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.