Happy Halloween!

Can you believe it's already Halloween? and that tomorrow's the first day of November? Because I can't.

I haven't really been doing a lot of writing lately, which I feel guilty about, but I'll sit in front of a document and just...nothing comes. Or if it does, I'll reread it later and just want to completely rewrite it. I'm going to look into alternative means of creativity release, at least to give my mind a rest and yet still feel creatively productive.

If that makes sense.

I'm getting back into drawing. I used to draw and paint growing up, and then stopped for a number of years. I guess I didn't think the starving artist was me. The only thing is that I've discovered that I really miss it.

And then we'll see where my writing goes now that there is also this other little release. I think it'll be good.

names

I like to give my characters, my main characters, names that mean something and that are usually pretty unique. I think that when used correctly, this makes the character even more memorable. Although, when does that uniqueness and meaning pass into something that actually places more distance between the reader and the character?

For my current novel, my main character was initially named Salome Braquemond. Salome is a Hebrew name that means "peace," which was central to Salome's metamorphosis in the novel. However, the people who've had a chance to read it so far kept asking what it meant or how to pronounce, and let me know that they felt no connection. Granted, I thought this was a relatively common name seeing as how it's in the Bible. I haven't even really read the Bible and knew of the name.

Turns out it's not so common.

So I tried Zoë. It means "life." But every time I worked on editing, the name just didn't click. It didn't feel right. Perhaps knowing that I knew about five people with a dog with that name may have had something to do with it. Regardless, I've changed the name again to Sophie. Sophie means "wisdom," coming from Greek. So...we've gone from Salome, to Zoë, to Sophie. Peace to Life to Wisdom.

Sophie seems to work. I've told those people who have either read an earlier draft or more recent chapters and they're like "oh?! Sophie, I like that."

So it seems we have a name. But I think this just reiterates the importance of naming. As a writer, you want them to be really memorable (as it helps keep your book memorable) but you can't make them so 'memorable' that you distance your reader.

lack of writing

I always feel...different, or like something's not quite right, when I go through extended periods of not writing. That's sort of how much of September was. My office had a very large event that occupied almost my entire mind during September, and then I was house sitting for a week immediately after that and then was out of town for a couple of days. I was actually looking forward to coming back a day early and spent a good deal of last night writing.

I'm also very pleased to say that I got much done. I still have more to do, but I get tomorrow off so I'm hoping to do much more work tonight and tomorrow morning.