Placenames!  I hate 'em, I hate 'em, I hate 'em.  And what is worse, this is not a rant about how other people use horrible placenames in fiction.  It's that I have to invent placenames for my own fictional worlds.  And I'm horrible at it.

I usually end up using compound nouns.  Which works, it seems.  (Though the critique which told me I had to hyphenate "Firerock" is one of the more -- memorable ones I have gotten.)  But then I have to find the appropriate nouns.  One thing I hate, hate, hate about fantasy names (and this is a rant about the horrible things other writers do) -- is form a compound noun with no discerable relationship between the two nouns.  On the order of "Leafdeer" or "Riverfeather" sometimes.  Plus, of course, they will be Meaningful Names so I have to analyze the significance that those nouns will give the location. . . . and anyone who is Name of Place.

sigh

The Return To Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman by Mark Girouard.

This book is about chivalry, but not as it was known in the Middle Ages, as it was revived in the Victorian era -- as an ethos rather than a military code -- in Great Britain.

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You want to vary your names so the readers can tell the characters apart.  Make them long and short, keep them from rhyming, make them distinctive, give them different initial letters. . . .

The last is especially important for your dyslexic readers.  I have heard of dyslexics who can not puzzle out the name and so go by the first letter.  Some can puzzle out the first few letters, and others the first letter and the general shape -- but variety helps them.

May be impossible in a long work to have fewer than 26 named characters.  (Worse if your setting has no fitting names beginning with X or Z or what have you.)  But varying them can help even there.

The hero or the heroine, or even major characters, I chose the name with care, partly because knowing the right name -- with all its attendant baggage and expectations -- helps define the character.  But bit characters -- well, before I use them all, I look down the character sheet and chose the first letter of the alphabet that hasn't started a name yet, if I have no ideas for a name.  It helps limit the search.

Once I get over a couple dozen, I find I have to go through and count how many start with each letter.  Then I go for the unrepresented letters.  If I don't watch out, the names will cluster on one -- or at best, two or three -- letters.

Ah, the Person from Porlock who so rudely interrupted Coleridge and kept "Xanadu" the fragment it is. (Or so he claimed. I have heard there is evidence that this account -- is not true.)

Such events are a good reason to lug about a notebook in which you can quickly jot down notions before they evaporate.

OTOH, there is more to be said for the Person from Porlock that that account may make it appear. Odd and unusual things perturb your thoughts and feed your muse with possibilities. Can break deadlocks when you are unaware of how what you just did managed to produce that piece of inspiration. And even when you do know, it can be astounding.

I had an idea for over a decade about a wizard using Egyptian magic and could not write it -- could not even outline it. Then I read a book on Victorian travelers, and a character I thought was a man living in the ancient world, a recluse in the wilderness, filthy and unkempt, metamorphosed in a proper young Victorian Englishwoman. I wrote it soon after.

Random reading in the library or on the Internet, random conversations, random visits to strange locations -- all is grist.

A good rule. But it does raise the question of exactly how media you want your res.

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The immortal words with which so many D&D stories open -- and so a cliche that people try to avoid. An amusing list of alternatives here, but note that it ends: "Or the PCs could simply meet in a tavern..." Because, of course, it's an excellent way to get people to bump into each other. It's the place where travelers stay (if it's an inn as well) or eat. It's the place where locals socialize. It is therefore exactly the place where someone who wanted help would post the notice of the fact, etc.

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He didn't know it, but he would be dead in fifteen minutes. . . .

Ah, the flash forward. Rarely seen -- and with good reason.

Once in a blue moon, I have seen it used effectively. A first-person narrator is doing something and comments that afterwards, people who watched him noticed this, that, or the other thing that it would be implausible -- or ridiculous -- for him to notice. Occasionally, a chatty narrator -- whether first-person or omniscient -- can get away with it, if it fits the voice, and the voice is interesting enough to lure me along without suspense. Because that's the fundamental problem with it. You might as well wave a flag and announce, "Hey, Readers! I can't think of making this suspenseful or interesting, so I'm going to bait this with what's going on ahead."

Even Ciaphas Cain, much as I enjoy the books, can be annoying when he declares that if he had only known that his careful selection of the safest-looking place would precipitate him into danger.

And in third-person limited, where there is no narrator to be chatty or who knows how it will turn out, it just doesn't work.

The reason that clichés become clichés is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.

Terry Pratchett

You want to show your action. You don't send the hero into the labyrinth of monsters, and have your characters peer at it and wonder if he will make it out alive and then have him appear at the top of the central tower. Go with him. Show every dramatic battle, pitfall, and attempt to find his way.

Except -- sometimes you don't want to.

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One piece of description I have run across more than one in writing books is of the first-person: that it is the third-person with the pronouns changed to first-person.

Bosh, piffle, and nonsense that.

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Lady Moon, Lady Moon, where are you roving?
“Over the sea.”
Lady Moon, Lady Moon, whom are you loving?
“All that love me.”
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I've read some contradictory advice on multi-person third-person limited POV.

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Now thank we all our God,
with heart and hands and voices,
who wondrous things hath done,
in whom his world rejoices;
who from our mother's arms
hath blessed us on our way
with countless gifts of love,
and still is ours today.

O may this bounteous God
through all our life be near us,
with ever-joyful hearts
and blessèd peace to cheer us;
and keep us in his grace,
and guide us when perplexed,
and free us from all ills
in this world and the next.

So you want to write a sequel. . . .

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There is one way not to write a critique. Which is sit down, read the story, take notes -- and ship it off.

Go ahead and read it -- even take notes -- but then look at them and organize them.

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On Japanese roots. I found particularly interesting that a hunter-and-gathering society had a population explosion once they invented pottery. Both because it allowed them to make more things edible, and because edible things could be rendered mushy enough for those with no teeth -- both the elderly and the infants.

Red deer still live in a cold war world. They do not cross where the electric fence once stood between West Germany and Albania.

There are a lot of them out there. Some of them are even useful. But they do need to be approached with caution, and a salt-shaker in hand.

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Blood Pact by Dan Abnett.

This is the twelfth book in the Gaunt's Ghosts series. You can read my review of the rest of them here. It can be read as a stand-alone, unlike, say, Only In Death, but I don't recommend it as the series does have arcs. And this review may spoil the earlier works.

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So said Henry James. Or, at greater length



So I heft up my cudgels to quarrel with the master, since this is true only as far as it goes.

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Endless Blue by Wen Spencer

In a space-faring future, where humanity is under attack from mysterious aliens called nefrim, where genetic modified Reds and Blues are slaves of human society -- Captain Mikhail Volkov (who is also the crown prince of Novaya Rus) is summoned for a mission.  A ship that had been lost years earlier had reappeared in space -- at least its engine had -- and it was encrusted with coral.

Turk -- Mikhail's foster-brother and Red Commander, a Red himself and so an oddity -- replaces their lost Reds, they prepare the ship for sea (insofar as anything can be done), and they replicate the passage of the ship that was lost.  It lands them in a strange world.  Where chunks of rock soar through the sky over ocean.  Where multitudinous alien races survive -- minotaurs, hauk, and seraphim, among others -- and time does not flow as it does in their universe.  Where Turk wrestles with his heritage and his resentment, and Mikhail with his depressive tendencies and his past.  Where significant secrets are discovered, which will affect the human race.