Patti O'Shea's Blog

I hope everyone had a good Halloween. I forgot what day it was until I got to the EDJ yesterday and saw everyone wearing orange. Oops! If I had remembered, I would have wished everyone a great holiday.

I wish I had something interesting to talk about. I worked some on one of my proposals yesterday. It’s nearly ready to send to my agent for some feedback except for one small thing. I still need to hammer out a better plot idea for one of the stories; that’s the main hold up right now.

My Polynesian heroine still needs a name. I thought I had it, but it’s just never settled on her right. In fact, she’s stopped talking to me since I started using it. I’m guessing that means it’s wrong. Darn it, I hate it when they don’t tell me their names. And I know, that’s a complete 180 from how I was lamenting the fact that I never get to pick my characters’ names. After being forced to come up with Logan’s last name on my own, I changed my mind–fast. Now I’ve got two separate proposal packages where characters are refusing to divulge their names. And it’s all the women! I’m taking this to mean I have a better rapport with these heroes. After all, I have first and last names for all of them.

So let’s see where I stand. No name for my Polynesian heroine. No last name for Hope. She’s the heroine in one of the books in the proposal I’m close to finishing up. Also no name at all for Rafferty’s heroine, also part of that proposal. That would be three out of three. I guess I should console myself with the fact that Shona gave me her name months ago.

Ooh! Do you think they’ll start sharing when Mercury leaves retrograde? I didn’t think of that, but maybe that is the problem since the planet does affect communications.

I know y’all are probably sick of reading about my naming problems. Hell, I’m sick of having naming problems. Once everyone has a name, I’ll stop blogging about this, I promise.

During a discussion with some other authors, one of them admitted that she couldn’t remember the names of all her heroes and heroines. That kind of shocked me because I couldn’t imagine anyone forgetting characters that they’d spent months working with. In fairness to this author, she’s written probably 5 times the amount of books that I have–maybe even more. But I was curious, so I made a list of all my completed books starting with Ravyn’s Flight. I figure my earlier three books don’t count because those were practice books as I learned out to write. Without hesitation, I ran through all my h/h’s easily.

Then I decided to list the bad guys and the secondary characters. Now this is where I did run into some trouble. I couldn’t remember anyone in RF beyond the h/h and the secondary h/h. In Power of Two, I came up with the villain and three of the names of Jake’s teammates, but I couldn’t remember the name of the other quandem (oh! Tony, something or other de Luca? Something like that. It just came to me. The woman remains a mystery.), and the remainder of Jake’s team is a cipher to me as is the name of the general.

I leapt to Through a Crimson Veil next. It took me a good long while to remember Marc and hours to come up with his last name. Eternal Nights was easier, but then I was working on three more books with Wyatt’s teammates as heroes and it’s a more recent story. Easiest of them all was the anthology since there were really only three characters–my h/h and the bad guy.

In the Midnight Hour took some thinking because of the sheer number of secondary characters, but I did–eventually–come up with everyone. I think. I didn’t attempt this for In Twilight’s Shadow, the book I’m working on copy edits for right now, but I think I could come up with them, too, given some thinking time.

My next attempt was to name all the heroes and heroines in the projects I have in progress right now. The numbers are daunting because I have a lot of proposals in the works and most of them have stories that can spin off with more h/h’s. Naming the heroes was easy. I spewed those right out, although I only remembered Ethan’s last name and not his first name until I checked in some sent emails. For the life of me, though, I could not come up with his heroine’s name! It took hours before I remembered.

On the one hand, I just learned her name recently and she hasn’t been talking to me. On the other hand, I can’t believe I didn’t remember when I was working on that just days ago!

Anyway, this exercise was an eyeopener and it makes me think I should create a list of characters and file it in the front of each books folder for easy reference.

My hero without a name finally coughed up the information. It took a threat, though, on my part to get the information. I told him if he didn’t share what his name was that I was calling him Immanuel, and since his last name is Kent, that would have made him Immanuel Kent, like the philosopher Immanuel Kant. My would-be hero was not amused, but I was. I told him if he didn’t provide a name, I’d pick one for him and I liked the humor. It’s amazing how quickly he came through then. I even got the last name of his best buddy. Sometimes threats work.

His name is Ethan. The jerk had me looking in the R’s when I was searching the baby name books. I can see already how much fun he’s going to be to work with. Gah!