Patti O'Shea's Blog

I’m almost afraid to write this post, but I think my hero finally has a name. I don’t like it that much either, but like I said on Tuesday, I’ll take anything and smile at this point. The final choice? Mason.

My poor Twitter followers have been trying to help me for at least a week, probably longer, by tweeting me links to naming sites. I swear I have them all bookmarked. Actually, I must have 50 naming sites bookmarked by now, but so many of them have the same names. I also have a pretty extensive collection of reference books on names. Nothing helped.

The frustrating thing is that the name isn’t uncommon. I ran across it pretty early on and kept running across it, but my darn hero remained mute. Since I don’t like the name and he didn’t speak up to claim it, I continued to look. And look. And look.

I need names before I can get story/plot because what they’re called affects their actions. A Mason is going to behave differently from a hero named Jack or one named Scott, so it was critically important to me to get the correct name before I moved forward. It did get frustrating because he’s the third hero in a trilogy and I don’t need more than a couple of paragraphs on his story, but the third book wraps up the series arc and that could impact the earlier books, too.

Now that I have this vital piece of information, I can move forward with the next problems. I need pictures of my characters–it also helps me connect to their personalities–and I need to work out the three book arc. After that is in place, then I can think about the individual stories.

I do have some information already, but it’s the barest of frameworks, a patchwork of pieces that need to be sewn together to form the whole fabric of the trilogy. All I can do is hope this goes more smoothly than the name game.

The name game continues with my hero. I talked about this last week and it’s ongoing. Every time I think I have the right name, I get pulled up short. The problem is the overnight test. Basically this means the name has to stick overnight. This includes some test scenes with the name as I’m lying in bed. This hero nixed one of the names I thought was his at this stage.

The second name made it through this run, but when I woke up the next day and tested it again, it failed. I knew it hadn’t worked when his father wouldn’t call him by that name. Not that his father provided the correct name, but I rarely get helpful characters who provide information willingly.

Stubbornly, I continued to use the second name a few more days, but I finally was forced to admit that it wasn’t going to work.

It was back to the drawing board. I spent hours searching over the weekend and I have a third contender. I haven’t had time yet to run too many scenes through my head with this latest name–I’ve been falling asleep too fast–so I’m not calling it a done deal yet, but it has made it a few days with it in place. Personally, I’m not in love with it and it’s a name that strikes me as being old fashioned. Old fashioned enough to be unusual.

If it’s the right one, though, I’m not going to argue with him. I’ll take anything at this point so I can move forward with figuring out stories and arcs for the trilogy. I can’t do anything without the right names for my characters–it actually can and does influence action/plot.

And in the few hours since I wrote this post, my hero has rejected the latest name. The search continues.

Since I wrote my posts about the characters in my Works In Progress (WIP), one of my heroes informed me that his name isn’t his name. I hate when they do that. Last names aren’t a very big deal because when I think of them, I rarely use their surnames, but changing the given name does throw me.

The thing that’s so frustrating is that this is a character that’s been around for a long time and his name has always been Michael. Until now. Now he tells me it isn’t. That his name changed when he moved from a contemporary story to an alternate universe, and that in this alternate universe, he’s different from who he was before and he has a different first name.

His logic made sense to me, but the problem? He’s not telling me what his name is supposed to be. Oh, he’s happy to tell me what it isn’t. And apparently it isn’t any name I’ve come across online or in a naming book. At least so far.

I can’t even get him to give me a hint. A simple It starts with a B or whatever would help tremendously. But nope. No help from him whatsoever.

So in the meantime, I’m still thinking of him as Michael. If he doesn’t like it, maybe he’ll reconsider his level of cooperation.

Two of the fields on my rarely used character sketch worksheets are: How does the character perceive him/herself? How do others perceive the character?

To give an example, I’m required to go through assorted training classes for my day job. One was a two day training class in Human Factors. On the second day of class, the instructor made some comment about my being an extrovert. It stopped me in my tracks and I was like, whoa! Not only am I not an extrovert, I’m also shy and tend to be nervous in situations with people I don’t know well. I also tend to be quiet in those types of situations. So who’s right?

Let me explain what the instructor saw. I’d been through enough other training in the recent past that I’d learned a few things. 1. when the instructor asked a question of the group, no one would answer. 2. the lack of response dragged the classes out even longer than they were already. 3. If someone gave the right answer, things moved much, much faster.

So whenever a question was thrown out to the group and no one else immediately spoke up, I would give the answer to get the class moving. I hate sitting there with crickets chirping. "Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?"

The instructor perceived my willingness to speak up when he asked a question as outgoingness. But I’m far from outgoing; I was answering questions as self-preservation. It made the class move faster. I also had some hope of getting through the course material ahead of schedule on day 2 so we could be dismissed early.

Despite my speaking up in class, it actually shocked me that he thought I was an extrovert. I had to take a mental step back to assimilate that and figure out why he could possibly believe something so false.

To bring this back to writing and characters, how your character behaves in certain situations will shape how other characters see him/her. Maybe your character answers all the questions in a training program, so one set of people see her as outgoing, but she stands in the corner at a house party. Those people will perceive her differently. Other characters act on how they perceive the hero/heroine. Maybe the instructor asks the heroine to lead the discussion on day 2 of training. He asks because he sees her as outgoing, not realizing that she’s dying over the thought of being in front of the class. (This did not happen in my class.

So it’s not enough to just know that your character is perceived differently by his mom than by his sister. You have to have these characters behave in a way that fits their expectations of who the hero is.

I’ve been dealing with some of this in one of the Works In Progress (WIP). My hero has long hair, stubble, and is hanging out with secondary characters of questionable morality when he meets the heroine. My heroine isn’t going to treat him the same way she’d treat a clean-cut man who worked for a charitable organization to feed starving children. There’s going to be a big dose of wariness on her part. There has to be because of her perception of who and what the hero is.

Perception always colors reality. IMO, of course.

Couple three in my Blood Feud trilogy are the sketchiest of the couples. Which doesn’t surprise me since they’re the final pair.

Michael Lassiter is a wizard. You’re thinking, what? There are no wizards in the Blood Feud world. Ah, but there are. They’ve kind of been skulking in the background, but none of the stories released so far have had them involved in anyway. That changes with Enemy Embrace which comes out in October in Crave the Night.

This world is interesting to me because there are so many groups with so many different agendas. A hero and/or heroine can come from any group at any time. A villain can come from any group at any time.

So Michael is a wizard and a powerful one. He’s not thrilled to be in this position because he doesn’t want the obligations to his people that come with this power, but he doesn’t have a choice about it. I’m honestly not sure at this point how the wizards get involved in the trilogy. More pieces of the puzzle that I don’t have yet. Maybe (and this is only a guess on my part) he gets dragged in because of his heroine? Definitely unsure about this.

His heroine’s name is Honor. She’s a human with power, too. I’m not sure what–exactly–she is yet, though. I also don’t know even the vaguest basics about the storyline. All I know is that this is the book where the story wraps up and the bad guy defeated. Beyond that? It’s all nebulous.

If you read my post about puzzle pieces from last week, then you know how frustrated I am with how little I’ve been given. I just have to trust that it will all work out when I do get those pieces.

Last week I promised I’d continue talking the couples in my Blood Feud World trilogy idea and mention couple number two.

This hero is another of Malachi’s friends whom he mentioned in Shadow’s Caress. His name is Jet and yes, that is short for something which I won’t mention here because it might (or might not) end up being something I use in his story. Jet is an enforcer for all the vampire clan lords, not only one.

If you read Blood Feud, you know Isobel was an enforcer for her clan lord. That puts her in an elite category, but Jet goes beyond that working for all of them. That means he’s the elite of the elite, like special forces of the vampire world. He’s been assigned by the clan lords to tail his heroine.

Rachel (I’m reasonably sure this is her name) is a rogue vampire. In the Blood Feud world, rogue means unaffiliated with any clan lord. There used to be no rogues until a clan lord died in the demon wars. Since then, many vampires re-affiliated themselves by sharing blood with members of other clans, but there is a large group that didn’t do this. This dead clan lord was not a kind and benevolent vampire and none of his now-free constituents want to risk being tied to another clan lord like that. The bad guy in the trilogy is the leader of the rogues, but Rachel has no interest in following him either.

Jet is the one who came in a while ago and was kind of skulking in the shadows. Really. I just had this sense that he was stalking someone. It turns out, he was stalking Rachel. On orders.

This is about all I have about this story. I’m still waiting for more puzzle pieces to show up here.

Tune in Thursday for couple three.