Writing and Character Names

I am making headway on the sequel to Infused, I've written about 7,500 words now.

One of the things that authors have to deal with when writing any story is the character names.

When writing Infused, I only had a few of the names selected before I started writing, the rest I just came up with as they were needed. In the fantasy novel that I was writing last year (and is currently on hold), I researched medieval English names and created a list of names to use before I started writing. I also spent time coming up with appropriate town names in for that story.

In this story I had to make a different kind of decision about the names as I started writing. Although Geoff understands any language, the story itself is actually written in English, so, the question was what to do about proper names for people on another planet. I could have decided to "translate" the names to something that Geoff would have been used to, but it would have felt odd to introduce an alien named Betty or something similar. I instead decided to have the names (for the most part) be completely made up but without making them difficult to say.

I know that if I am reading a book and a character is given a unique, hard to pronounce name, I tend to make up a short substitute for it and automatically swap the name out as I read. This has caused some confusion when talking with someone else about a book because they would refer to one of the characters that has a twelve character long name by that name, and I would not have a clue who they were referring to (because I thought of that character as Matt).

So, you can expect my aliens' names to be short and pronounceable.

Writing Again

After I made the tweaks to the printed version of Infused recently I think that I finally felt that I was finished with that book. It's been quite a while since I have written anything, but in the last week I started working on the sequel to Infused. I've written a little over 3,000 words so far, and I feel that it is going pretty well. I have the basic story mapped out (which is quite a bit more than I had for the first book when I started writing it since I really only knew the beginning and the end). For comparison, Infused is about 90,000 words long.

Hopefully I will be able to maintain writing at a good pace. My plan is that if I get stuck or just feel that I need to think a section through more before continuing that I will switch to writing on a fantasy novel that I started before Infused was published. After all, I do have over 16,000 words already written on that one.

I don't tend to follow the method of "just getting it on paper". With that method, writers tend to just get the story written down without really paying close attention to grammar or sentence structure or paying attention to details in general. To me, that seems like writing a very detailed outline because you really have to go back and re-write the entire thing again at least once (and probably multiple times). I tend to try and get very close to the final product on the first pass. I will go back and fix grammar some (and punctuation quite a bit) and tweak sentences a bit (usually replacing words that have been used too often), but I don't go back and restructure or re-write sections. This of course means that I am not the fastest writer out there, but it also means that there should be less effort in the editing process later on.

Now that I have gone through the process to publish Infused in paperback and have made it available in the three major ebook markets, hopefully the post writing process in general will be much shorter the next time. That is if I can figure out what the cover art should be and I can figure out how to make that happen of course.