With my current WIP, I've been going through a final review, which has had me filling in a couple of blanks I'd made during the initial go through, and a few of those blanks have included introducing new minor characters. Babynames.com, 20000-names.com, and behindthename.com have been my friend the past couple of days. It's funny how when looking at one website to find a name and then the others to look up the name's meaning as well, I get multiple answers. One character's name was shown to be of Greek origin on one website, English origin on another website, and Italian origin on the last website. I just sat there and scratched my head for a moment on that and decided to pick a new name with a starting letter I haven't used yet.
It seems like I have an affinity for names starting with "J" and "T" as well as "M". And a few names that I was almost sold on for the new characters started with M, but I've restrained myself from going overboard and having too many with the same beginning letter. That's not to say that I'm super critical about not having any two characters with the same name letter, but past two or three, then it's time to start expanding my usage of the alphabet!
I updated one of my blog gadgets to not just list the links for the blogs on my blogroll, but to show when they were last updated and the title of the blog post. Yesterday, I checked out some of the blogs links I have listed, and I really enjoyed reading them again. Woo!
I also recently found a great website with some very cool looking workshops called Savvy Authors. I'm currently taking one on revision with Holly Lisle, who mentioned that she would be teaching an inexpensive course on Crash Revisions (editing a novel in 7 days) at Savvy Authors. Very cool stuff there. =)
Bye twitter, hello Bluesky and Netgalley
4 days ago
Keeping a list of names will help. Too many characters with similar names will create confusion and make the story hard to follow. I like seeing names that match with their meaning with the characters personality.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a great step. Keep it up. :)
(More peeks at WIP would be great ;))
Thanks for the comment, Marko-Bob! I agree. It is hard to keep up with characters with similar names. I also like there to be significance between characters personalities and their names. =)
ReplyDeletePeeks at the WIP, eh? Hehe... I'll definitely keep that in mind.