And then it was December. I'm about halfway done with the scene-tightening exercise I described in the last missive: going through the novel to ensure each scene does the work of moving characters toward or away from their desired outcomes. It's awkward, painstaking work, but well worth it.
In the meantime, I've been thinking about names. Names are pivotal, and the wrong name on a character can feel like a perpetual bad hair day. A wrongly-named location can feel like an tourist trap instead of a local gem. I've just made my way through The Wall of Storms, the almost 900-page second book in Ken Liu's epic "silkpunk" Dandelion Dynasty series, and one of the things I really like about that series are the east-west blended names. An Emperor Mapidéré; a strategist Luan Zya; a rainbow-scaled flying fish called a dyran. I like the idea of a similar not-quite-French, not-quite-Asiatic linguistic styling for my world. Since I'm not building a language before a world, à la Tolkien, I've been experimenting with constructed language (conlang) generators, such as Awkwords.
tunsarédu esrâe eka kazon neldea uka lansau zetie ilçun nadua ese memae reltâa arkeu çassane sakti altur tâmui zarmém nallan ané izsâna...
Something like the flavor above is my aim. Although it's awfully easy to tip the scale toward too far out, these generators do make it easier to recast characters and locations with new, "in-the-family" names without much effort.
A big name change I'm considering relates to the magic system -- right now, Speech/Titled Speakers/Bespoke/the Lexicon. I've always loved the wordplay with "a Bespoke sword," etc., but "so-and-so's Speech/Speaking was powerful" rarely has the desired impact. Amazingly, I'm now at the stage of sufficient completion that I can think about polish, and, like painting one room before I paint the whole house, I've decided to trial out a new nomenclature: Incantation/Chanteuses/Incanted/the Chant. My hunch is I lose a little, gain a lot -- but it remains to be seen if the change reads as positively with some distance.