firecat

Tonight's writing was hard going, I wasn't inspired, but I did it anyway.

However, several of my characters are currently called name1, name2, name3, and name4 because coming up with good names for them did seem entirely beyond me in this state.

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From:

nex0s.livejournal.com

every day's writing doesn't have to be inspired. good on you for doing it anyway.

OMG! you're so close to 50,000!

n.
impressed

From:

kshandra

Careful...that's how

gridlore wound up with penguins in his books.... ;-)

From:

firecat

Tell me more?

From:

kshandra

Straight from the penguin's mouth:

A few years back, James Lindsay and I wrote At Close Quarters, a variant (vastly improved) combat system for Marc Miller's Traveller (aka T4.) James loves somewhere in Canada. I was living in San Francisco. We sent sections back and forth over the net. I write in an express train style.. if I try to stop, things derail. I was writing the thrown weapons rules, and was stuck for a third example.. so I used penguins. James came back with rules for balanced and unbalanced weapons, with a comment about penguins resisting being thrown so being counted as unbalanced despite their aerodynamic bodies. We were off and running from there. The insanity spread to the TML.

Since then, the penguin has been the sort of totem or mascot of the list. And people keep sending me the bloody things. I have three dozen plush penguins, 10 of them various versions of Tux the Linux penguins. I have Scandinavian tissues, Australian breath mints.. all with penguins on them. The bloody things have taken over my life.

Why did I write penguins into ACQ? Because I like them. Wrote a report on them in 8th grade and have been fascinated by them ever since.

What's really funny is that after Ground Forces came out, i received several emails asking where the penguin reference was.. they were convinced I couldn't go 150-odd pages without mentioning a penguin at least once.. they were wrong.

From:

therealjae.livejournal.com

The random name generator (http://www.kleimo.com/random/name.cfm) is a writer's friend! :-)

-J

From:

firecat

Thank you! It won't work for these characters because they're not human and the names have to sound alien. But it will be very helpful in general!

From:

epi-lj.livejournal.com

Last year I used the random name generator that someone else linked in a lot, but I also agonized a lot over names. This year I'm finding it easier, because I'm allowing myself to use ridiculous names, and riff on anything without worrying about it. My main character is named Stephen Paige, because someone on my LJ page was talking about Steven Page from Barenaked Ladies that day. Half of the introductory chapter is him talking about how he's not *that* Stephen Paige. I have a robot named Johnny Five, after the robot from I think it was Short Circuit, and a whole whack of characters with cumbersome names that seemed like fun. I'm doing the same with streets. Everyone lives on like Northunderbirkshireton Place and stuff.

From:

firecat

I don't have problems using ridiculous names for human characters with the option of changing them later. But these characters aren't human, and there's some sort of honorific system in place that I haven't figured out yet.