Rise and Shine!

It’s official, Miss Lise — I have been done with my latest book for exactly one week and I am bored without a book to work on! Incredibly, I do believe it may be time to dig out the next Casey, which has 75 pages done somewhere on some computer in this no-longer-a-hellhole house of mine and get going again. When did you have me lobotomized and how did I not notice?

I don’t know if this increased desire to write is a product of getting older and hearing the old life clock ticking… or this weird dynamic in my head that has developed, which can best be described as “hmmm… write or do housework? It’s got to be one or the other” or just an indication that the time I took off from writing was good for me, but… I find I miss my words and sentences and paragraphs and must return to the fictional worlds of my own making soon.

Tomorrow, I have my first reading for Desolate Angel and Bad Moon at The Regulator (one of only two readings I am doing; the older I get, the more it feels like dancing for grandma… or maybe I am just determined to be eccentric and demanding and grumpy as soon as possible, it’s hard to say, but I am definitely starting to think that J.D. Salinger has the right idea). I have decided to give out Little Debbie snack cakes with every copy of Bad Moon sold, for reasons that become obvious once you read the book. But after that, any ideas you have for making it a fun, invigorating party-party are welcome. Just send them quickly.

XXX– Katy

Name that character!

So how do you pick names for characters, Katy? This is a complicated task before the book even starts to be written, in my experience. I need a name for my main character of course. This is vital! Although it often changes. But she or he must be named, like that new baby. (I guess I could call her Baby through the first draft….! But other characters also react to people’s names, just like real life.) Certain other names associated with the main character sometimes just come to me then. But  the vast majority of names must be concentrated on, conjured from the misty murk.

I have a very emotional reaction to names, I either love them or don’t. Of course this doesn’t really matter for most of the characters. But for the main ones, at least three or four in the center of the story, their names are key. I am currently doing a rather strange thing, using a name of a charcter in a book I wrote (but never published) years ago. That is, re-using the name, putting it on a completely different person. I’m not sure this will stick. I like the name (Netty, short for Jeannette — or in The Wide Sargasso Sea, short for Antoinette, Mrs. Rochester’s mother) but will it fit this new, different, modern, can-do federal agent I am dreaming up? Sometimes I’ll write the whole book before I find out the name doesn’t work. Dorie Lennox’s name was originally Mysie. Sort of like Maisie (and a bit too close to Maisie Dobbs, another mystery character). That’s not why I changed it. It just didn’t feel right. Alix Thorssen was originally a Katja, but there are too any Kat’s in mysterydom, for sure.

Naming characters is so like naming children, don’t you think? (Or dogs… I know a man who was named after his father’s favorite dog, Spike. I found out because I had a dog named Spike too. I sort of felt sorry for that guy.) One of my young friends named their baby a name I was quite surprised at — I had never liked the name. But now I am warming to it. Will I name a central character that name? Probably not… but you never know.

Now Casey Jones… there’s a name to remember. How did you pick it?