Thursday, November 6, 2014

NaNoWriMo Day 5: Double-Named Characters and Mean Siblings

Current Day: 5
Current Page: 30
Target Page: 32-35
Place in Story: the villain has been introduced. Who is he? Eva's brother. (He was introduced way earlier than I intended, but I like where he is right now.)

One thing I realized as I was writing today was that I broke one of my only rules of writing: I accidentally gave my villain, Joshua, the same name as an important good character in my 2012 novel. The rule I generally give myself is DON'T SHARE CHARACTER NAMES BETWEEN WORLDS. The short explanation of how this rule works is that there's only room in my annals for ONE Joshua.
Of course, I don't want to change the name of either of these characters. All my character notes for 2014 call Eva's brother JOSHUA Thompson. At the same time, my 2012 villain is called Jericho, so I intentionally called his counterpoint Joshua because of the Biblical reference. It would be easiest to change Joshua Thompson's name now, while it's still early on in the process. Part of me doesn't want to - it would be really simple just to keep the names as is. The 2012 novel may not see the light of day, after all. The 2014 novel might not either, for that matter. Still, the fact remains: in the showdown between Joshuas, there's only room in the annals for ONE of them.
Though I do want to make sure that each name gets its own association, it's difficult to simply turn to a generator for answers.
Since all the names except one (and she's a fairy that only shows up in backstory, so she doesn't count) are in the typical realm of English names - Evangeline, Clara, Galen, Samuel, Noelle - it's a bit more difficult to figure out a new name than it could be. If they were all fantasy-style names, I could easily combine a few random objects around me to create a name for him, but most English names don't do things like that. I've been writing so many common-name characters, however, there are a few issues with most male names: I've either used them as characters, know someone with that name, or the name sounds unfitting (Euseibo, Frederick, Carl, Willy, Wilford, etc). Hopefully, I'll be able to sort this out.
Until then, TO WRITING!


UPDATE: Eva's brother is now named Jasper Thompson.

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