On the topic of naming conventions, just think of the culture of your characters and why they'd have whatever names. For example, in some cultures it's very common for first sons to take the name of their father, or a derivative. Surnames very commonly refer to professions. You can sometimes just take that and then spin from it
@Cerberus Exactly. Nothing makes things weirder than having two people who are allegedly similar in domain, have completely and wildly unrelatable name concepts.
One thing you should watch out for is the unintended consequences of picking existing words or names from some language or culture that the reader actually knows.
Like, I find it annoying when a fantasy book uses Latin roots for all the character names, in a transparent attempt to connote whatever the latin word is as a character trait.
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hackneyed stuff for hinting purpose I've never really liked, to some extent. I like it to be "Hey, this is relevant" without being "Ooohoohoohoot, I am soooo clever here"
Though frankly, I find it annoying when the author chooses the name of the character to hint at something at all. That's not how names are chosen. Names are random.
So I have a few ideas: a My Little Pony fanfic, a Neopets fanfic, a murder mystery set in an empty city called Vendetta, and a story about an entire Pig Latin civilization (of what nature/genre I don't know yet)
@Cerberus It comes from an actual game I played four years ago. So far, while the actual cool factor of the name in the first question varies from "Pretty cool/fitting" to "Decent", it is unanimously declared as "All cool factor lost" the moment the warcry is brought up.
@Cerberus Robots are significantly easier to name. Series RJ-0002 stepped off the assembly line. Today was the first day in it's 280 day non-replaceable Apple battery life cycle.
To me, while owls are vicious predators, the name "Owl" isn't intimidating to hear in an "I'm about to deliver you from this world" sense, especially when it's phrased in a sentence like that.
Normally I bring this game up because the romantic leads for the main character were: your younger sister, the 14-year-old Princess of Darkness, and the Pope.
@Cerberus Well, the main character is a prince, but you aren't actually the prince, you're the official double who they use for public functions and all that, y'know, in case there's an attempt on his life. Not that this helped since he ended up getting killed and now you have to continue to pretend to be him. But this also means that she's not your real sister.
When I was a kid a pair of Great owls moved into our area and anniliated all of our cats (of which there were at least a dozen). We lived in the country.
@Cerberus True story. We eventually found the owl nest littered with cat bones. Additionally one of the owls got snagged on a barbwired fence and died.
@Cerberus According to one author, "Almost any living creature that walks, crawls, flies, or swims, except the large mammals, is the great horned owl's legitimate prey".
Actually, I'm not sure if it's because I watched octopus videos recently. It seems like YouTube's beginning to mix suggestions based on my recent history with suggestions based on the video I am watching
I'm a little bit late (as always for Tuesday chat), but nonetheless let me add a slightly different viewpoint to your NaNo approach.
First a hint: character development and naming is handled on the main site. Take a look.
So, you guys want to write your first novel. The first is different from any other. And if you want to do it during NaNo, I tell you: preparation is overrated.
Look, there is a lot of good advice in writing books, on Writers.SE and all other kind of places, telling you about plotting, world building and stuff. The truth is, if you haven't written a novel yet, you are lacking experience to understand and use all this advice in a meaningful way. Difference between theory (oh, sure, that sounds easy) and practice (fucking shit how do they do that?).
Summary: Don't sweat it, write! Go pansing for NaNo (or whenever you write your first novel). Make up details as you write and jot them down somewhere. This goes for world building, character development, naming, and on and on.
I'm doing pretty well. Been a bit... swampish for the past few months. I should drop by and say hi to Welbog again, I feel really bad that I don't drop by as often as I used to
How have you been? Last I heard you had pretty much vanished.
Oh, just random collections of designs for one of my major game projects - some parts charts of stuff, other parts paragraphs on some character or component of the world. There actually is no reason why they're separated in eight documents, which is actually a really bad thing.
This is their site if you're curious but I say that "No reason to change tools if the current one does everything you need". It's just a simple and lightweight wiki thing.
I stopped using PBWiki because needing an internet connection started to be inconvenient.
Y'know, the more I think about it, the more I should actually write in there. I have a lot of stuff from long ago that I still use to help shape stuff, but the actual writing of all that is buried in ancient documents I'm not even sure I still have. No harm in a refresher course.
Since I was going to bring it up on next week's talk, I'll probably start with the personality matrix.
Personality matrix? Well, bring it up. As I said, we have some stuff on the main site, but it can never hurt to get more. And if you have a strong character, it is easier to go through writing and neglecting everything else (like worldbuilding).
@LadybugKiller Personality matrix is essentially just a variant of the Myers-Briggs system. I created it actually for a game-mechanic in a different project, aligning 14/16 elements with certain personality expressions (the last two elements representing the two ends of the axes of the seven sets).
Basically, a literal correspondence between how a person was at heart, and what elemental control that person was best at. But it turns out that it actually had some handiness in just analyzing characters so I've started to use it as sort of a "Base measurement". It's of course just as inaccurate as Myers-Briggs is, but somehow, for me at least, it works.
Quite. The numbers aren't even as meaningful as just measuring them out, it gives you insight as you think why they might be more inclined to one side or another.
Hah, actually if I think about it, that was even one of the things I had to do for one of my last courses in school. They had this survey thing that you had to fill out in the voice of each of your characters in your project.
Didn't think about extending that. Thanks, @Ladybug
Oh, almost midnight. And I still have something to do. I also need some sleep. @GraceNote, that was nice chatting to you again. Maybe we meet next week. So long.
The Overlook Hotel
The Overlook Hotel