Third Person

Do you have advice for changing perspective? For example, switching from writing exclusivly in third person and switching to first person? Or do you have a reason for staying with the perspective you do?

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For a long time, I wrote exclusively in the third-person viewpoint. I just could never get comfortable with the first-person view. It’s why Daermad Cycle and Transformation Project series are written in third-person viewpoint. I do switch character viewpoints, but I originally felt weird trying to write character thoughts rather than actions. I think this was a holdover from my reporter’s training, although I also wrote fiction when I was a reporter, so maybe it’s just how my brain works.

Or used to work.

Advantages of Third Person

There’s something to be said for being an omniscient narrator. You can feed information to the reader about every character and situation, even when the individual characters are unaware of the greater circumstances. You can even provide information that none of the characters knows. Many writers who write in first-person concentrate solely on one character, so there is a lot they don’t know unless they’re present for every pivotal scene, which I find unrealistic and awkward, not to mention you can’t know another character’s thoughts or motivations. The main characters is left with no way of gaining access to other characters’ states of mind.

I like to have more than one viewpoint character and for many years, the “experts” said if you were going to write in first-person, you had to concentrate on one character or you’d confuse the reader. I think novel writers have evolved beyond that sort of rote rule and readers have embraced that.

First Person

Although I struggle through some first-person perspective work in creative writing courses, I didn’t really embrace the POV until I was writing a short story for a libertarian anthology and found I really needed to cut several thousand words to meet the submission guidelines. Because it was a short story, I only had one viewpoint character. It was an alternative history and in third person, it had a lot of explanatory narratives. When I cut the explanatory narrative, the story felt incomplete. So I experimented and wrote the first scene in first-person. Written from Lai’s perspective, I could avoid explaining some things and just express his feelings about them. And those thousands of extraneous words just disappeared. The resultant short story became one of the anchors of Echoes of Liberty, an anthology by Agorist Writers Workshop.

You know how sometimes you try something for a particular reason and you like it so much, you want to expand it to all of your writing?

I had a problematic work-in-progress that would become the What If Wasn’t series. I didn’t like it in third-person. There was too much explaining of feelings. It’s a young-adult novel and that just didn’t feel right. Peter should feel his emotions, not have a narrator explain them. Show, don’t tell, right? So I tried rewriting it in first-person. It still didn’t feel right and a beta reader said “You need the perspective of others in here.” Well, that was the whole point of writing it in third-person. Peter is part of a community of characters and his actions affect them all. But I really liked the first-person perspective, so I took another run at it.

The more I played with it, the more comfortable I became with writing multiple viewpoints in first-person, just sticking with one character in every chapter which I clearly label. I was basically doing what I had been doing in third-person but with much more intimacy. I have now written three of the novels in multiple-character first-person viewpoint and I like it. My beta readers like it. I’ve gotten messages from readers saying they like it. It makes a faster story that can express feelings and inner dialogue so much better than third-person can. Multiple-character first-person allows for richer character development without devolving into head-hopping. Humans are complex and fictional characters must be complex as well to be believable. A primary goal in fiction is to engage the reader — to make them feel like they could be there in the action. A great way to do that is to put them in the head of the viewpoint character.

I wish sometimes that I could go back and rewrite the other two series in multiple-character first-person, but that would be way too much work and might throw off already engaged readers. It is a jolt though, every time I go from first-person back to third-person. It’s an adjustment I have to deliberately make.

But, hey, I bill myself as a multi-genre writer, so why not also a multi-perspective writer? I wonder what my fellow blog-hoppers are thinking on this subject.

Definition, please!

Do you include any inside jokes or Easter eggs in your work?

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I guess I wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t really know what an Easter egg is in literature. I was aware the some of my favorite authors link their books in the same universe by leaving hints of them in each book, but I didn’t really know that was a widespread practice.

And it’s not one I use deliberately.

First, my fantasy series Daermad Cycle is not in the same universe as any of my other books. It is literally in an alternative space, so I can make magic work without offending my own rationality. I think the only “Easter egg” in that series is “who killed Prince Maryn?” That question can get a little muddled from time to time, but solving that mystery matters to understanding the series.

I suspect the reason why I don’t deal in literary Easter eggs much is that metaphors are hard to manage and they can become tiresome and strained over the stretch of many books. They’re fun as a one-off, but as a long-term strategy…okay, I figured out who Jon Snow’s mother was in the first book and every time George RR Martin dropped a hint in subsequent books, I wanted to scream …. yeah, if you haven’t guessed it for the books, I’ll not ruin it for you.

However….

Jon Dracines, a reporter for a New York newspaper, gets a mention in both Transformation Project and What If Wasn’t. You never meet him in either series (well, so far). He exists in a long-neglected WIP that may well never be published, but when I needed a reporter for Javier Chavez to reach out to, I used the character name and I am getting to a point where it might make sense for Jon to show up.

He also shows up as a reporter in What If Wasn’t series when Alan Wyngate wants to leak information about his son to the press. Maybe someday, he’ll show up as a fully-fledged character.

Recurring Themes

I use some themes repeatedly in my writings. “Objects in View” is the title to the 2nd book in the Transformation Project series. It’s a phrase that gets used pretty often by the characters. You know a character knew Jacob Delaney if you hear them say or think the phrase. Jacob Delaney’s libertarian philosophy is a throughline in the series.

What If Wasn’t is the title of a series and probably will be the title of one of the books in the series, and it’s also a philosophy I have main character Peter developing as he goes through rough times.

Individual freedom, even in a feudal society, is a consistent theme played out in different ways throughout all of my books. While my people are often surrounded by healthy communities that work together to get through challenges, I try to make the case that they are not forced to participate, but choose to do so.

Another theme that my son recently pointed out to me is that I pay homage to female empowerment outside the lines of women’s liberation. An ongoing theme in Transformation Project is “My partner is a bad-assed mercenary. Of course, I can take care of myself.” This is not necessarily because the female characters want to take care of themselves, but because their male counterparts are often dealing with other crises at other locations and therefore unavailable to protect the women they love, so their women learn to take care of themselves and to overcome the damage they experience when they physically aren’t strong enough to defend themselves from the bad guys. So, while (for example) Jazz couldn’t prevent Paul Osmowitz from raping her, she had the strength, anger, and gun skills to blow his face off later in the series. In my current WIP, she’s developing into a good backup for her bad-assed mercenary partner Shane Delaney. Meanwhile, Keri Lufgren had to shoot a man who tried to hurt her, but she doesn’t want to do that again, which causes her protective husband Alex to rise to the challenge of defending her. I like to show women as strong and capable, but still feminine. With the possible exception of the elfling Ryanna in Daermad Cycle, my female characters can only best a man if they are possessed of superior firepower, because that’s the reality I see in the world and I don’t think that diminishes my own gender in the least.

I don’t know these are Easter eggs (especially since some of them I didn’t even realize I was putting into the books), but they are themes that undergird my plots. And since I’m not going for metaphors, hopefully they stay fresh through the series. I admire writers who can deal in metaphors with panache (CS Lewis, for example), but I’m not him, so I’ll probably not leave a bunch of Easter eggs in my books, because I don’t want to become a slave to a literary technique.

What a Hard Question!

What is one thing that you wish you’d known about writing before you started?

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First, I was 12 when I started writing. That is to say, that’s when I started putting ink on paper. Before that, I was making up stories to entertain myself and friends. So there was a lot I didn’t know about writing. I think I didn’t really know grammar when I started writing.

Let’s fast-forward a bit. I started thinking about writing books for other people to read when I was in my 20s. I was studying and then working as a journalist, but fiction always called to me. And there was still a lot I didn’t know.

There Is More than One Way to Publish

Frankly, in the 1980s, there wasn’t more than one way to publish. The Big 5 were it. Sure, you could do a vanity press, but you’d never sell the cases of books the press would sell you unless you had a publisher to help you with marketing, so there was really only one way to publish where other people were going to read my books.

I didn’t know about KDP for quite some time after it became a reality and it took me a while to get over my snobbery about “vanity presses.” I wish I’d gotten over those hurdles a couple of years sooner. Instead, I wasted time with traditional publishing.

The traditional route to publication involves submitting your manuscript to literary agents and hoping one of them likes it well enough to secure representation. I am a Christian who writes non-Christian literature that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories, which literary agents didn’t like. I kept getting advice about The Willow Branch which always said it was a great book, but I should rewrite it to be one or the other. It couldn’t be both. That left me unable to go forward because I wasn’t willing to turn my high fantasy into a Mitford novel or the Left Behind series. And that made me realize that I really didn’t want to wait forever while my agent submitted my manuscript to editors at publishing houses who would then tell me to rewrite the book.

There is nothing wrong with this approach, but there were new options. There are small publishers and digital-first publishing houses that put out high-quality books and many don’t require authors to have a literary agent to submit manuscripts. Unfortunately, they wanted money, which felt a lot like vanity press and we also didn’t have the cash to spend on that sort of long shot.

Self-publishing is the option I chose because I could work with others in an authors’ cooperative to produce a great product. The cooperative created a boutique press that allows all of us to appear as if we’re part of a publishing house. But the cooperative doesn’t own my copywrites, which I’ve come to absolutely love as I’ve had friends have to fight their way through a rights battle with small presses that fell apart. Self-publication is definitely not a shortcut, but it helps to be able to set my own deadlines and make my own decisions. It’s a lot of hard work but to be a successful author requires a lot of hard work no matter what route you take. I might as well do it for myself rather than for an editor at a publishing house.

Adventures in the Culinary Arts

Jan 9, 2023

Have you or any of your characters experienced cooking disasters?

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I tried to give some deep thought about cooking disasters my characters might have had. In Daermad Cycle, it’s a medieval society, so they cook in open fireplaces. In Transformation Project, they’re living through the apocalypse and are grateful for whatever food they can get. In What If Wasn’t, well there’s a kettle of fish there.

In Daermad Cycle’s third book Fount of Wraiths, a blind Tamys prepares a meal for himself and Padraig and he refers to a near cooking disaster. He’s blind and still unused to his condition, but gifted with special psychic abilities. He still nearly fell into the fire.

I haven’t actually written a cooking disaster into Transformation Project. It’s more like adventures in the culinary arts as Jill Delaney attempts to feed a houseful of people with dwindling resources. Shane mentally remarks on it once that the meals are getting “creative” and involves potato slices swimming in a yellow broth. Since Shane doesn’t know, I don’t actually identify what they’re eating, but yes, it’s a thing if one lacked corn starch to thicken the sauce.

It’s not been published yet, but a great deal of it has been written — an episode in What If Wasn’t when Peter is first out of prison and trying to remember how to make himself breakfast. Suffering from culture shock and genereally finding it hard to think, Peter struggles to remember how to adjust the toaster to end up with palatable toast. This is based directly on a friend’s experience of his first morning after being released from prison. Thank you, Bern, for being willing to share that even simple things are a struggle when your whole life changes abruptly.

How about me?

Like everyone, I’ve overcooked a few meals and I once meant to shake a sprinkle of cinnamon in waldorf salad, but the screen wasn’t tight and I ended up putting half a bottle of cinnamon in the salad. Not particularly good eats even after I spooned most of it out.

But the most memorable kitchen disaster I’ve ever had didn’t occur in a kitchen. We go annually to get our winter fish supply to Chitina, Alaska, on the banks of the wild Copper River, where the wind rarely stops blowing. Usually Brad and I subsist off MRE’s or pilot crackers and tuna when we do these trips, but one year we went with our friend Ray, Brad asked me to make breakfast a priority and I knew Ray’s favorite breakfast was pancakes and bacon.

First I built a firepit from the slab rocks that break off the surrounding cliffs and tried to shelter it with the more rounded river rocks on the beach. And then I built a fire. All went pretty well with that and my cast iron skillets are great for campfire cooking. I put the bacon in the high-sided 9″ skillet and started the pancakes on the griddle. The wind gusted violently, sweeping down off the mountains to our west and then a second wind rushing hard along the river to the north, turning the campfire into a blast furnace with flames shooting several feet out the leewind side of the pit. I managed not to set myelf on fire, but it was a near thing a few times and even above the fire and on far side, the fire was HOT! The bacon cooked really fast and was black in some places and raw in others. Fortunately, that’s how Ray likes it. (I swear the man was raised among cavemen).

This cooking technique didn’t work for pancakes however. They were also black in some parts and raw in others — earning them the nickname of glue-cakes. I’ve never attempted to make pancakes over a campfire since, not even in the windless Interior where I’m sure I wouldn’t have to same problem. We now usually stick to cereal or bananas. Way more predictable results and you don’t risk burn injuries.

This is what I mean by adventures in culinary arts.

What Works and What Doesn’t

Does anyone do cover reveals as part of your publicity for a new book? Do they work anymore?

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Cover reveals can be a great marketing tool. At least they were when I first started publishing eight years ago. Admittedly, I had a really pretty cover and that drew a lot of attention. Some of my later covers are just as pretty, but I have to admit the cover reveal — like so many other marketing ideas — is a hit-and-miss thing. Timing is everything and sometimes you just can’t time the timing right.

Wrapped in Plain Vanilla

I like the strip tease. Wrap my cover in a plain vanilla wrapper, publish the blurb, and ask people to tune in for the slow-motion reveal. I start about a month before I publish the book by announcing the cover is ready and then a week later I offer the hidden cover. Then a week later, over a period of about one week, I reveal it bit by bit. Then I start publicizing the publication date for the book, using the cover as the avatar.

Results?

I do notice a bump in activity on my blog and occasionally a few sales of earlier books in the series or a bump in reads. So I know it has an effect, but it’s hard to quantify. Like so many things, cover reveals seemed to have changed during covid — it’s now harder to get attention. Maybe it’s because my series has an ongoing pandemic and people are done with pandemics. On the other hand, a reader sent me a note recently that complimented me on a pandemic with real consequences rather than what real life has provided. So it’s hard to know what effect cover reveals have on early sales in this era. I’m still going to do one if I ever get the next book finished.

Why? Because it worked in the past and I’m hoping things will return more to normal in 2023. We’ll see.

Open to Edits

Do you set monthly/yearly goals for your writing? What are your goals for the coming year?

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I have a loose goal to publish a book every year. That said, I am my own publisher so I am not held to any dates. I don’t advertise release dates until the book is finished and I’m just doing last-minute cleanup, so I don’t have to sweat that goal.

So far, I’ve been really good at keeping it, and I usually publish two books a year. During covid, I published three books in a year. But it’s a loose standard, subject to revision as conditions allow.

When I published Worm Moon last summer, I turned my attention to the next book in What If…Wasn’t and immediately hit a writer’s block. I don’t get those very often because if I can’t write one story, I’ll turn to another which usually gets me going on both.

And it was understandable for this book because it’s the first full-length romance I want to write and, well, yeah, me and romance aren’t really close. I’m feeling my way through it. And it was also summer in Alaska, so wanting to be outside would have slowed me down a bit anyway.

In September, I realized I needed a break. To give myself some time to marinate the story I was struggling with, I decided to start work on the book that comes after Worm Moon (title tentatively “Inalienable Liberties”). Turns out, it wasn’t just romance that had me down. Writing the most-complicated book in the Transformation Project series turned out to be a struggle. Or maybe it’s writer’s block in general because I haven’t written much nonfiction either. Anyway, throughout October and November, it was like writing through molasses. I wrote a bunch of scenes in no particular order and felt like I was scattered and never going to finish. But then on Thanksgiving, I had a lovely conversation with some of my alpha readers and they gave me a bunch of ideas that provided the climax to the novel. Because everything is out of order, it still feels scattered, but I’m getting to a point where I can actually organize the story and then work on what is missing and what can be trimmed.

Whew! I still need about 40,000 words to make it a novel, but I know that’ll come once everything is organized.

So the point is, I will probably still keep my loose schedule of one book published per year, but it probably won’t be two books in 2023.

Beauty in Flexibility

I am still working my full-time job and trying to live life. I refuse to be a hermit-writer. So naturally, I can’t be too ambitious about writing goals. I strive to write somewhere between 350 and a thousand words a day about anything, but it’s not always my novels that get the attention. I try to finish a book every six months and publish yearly, but I’m not going to kill myself doing it. And sometimes, I go through dry periods when writing doesn’t flow like normal.

There’s beauty in flexibility because I don’t need to freak myself out if I’m not producing like normal. I did this once before a few years ago, where I watched TV instead of writing for about three months and then wrote the rough draft for the next book in six weeks. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a more productive period of writing. Sometimes we need to take breaks to recharge our battery/muse.

I still do have a couple of dates marked on a calender that tell me when to start pushing myself hard to complete my loose goals.

Bright Spots

The good news is that Cai Delaney may be talking to me again. The character had stopped talking to me a while ago and I put him in a position where he could die at the end of Worm Moon, but now I’m getting slivers of a future story, so I might need to resurrect him. I try never to kill off a good character unless they stop telling me their story. And I really love Cai. He’s such a nice guy and I put him through hell. I think this resurrection isn’t going to be a walk in the park. I’m not a capricious god-creator, but bad things definitely happen to good people in my books.

And then there’s what I’m working on over in What If…Wasn’t. I put Peter in prison, where I don’t really want to write his story. Even with my friend Bern giving me insight into the experience, I don’t want to write Peter in there. But the story of what happens later in his life is almost entirely written. I thought I’d concentrate on what happens to the people he affected, but that’s where I started struggling. I know Lily and Ben fall in love while Peter is away, but writing it as a traditional romance is s struggle. I know the other stories too and they will be easier, but I have to get past that hurdle first. Maybe finding a dead body is the answer. Or, er….

And then there’s Daermad Cycle. The fourth book is largely drafted and I just have to find time to write it. Fantasy takes time and a lot of immersion compared to writing real-world fiction. It also requires a reset in my own thinking because I’m entering a different world with people who think very differently from ordinary people.

The point is, I have lots to work on, so I shouldn’t have any difficulty with keeping up with my goal for a few years.

A Cautionary Tale

Do you use real or fictional cities in your writing? How do you incorporate them into the story?

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There’s something to be said for skipping some world-building, but authors generally need to be more careful when they use real locations in a work of fiction.

There was a book written in the 1970s about Fairbanks during the TransAlaska Pipeline construction boom. It wasn’t a very good book, but I was forced to read it as an assignment in an Alaska Literature summer course I took for extra credit. I wanted to graduate in four years but the University of Alaska tried to foist a 9th semester on me by saying one of my English credits didn’t qualify because…reasons. So I took a correspondence course because I had a life to get to.

This book, which I don’t remember the name of, supposedly described places in my hometown, and it got a LOT wrong. The writer supposedly lived in Fairbanks during the TAPS, but I’d bet he didn’t spend a lot of time here. So I’ve always been leery of using real locations, other than Fairbanks, Seattle (where I’ve spent a lot of time), or Manchester New Hampshire (where I’ve also spent a fair bit of time) as locations in my books because it’s offputting when authors get stuff wrong about your town. One of my favorite mystery novelists Phyllis A Whitney admitted at the start of a book that she’d moved some locations around in a novel for plot flow and that’s great. I’m sure the people of Charleston SC appreciated her honesty, but what if I get something inadvertently wrong and a reader goes to that location trying to find it.

Nope, I prefer not to do that.

Real as a Foundation for Fiction

But I do use real communities as the settings for my books. I just don’t identify them that way. For example, the town of Emmaus in Transformation Project is based on two real towns. One is my mother’s hometown in North Dakota. Some of the people in the town (renamed) and some of the buildings are borrowed from that location, transported by fictional magic to Kansas, where I use the statistical data of a Kansas town in that general location to tell me what highways run by it, whether they have natural gas or a nuclear plant nearby, and what the weather is like at different times of the year. What flight trajectory would you take if you were taking off from this town? What crops grow well there? I drove through that town 30 years ago. It seemed like a nice place, but I don’t think the residents would appreciate if I took liberties with their town in my fictional book. So it’s called Emmaus, Kansas, which is a very fictional town with some basis in reality.

I did the same thing in What If Wasn’t series. I picked a town where I wanted to situate the story. I’ve been there — once–15 years ago or so. I spent an afternoon. That’s not enough to say I really know the town. I use the town as a template for the fictional town in the novel series, but I feel much freer to take liberties because it’s not really that town. It’s Port Mallory, New York, and it only exists in my books.

Someday, I do plan to finish the story I’ve been noodling with that is set more or less in Fairbanks. But I don’t know for sure that I will identify it as such. Yes, I’m intimately familiar with this town, but the fact is I might need to make adjustments for plot flow and I’d rather not make a muddle of my hometown.

Junkyard Dog Editor

Nov 14, 2022 How do you deal with negative feedback? Do you have tips for critiquing other writers’ work?

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Back when I first presented my work on the now-defunct site Authonomy, I received a review by one of the best writers on the site. That should have been good news, but this guy was meaner than a junkyard dog. I say “guy” uncertainly because he had at least two sock accounts, one in which he played a young British woman. Both of them were mean-spirited beyond measure and most people with any sense avoided them like the plague. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in lying about who you are, so I somehow made an enemy of this jerk.

Go Hiking

Anyway, his review of my book would have made a lesser person cry and probably take their work down and never publish it. But I was a reporter and journalists are used to taking critique of their work. What’s more, it was summer in Alaska. I logged out and went hiking.

I came back in a week all refreshed by sunlight and clean air to see a few people had tried to repair what they perceived might be damage, and I said thank you and moved on. I left that flawed copy of The Willow Branch up on the site and gave serious consideration to Michael’s review. A lot of it was just mean-spirited screed meant to illicit a response he never got from me. I’d seen him do it to others, so I put it in the dust bucket where it belonged.

But behind the nastiness, some of his critiques were legitimate. He was a good writer and he honed on my weaknesses with a laser sight. I wasn’t writing an exciting story. There was no definable bad guy My characters were perhaps too “nice.” I wrote the story for myself, not the readers. I needed to consider what they wanted.

Off-site, I re-edited the book. It caused me to create the Kindred sections. I was honest about what happens in Tallidd’s compound (which alienated a few Christian readers but got more compliments on how I handled it with deftness). I decided to insert Gil (Ryanna’s abusive ex-mate) into the story instead of just having him as a background motivation for what she did. I ended up creating a great character in Prince Maryn and then killing him at the end of the first chapter.

Since I couldn’t get my present-day characters to engage in violence right away (they would later in the book), I drew from history and created the whole historical line that has now become an important feature in the series. Since they were at the beginning of a civil war, those characters were far more willing to draw blood early in the book. This left my primary characters free to rebuild society.

The extra story led to me split an already overly long book into three books, which will eventually be five or six published books. Those original three are here in part because Michael’s critique made me determined to publish the book instead of just noodling with it.

In other words, Michael handed me lemons and I made lemonade. Negative criticism didn’t need to break me. It helped me go in a better direction. When I put the rewritten first three chapters up on the site before its demise, I got a lot of compliments with “wow, this is a big improvement, when does the first book come out.”

A Better Way

I don’t recommend Michael’s method of critique. It’s brutal and unnecessary. I’m sure there were many Authonomy writers who gave up on great projects because of his critique. But sometimes, you do need to give negative criticism of someone else’s work. It should always be done in the spirit of trying to help the writer produce a better product, not destroy their enthusiasm for the project. Always mix what you think is good about the project with helpful suggestions to improve it.

Remember, there’s a human being on the other side of your critique. Treat him or her like you’d want to be treated.

Making Assumptions

What assumptions do people make about you when they hear you are a writer?

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I suppose you’ve heard the old saw about what making assumptions says about you?

Enough said on that topic since this is a family-friendly blog.

Assumptions Made About Me

I’ve only really encountered three assumption from people who learn I’m a writer.

The first two are perhaps understandable. What do nonwriters know about the lives of writers?

First, they assume I’m unpublished. Twenty years ago, they would have been correct because back then the big publishing houses could control the gateways to publishing, but that’s changed in recent years. It’s an understandable assumption but an incorrect one. I wrote for my own entertainment for a long time, but now I write for the entertainment of a paying audience.

Then, upon hearing I’ve actually published 15 novels, they leap to another incorrect assumption — that writing is all I do. This is not true. I have a life outside of writing (or my life includes writing) and I also have a money job that pays for things like the mortgage, medical care, and funding my retirement. It takes a lot of effort and no small amount of luck to become a self-published author whose writing pays the bills. I’m not there yet. Because I don’t assume stuff, I am not expecting to quit my job before my retirement plan reaches maturity.

The third one is an assumption that I find annoying. They leap to the assumption that published authors make a lot of money and therefore I’m rich. This is most annoying when it’s my husband’s relatives making these assumptions. My books do make money, but they don’t make me rich. In fact, if you look at the lives of truly professional writers, you quickly learn that most aren’t rich. Even the ones who work for a big publishing house make middle incomes.

And, so this third type of assumers truly earn my first comment. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, folks, and I don’t have a huge bank account. Maybe someday my books will get the readership (and the earnings) I believe they deserve, but for now, they’re a hobby that pays for itself.

Naming Conventions

How do you come up with the names for your characters?

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I write in several genres, so naming my characters varies depending on what book I’m writing.

In Daermad Cycle, which is a Celtic-inspired fantasy, there are several races of peoples and of course they have different names. It wouldn’t make sense to just select names at random. For the Celtic names, I google Celtic names and then adapt to the novel’s naming conventions. For the Svard names, I google Scandinavian names. Those are pretty easy. However, there are no real-world equivalents for Kindred names because they are the indigenous population of a fictional world. I created a naming convention — paternal last name first, clan name second, first name last — and then I just began goggling names from various cultures around the world. I slowly developed a sense of what I thought the Kindred would consider to be good names and then I set about deciding what my characters, who mostly already existed, should be called.

In Transformation Project and What If Wasn’t, these are stories set in more or less contemporary America. Transformation Project is set in Kansas, but based loosely on the North Dakota town my mother grew up in. The culture of that town is a mixture of German-, Scandinavian-, and Irish-descended people. I mostly troll online telephone directories for American Midwestern towns. I find last names I think work for my fictional community’s ethnic structure and then I separately find first names that I think go well with those last names. I’ve run across some truly interesting names in my telephone book searches, but I (regretfully) choose not to use them as they are because I don’t want anyone with a unique name feeling as if I somehow stalked them.

What If Wasn’t is set in Long Island, New York, and I pretty much did the same thing, although the name Peter is one I’ve always liked and my husband doesn’t, so since it couldn’t be our son’s name, I set it on my main character. I wouldn’t want my child to go through the tough times Peter has been through. The name Ben Anderson actually is a real person’s name, the best friend of a high school friend of mine who gave his friends as much reason to be sad as Peter does. I guess it’s kind of a tribute to a guy I haven’t seen in 30 years.

Some names just come to you. In What If Wasn’t, there’s a character called Grey. He’s the father of Trevor Grey, one of Peter’s friends, and he’s also Alan Wyngate’s best friend (Alan is Peter’s father). He was Grey from about 30 seconds after I started writing the character and I didn’t really give much thought to his real first name. When I wrote the third book in the series, I found I needed him to have a first name for official reasons. Why would a man call himself “Grey Grey?” Well, if he had a dorky first name, that would be a good reason. So, I listed out a bunch of names my generation considered to be dorky back in our day and Melvin stood out. Of course, a lot of those kind of dorky names from back then are being revitalized and coming back into use, but that doesn’t mean Melvin Grey has to like his name. He’s a rich eccentric businessman. If he wants to just have one name, why not? It works for Cher and Bono.

So, I do have a method to naming of characters, but sometimes the method can be a little obscure. Sometimes, I just like a name. For example, Jazz Tully in Transformation Project. I worked with a woman several years ago who went by Jazz. She explained her real name was Jessica, but her toddler brother couldn’t manage Jess. It came out as something like Jazz, so she collected this nickname. I knew Shane’s eventual love interest would be named Jazz before I even sat down to create the character because it’s a name that should be used.

On the other hand, Marnie Callahan Delaney, Cai’s wife, was never supposed to be Marnie. The character had been around in my head for a while. I knew her personality, but not her name. When I wrote the initial scene with her in it, I choose “Marnie” (a friend’s name) as a placeholder, fully intending to try out names for her later. But when I got back on edit, the character had accepted “Marnie” as her name and resisted changing to the name I’d researched and selected.

I’ve said before that my characters can develop opinions of their own and if I try to push too hard, they stop talking to me, so I let her keep Marnie, even though it meant I had to reset Maggie’s name. She’s Marnie’s mother and I knew she would name her two daughters with a first initial that corresponded to hers and her son with a first initial that corresponded with his father’s. Although I never wrote the scene, I created one in my head where Maggie and Jason argued over the name change of their daughter on the day of her birth and in doing so, I convinced the character of Maggie–a very strong-willed woman–to accept her own name change. I also had to reset Marnie’s sister’s name to Marie, but since the character is dead when the series began, that was easy. Dead characters in my novels have no opinions, for which I am grateful.

I wonder how my fellow writers develop names for their characters.