and the beloved Harlequin “white covers” that Rachel grew up reading as a young adult. Many of their themes are tame to modern readers, but they still hold a regal place in the history of the romance genre: the wealthy sultan and his harem girls, the billionaire playboy and the secretary/down on her luck heroine of some kind, etc. Flashdance. From rags to riches, swept off her feet and into his heart.
But we wanted to write a M/M romance, so we looked at this tropes with a new twist – what about a sultan with his harem boys? Now, coauthoring being what it is, her ideas met mine and merged into a synergy that is now what we know of as Persis and its Keeps.
But that begs the question: where shall we put our Sultan and his harem, I wonder?