Character Descriptions Almost Done

I've finally gotten back into writing after finishing some school projects. I'm just finishing up the character descriptions. You can't see them as they are full of spoilers--too bad! I hope to get started on my chapter outlines and then I'll have a clearer idea of where everything is headed. I'm kind of setting up my own lexicon. Every character, major and minor, has a description and potential to be more than I originally plan for them to be. I don't know how much of this stuff I'm going to use however. It would be awesome to one day construct an entire lexicon or an entire R271 universe like this: http://www.hp-lexicon.org/index-2.html


On a side note:
I have set up a few other blogs on other topics such as politics, movies, cool stuff, and a personal blog. I will post the links to those blogs on facebook when I've officially got them running.

Thanks for hanging in there!

-C.S.

TIME

Time! I wish somehow I could stop it!
I never seem to have enough time to do anything.
I haven't had much time to work on my story but today, after I've finished reading Frankenstein, will be totally devoted to finishing the character outlines and working out a summary type thing, you know those blurbs on the back of books. I'll post that when I'm finished.

-C.S.

Whoops!

I took a break from outlines and stuff today. I feel kind of guilty for not doing much. I hope having the computer back won't distract me from my writing!
-C.S.

Character Naming

How does an author come up with names for a character? Do they think them through or do they come to them in moments of inspiration? Do they name characters after people or objects around them? Do they just make them up or do they make them mean something?

For me it's a combination of all of the above. Some of my characters reference other works and some are named after people. Here's a short explanation of a few of my character's names.

I wanted all the emperor's family to have kind of a French sounding name but without being too overt. I made up the name Lebar, originally LeBar. And went from there.

Rafe is actually the name my high school crush gave his cactus in our Biology class experiment.
Peter is from Pete Wentz.
Bik, an alien character, is taken from Bic, the type of pen I was using to write at the time. I changed the last letter to avoid any possible law suits.
Chase Bloom is a combination of two actor's names, Chace Crawford and Orlando Bloom. But also a kind of nod to Leopold Bloom from Ulysses.
Enora is a play on Inara from Firefly.
R271 was a random letter and number pulled from the air although it does have more significance in the story which you have to wait to find out.

Luego habalamos!!

C.S.

Preliminaries

I'm finding this a little tedious. I'm eager to just put pen to paper but I know that if I do so I will not finish or the final product won't be as good as its supposed to be. I keep reminding myself that Rowling had a back story for every person in the Harry Potter series. I'm not trying to write a series, I kind of find it tacky if there is no basis for it. This is a one shot deal and I have to get everything laid out before I can actually accomplish what I'm setting out to do.

So far I have about 10 hand written pages, back and front, of character descriptions and on top of that like 3 very bad sketches of the planet layout, another 10 pages of ideas and rough notes. I'm trying to get it all consolidated on my new laptop which is an added distraction what with all these cool new comics I've found online.

I'm going to go back to Neil Gaiman's website for inspiration.



Happy Halloween!!

-C.S.

p.s. From now on the 31st of every month is Halloween! Celebrate!

Main Character List

MAIN CHARACTER: R271

EMPEROR: Cail Lebar
HEIR: Rafe Lebar
EMPEROR'S BROTHER: Peter Lebar

TUTOR: Bai Shong
HEAD OF CHURCH: Senor Dais Exerbus