Character Names: Real vs. Fantastic

Besides being a Sci-Fi nerd, I'm also a name nerd. It's an interest that I think lots of writers, what with having boatloads of characters to find names for, also share. This interest became especially poignant in the past few months, after I learned I was pregnant. Instead of my monthly trek over to Babynames.com, I started seeking out and reading as many name-advice blogs as I could find.

The best site I found was The Baby Name Wizard, which not only allows users to search for names and meanings, but uses the Social Security Statistics on births to chart which names were popular in any given year since the 1880's, and in which state! And even better, the author keeps a rather scholarly blog about naming trends and statistics.

This week she made two interesting posts called "The Women of Fantasy Part One and Part Two." Since the novel I'm working on right now is a fantasy novel, and I'm familiar with a good third of the names on her female fantasy names list, of course I was interested.

I was especially interested after someone at my writing group today commented on my naming conventions in the novel. She prefers that characters in a fantasy world have entirely made up names, and for people in the real world to have entirely conventional names, and objected to my use of ancient latin names for some of my fantasy characters. At first I was in total agreement with her, and started to mourn the loss of my carefully chosen character names. But then I started thinking about why I chose those names to begin with, and I realized that I actually do have a rhyme and reason for using "real world" names in my fantasy setting.

The reason is this: to differentiate the cultures within the fantasy world. It's a technique that I definitley picked up from reading Tamora Pierce a lot a teenager. Though her entire world is fantasy, many of the countries within that world are fantastical representations of real places. I attempted to do the same thing when I first set out and began building my fantasy world, though many of the similarities between my countries and their places of inspiration end with the naming conventions.

One country in my world uses mostly Slavic inspired names, accents, and culture. The merfolk have generally more Germanic sounding names. The fairies have names derived from Latin and Greek, and the regular people have simple names which are often twists on common names, or hey, even names of family members and friends of mine. Liedre is totally named after my cousin Dierdre, even though she's just a maid in the palace. My feeling was that as long as it sounded and felt fantastical, and was generally unfamiliar to the reader, then it was okay to use in a fantasy setting.

My main character is a fairy, and his name is Pax. It's Latin for peace, and his mother named him that for several specific reasons--his birth was preceded by a century of peace, and his father was a diplomat. I also liked the incongruence of a boy named Peace being thrown into very un-peaceful situations. He's a character who doesn't like to fight and who isn't very good at it--in the very beginning of the book he pukes at his first confrontation and is persuaded to run away from his second big skirmish.

Pax's brothers, also fairy princes, are Lucian, Demetrius, and Genevio. Of those, Lucian was picked primarily for it's link with Lucifer in order to foreshadow Lucian's darker side, and Demetrius was picked in order to tie back into my Midsummer Night's Dream allusion later in the book. None of the names are too similar to another character's, and they are all relatively pronounceable.I think that stylistically they still work as brothers, and since they are the only male fairies in the book, they fit into their own little naming convention.

Overall, I'm comfortable with my reasons for picking most of my character's names, and I think that enough other authors have done the same thing within the genre (Tamora Pierce for example) to make it an acceptable way of naming fantasy characters. As with baby names, character names are certainly a matter of personal taste!

I'm a Nerd

I have a confession to make: I read Star Wars Extended Universe books. And I like them. 

To people who know me, this probably isn't that big of a surprise. But when I made this blog and this website, the idea was to make it look professional. I my best foot forward as I look for a job and solicit agents about my novel, right? I wanted to make something that my college technical writing professor would be proud of.

But that's foolish. Anyone who googles me will find pictures of me dressed as Princess Leia, a Pokemon Trainer, and Sailor Jupiter. I can't hide who I am, and I don't want to. I'm going to hope that a future employer might not want just another boring, bland writer with a boring, bland website and blog. Because I'm not boring or bland. I finished a Tough Mudder and have won the National Novel Writing Month Challenge four times. I have two black belts and some killer costuming skills.

So why hide some of the best parts of me? Why try to pretend that I only read classics and books in the genre I write in? I'm sure that Rowling read a few romance novels in her lifetime, and maybe even enjoyed them! This is a blog where I review books I read and talk about my writing. So that's what I'm going to do. The good, the bad, and the embarrassing. Star Wars Extended Universe included. 

For my fellow Star Wars fans, if you haven't seen this you're totally missing out:

Dear Mr. Potter

Dear Mr. Potter

You and your books were not my first love. A great and passionate love, a long-lasting and pure love, yes, but not in any way my first. Because when it comes to books and universes and imaginary worlds, I fall in love rather easily. I've always known the power of a captivating, well told story, the rush of losing oneself in another world for a minute, an hour, a lifetime.

My first love was Little House on the Prairie. There's no contesting how I wore my home-made sunbonnet around the house on a daily basis, and that blue goodwill dress I thought resembled the one Laura wore on the cover of Plum Creek. I read and reread the series until the pages came away from the spines, and dreamed of covered wagons and checkered tablecloths and patchwork quilts.

Then it was Narnia, and then Elfquest, and then a string of anime and manga from Pokemon to Fushigi Yuugi to Naruto. You can trace the trail of my devotion through the stacks of handwritten fanfiction I've boxed up in my parent's attic.

Then, when I was about 12 years old, my aunt gave my brother Sorcerer's Stone for Christmas. It sat unread on his shelf for about six months, until the long hot summer months drove us, as usual, back to our books. I found it, read it in two days, and loved it. Then I found out that there were two more. I told my mom that I needed, urgently, to go to the bookstore. Delighted in my literary devotion, she took me that night, and I spent hard-saved allowance money on the two sequels. I stayed up late under my covers with a flashlight devouring them.

My love was strong, and over the next year and a half, my brothers and I read the covers off of those three books. Total, I have probably read each of them over 50 times over the years, and more than half of those times were in that first year, before Goblet of Fire came out. When it did, my brothers and I pooled our money to buy it, and then promptly got into a fistfight over who would get to read it first.

This is where it all changed. With the release of Goblet of Fire, people all over the world suddenly felt the way I did about every imaginary world I had so far happened across. Suddenly, I could talk to my friends about imagining what house we would each be in, and make lists of spells and recommend fanfiction to one another. Finally, after years of sharing my love with only one or two close friends or my family, millions of people I had never met knew what it was like to dream about getting a Hogwarts Letter, about making the Quidditch Team, and fighting Death Eaters side by side with Harry and Hermione and Ron.

It could have faded and relapsed with the release of each book, of course, but the summer before ninth grade, my best friend sent me a link to what she thought was just another online sorting quiz, but actually ended up being Virtual Hogwarts. We made up fake names and filled out he sheet as if it was us going to be sorted, and were disgruntled to find ourselves in different houses--me in Gryffindor, she in Hufflepuff. But then we started playing, and that changed everything.

Virtual Hogwarts was a validation of my earliest prairie-filled dreams. A mix of fanfiction and friendship and adventure, I delved more into the Potterverse than I ever had into anything else. To this day, my encyclopedic knowledge of HP is legendary among my friends and family.

The site and the experience grew with me through all of my high school years, on to college, and almost all the way up until my wedding, when I finally gave it up. I cried like a baby when I sent in my resignation, and I still tear up sometimes when I think about how much I miss it. In those dark hours, I reread GoF or DH and then write more stories about my beloved character--my alternate personality, who lived in the HP universe.

One line that they nailed in the recent movie struck me as a summation of all the time I've spent dreaming of other, nonexistent worlds: "Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?"

I have moved on. I have grown up. But I've never grown out of my love for you, Mr. Potter. I married man who understands what he calls my "nerdy obsessions," indulges them happily, and has a few odd ones of his own to add to the mix.

It's not over, Mr. Potter.Though the series is done, the movies are complete, and I've left VH for good, I still love you with a fierce love. You changed the course of my life, helped me to realize my talents and my weaknesses, and I'll never forget that.  I'll reread all your books every year or so and share your stories with my children. Your legacy will live on in my heart, in writing, and in the next generation.

Love,
Angela L., 24, Gryffindor, Texas

12 Classics: Gone with the Wind

After rereading some old favorites, I ordered a bunch of stuff from a book club online to fulfill my membership, and found Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell in my lap. Things had evened out a little bit in my life, and I was ready to tackle another classic! 


#2: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

For being like, the longest book ever, it was ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. I can't say that I liked Scarlett at all, but I couldn't put the book down. I stayed up late every night after Gunnar was snoring, fascinated by the fortitude of the characters and the devastation that was the civil war. I mean, I studied the civil war in AP US History in high school, but that was nothing compared to shivering under the covers while Scarlett drove a nearly dead mule out of Atlanta, hiding from the retreating confederate army, with her best enemy, a newborn, and a slave girl all depending on her while Atlanda burned around them. Talk about doing whatever you have to do to survive! 

As shallow and greedy as Scarlett was, I had to admire her. She had fortitude and determination within herself that even she didn't know about. There was amazing incongruity between her selfish proclamations against caring for anyone but herself and her actions and sacrifices for the sake of those around her. When she honed in on something she wanted, she wasn't going to let war, or morals, or conventions get in the way of attaining her goal. She was an exciting heroine, and I found myself shocked by her behavior over and over throughout the entire book! She was a very human, flawed character, and I could identify with both her strengths and her weaknesses. My favorite Scarlett moment was when she stole her sister Suellen's fiance. My jaw dropped open and I burst into surprised laughter. What a backstabbing bitch! Sure her sister was one of the most unforgivably annoying characters in the entire book, and sure Scarlett was desperate for the money in order to save Tara, but it still seemed extreme and underhanded.

In a stark contrast to Scarlett was Melanie. I didn't really like her as a character until they go back to Tara and she comes down the stairs to face the Yankee intruder, lugging the too-heavy saber of her dead brother and wearing only her nightgown, ready to do what she had to do, even if it killed her. She was an honest and true friend to Scarlett, practically glowing with kindness and love. But on the other hand, her meekness, her willingness to follow conventions, her pathetic helplessness...all of it got on my nerves. I wanted her to realize how stupid she was being about for trusting Scarlett unconditionally, to call Ashely out on the near adultery between him and Scarlett, and to just outright hate someone in her life! I probably had a hard time relating to Melanie because I'm more of a Scarlett myself. 

Vivien Leigh as Scarlett in the 1939 film.

As for the men in the story, I didn't particularly like any of them. Rhett was a rough and rude scalawag, who I might have liked if he had admitted to loving Scarlett in the beginning, and I started to admire when he showed affection for his daughter Bonnie, but the vision of him at the end, broken-hearted and weary of Scarlett, is what resounded in my mind. Ashely was too sad and pathetic--he described himself, accurately, as a defeated man and a relic of the past who must somehow try and survive in a world he didn't belong to. I also couldn't forgive him for not just telling Scarlett from the beginning that he didn't love and and would never be with her.  

The plot moved fairly quickly for such a long book, and was a good close look at the South before, during, and after the Civil War. It presented multiple points of view about the war, from the fervent nationalism and optimism of the Tarleton boys to the logical skepticism of Ashley Wilkes to the outright disdain of Rhett Butler. It showed the economic hardships faced by the soldiers and those left behind, and the utter horror in the number of men who died horribly in the battle. Numbers and statistics in history books are one thing, but hearing the names of all Scarlett's old suiters listed among the dead--characters who were funny and interesting and handsome--drove it home. Scarlett's search for a doctor when Melanie was in labor graphically demonstrated the number of dead and dying soldiers, laying out in the sun with no medicine, no doctors, and no water, while the entire city evacuated around them. Scarlett notices that they don't care about the war or the Confederacy. They only care about the pain, their imminent deaths. 


I was aware of the controversy regarding Mitchell's portrayal of slavery in the book, and took everything written with a grain of historically biased salt. I felt that Mitchell at least accurately portrayed the attitudes of the people at the time, even if those attitudes were ridiculous and outright wrong.  It was interesting to me that the northerners were just as racist as the southerners in the book, in different ways. Though they freed the slaves in the south, they didn't actually want anything to do with them. The Union failed to offer jobs and support for these men and women who had lived most of their lives being told what to do and when to do it. Like prisoners who serve long sentences in penitentiaries, they were uneducated and many were unskilled except as hard laborors or servants. There was no labor for the laborers since the plantations were burned up and the plantation owners were broke, and no servant openings since the northerners found black servants distasteful and the former slave owners, again, were mostly homeless and broke during the Restoration. One scene that really struck me was when Scarlett was riding with Uncle Peter in the carriage during the reconstruction, and a white lady splutters her dismay at the idea of letting a black person touch her baby, insulting Uncle Peter, Scarlett, and her beloved Mammy ( the slave woman who was Scarlett's nurse) all in one go. Of course, it's also telling that Scarlett didn't step up and defend Uncle Peter. I really want to read The Wind Done Gone and other slave-centric works about the same era for some perspective.

Despite it's length and other snags, I loved Gone with the Wind. It was captivating, romantic, and inspiring. The characters were real and flawed, and that my love of American History (Little House on the Prairie anyone?) made it all the better. I highly recommend it as a classic piece of American literature, and a must-read for anyone interested in the Civil War or historical romance! 


Pictures are from the Wikipedia commons.

The Comfort of a Reread

One of the things that has made my 12 Classics challenge difficult is that I'm a comfort re-reader. I re-read for other reasons, of course, but this is the main reason that my books have broken spines and food-stained pages. When things get rough in my life, I turn to my old favorites to cheer myself up and inspire myself to continue living and writing for another day. So this year after finishing Anna Karenina, when I lost my job, had live with my parents for a month, got ready to move away from my hometown, and almost lost my unborn baby I was in a pretty low place. I needed to read something that I was sure would give me a happy ending.

So of course I read Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. It is without a doubt my absolute favorite book of all time.

I was 14 when I first read it, and was shortly after gifted an autographed copy by my little brother who won it in an accelerated reader contest. Since then, I've read it once or twice a year, every single year. Eleanor is among my top choices of baby girl names. After all, what girl wouldn't want to be named after a protagonist who meets such debilitating (though humorous) obstacles with such dignified, defiant courage?

The premise and plot are both simple; it's a Cinderella (get why she's called Ella?) retelling in which the main character must obey any command given to her. In the very first chapter she explains that if someone told her to chop off her own head, she would have to do it. Yikes. The book is her journey to break the curse of obedience.

There are a lot of reasons I like this book. I like fairy tales, I like strong female leads, and I like hero journey stories. But I think that part of  the reason it rang so close to my heart was that simple theme of obedience. As a high school honor student, athlete, and role model to two younger brothers, I was under lots of demands. My Myers Briggs is INFJ and I've always been very hard on myself, so I worked hard to meet all of the demands made by others and myself, so sometimes it felt like Ella and I shared the same curse. I felt that if she could overcome it and find true love and happiness...then I could too.

I'm not in high school anymore. I'm grown up and married and have my college degree. I've accomplished a hell of a lot for only being only 24 years old, and I still have a lot to look forward to. Which makes me wonder, why is Ella Enchanted still my favorite book? Is it nostalgia? Is it just because I still enjoy fairy tales and female leads and hero journeys? Or is it because now when I can see myself as the Ella of the ending--victorious, happy, and in love? Probably it's a little bit of all of that, plus the fact that sometimes you just need to read something and know that there is going to be a happy ending.