This whole naming-the-characters in Wizards is turning out entirely weird. It’s not normally this hard. Generally my characters just tell me what their names are. Or jump up and down and point when I look at a list of names. In this case… I don’t know, maybe they’ve forgotten their own names cause they’re drunk. Rick forgot which one our house was when he was drunk once…
Then again… maybe they’re just speaking through other people. April (who apparently has psychic powers) totally guessed the name I’d already given to one of the characters. And I’ve had a startling number of votes for the name I was trying not to call the wizard. So I don’t know, maybe I should just give up on that front?
In the meantime when I got her email at around 4am and was thus thinking about names I noticed that lately ‘April’ has become associated in my head with the person and I get confused when people use it like a month.
This is the trouble with thing names. They’re confusing, even when they’re nice. April is nice. And there are a few others I like. But mostly thing names are weird. And sometimes terrible. I had heaps of friends in Zimbabwe who had totally awful thing names like Chastity, Prudence, Remembrance and Be-faithful. That’s like calling someone Avatar or Blogosphere. You wouldn’t call your kid Blogosphere. Well, okay, you could. But don’t.
And while one of the cool things about being an author is you get the chance to name people all kinds of things that you’d never want to force on an actual child, or even a pet, I tend to draw the line at thing names. Unless I deliberately want to be mean to the character for some reason. Which, let’s face it, sometimes I do.
And then my head goes to this place:
Me: We used to have a fish called Tiggers-Don’t-Climb-Trees. My sister named it. We’d have like thirty fish, and we used to name them, but we’d get bored before we finished so we’d only name three or four of them at a time. And then they’d die. But Tiggers-Don’t-Climb-Trees lived a really long time. For a fish. He had stripes. And whiskers. I like fish with whiskers. And Mexican Fighting Fish. But all the ones we had died really fast. Hey, can we have a Mexican Fighting Fish in a jar? Apparently they live longer in jars. Less stressful.
Rick: Yeah, also, not on top of televisions.
Me: Why?
Rick: Heat rises.
Me: Ah! Yes. And they boil. We used to boil our fish. We mostly had tropical fish and the thermostat was a bit wacky. We went away one time and the water boiled and the fish tried to jump out of it and fried themselves on the light. (Pause.) I’ve got good stories.
Rick: You have a funny definition of what constitutes a good story.
Me: Hey, when you’re seven that’s a GREAT story. It’s totally morbid; it’s got death, mayhem and family pets.
So I don’t know, I shouldn’t write for children? And also, apparently, I need to, you know, sleep and be less crazy. Well, sleep anyway.
Wuffie
24/08/2011
The first cat I owned that was technically ‘mine’, as opposed to the ‘family pet’ I gave the ridiculous name of ‘Mister CC Pinky-Paws Esquire’. I was very into Bill and Ted at the time, which is where the ‘Esquire’ came from. The ‘CC’ stood for ‘Christmas Cat’ (since I got him around Christmas time), ‘Cool Cat’, ‘Crazy Cat’, or whatever else I felt like at the time.
Unsurprisingly, we just called him CC.
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My mum owned a cat before I was born that was named ‘Dudley Lightshade’, being a pun on ‘Deadly Nightshade’. I think this is an awesome name, and I think my mum gained cool points in my book when I first heard it.
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During a conversation with Scott the other day, I declared that the best name for a cat (or non-cat pet) would be ‘My Dick’.
No seriously!
Think of the hilarious things you’d get to say:
“My Dick!! Get down from there!”
“My Dick likes to hunt mice”
“My Dick likes to be rubbed behind the ears”
“My Dick is warm and fuzzy”
“My Dick will attack you if he gets too frisky”
We tried it with ‘My Vagina’ as well, but it just didn’t have the same ring. 🙂
Kandace Mavrick
24/08/2011
I don’t know that I can condone the use of pets to perpetrate puns. i have never stooped quite that low. Quiet little in-jokes now, oh yes. THAT I do in character names all the time.
Jared S (@jareds)
24/08/2011
Perhaps space wizards don’t use real names. They might have code names, like spies or superheroes. Does that help at all? 😛
My youngest sister is notorious for letting her pets die. She was eventually banned from owning pets until she went and got a kitten on her own late last year/early this year. Cats are pretty impossible to starve though, they’ll drive you nuts if you forget to feed them. Plus this cat is a great mouser (and birder, though we’re not so fond of that).
My only “funny pet story” was pretty upsetting at the time. When I was 14 or so I used to have a big aviary with 15 or so budgies. For well over a year the aviary had been in a nice secure location, sheltered from the wind but then my dad wanted to move it for some reason. He positioned it (I suspect deliberately) right in the path of the sea breeze which sweeps through the western suburbs every afternoon. I aired my concerns at the time but he dismissed them. It was fine for a couple of weeks but then some stormy weather passed through and knocked the thing over and that was that – no more budgies 😦
You can bet if that had happened to one of my sisters they would have milked it for all it was worth, but unfortunately my dad and I never had that kind of relationship, so I just got pissed off and angry at him (hello teen years!).
Kandace Mavrick
24/08/2011
I swear to god, you guys. Psychic! Not code names per se, but there’s this whole thing in the story that is about the fact that [Charles Watson]’s name (whatever it is) isn’t really his name. And he doesn’t get called by it properly anyway. He gets called by his last name, which isn’t really his last name (and I still don’t know for sure what it is).
Okay, that’s… completely incoherent. But it’s part of the reason I’m having so much trouble because his name has to serve like three different story functions and be appropriate for all of them and for him. And it has to look all… natural. Gah!
And do you have any idea how hard it is to write a book without knowing the characters’ names? I am leaning further and further towards doing it in first person because then, at least for a little while, I don’t have to figure out one of them.
arkayspark
24/08/2011
Since it’s science fiction you could go to one of those sites that make up alien names http://www.abooks.com/alien/??!!
Or call him Reginald or Clive some hopelessly English name with a vaguely Russian surname like Orlovski