phywriter.com|Prone to occasional grandiloquence

How do I know when I have the right name? When it just… fits.

My WIP, The Adventures of the Sky Pirate, is a hybrid swashbuckling / steampunk / space opera, some of which takes place on a planet that is not Earth but was inhabited by people from Earth. Therefore, some names are familiar to an Anglo reader, and some are new. That gives me freedom to alternately crib from names that fly around me and make up my own. Add to that names based on local color ala Mike Resnick’s space Tall Tales, and you get a nice mishmash of names which are familiar, new, and flat-out exotic.

For instance, the characters on my swashbuckling privateer crew sport a rogue’s gallery of colorful names; Cooper Flynn (Capt), Clarissa McDougall (Flynn’s fiery love interest), Mr. Horatio Pitt (First Officer), Deena Prentiss (Dr, Mr. Pitt’s estranged wife), Cleric Mathen Vaneras (Van-air-es, converted assassin), Bola (Amazon merc and weapons expert), Eggplant (navigator, not his real name), Chain (mechanical genius who keeps the ship in the air), Tuy Meklanek (advisor to the Crown), The Barracuda (legendary assassin), Mr. Humble (sailor, his real last name, if a smidge ironic), Lt. Gillings (Lieutenant, duh, heh), Blind Bart (a once-clumsy navigator who has earned his unfortunate nickname), and the colorful Friar of Briar Island (Long John Silver-ish sometime privateer / sometime pirate). Piro and Miro are father and son servants for The Friar of Briar Island, and the Friar’s Champion is a short, slim, and utterly lethal fellow named Mok Moire. There’s a mysterious figure named Felo who is not of that world, and whose form is variable.

Each character’s name came to me in their own fashion. I’ve labored for days over some of them, and others, like Eggplant’s nickname, dripped straight from my fingertips to the page.
I have a love / hate relationship with names and naming. I hate doing it, and love it when it works out. And it always works out, sooner or later.

But there’s the rub. Some names come to me instantly, while others have taken weeks or months to correctly cobble together.

I was watching the guilty-pleasure film Twister again last night. I’m a sucker for misfit teams, and this team is right up there with the one from Sneakers. I went along for the ride, again, as Bill, former twister-hunter, tries to settle down and be a staid-but-dependable weatherman. But everyone knows that his heart (and art) is in being outside in-country sussing out where the next big one will hit based as much on chutzpah and seasoned feel as on observation and actual meteorology.

That’s how I feel about coming up with names; it is equal parts art and craft, with a healthy dollop of luck thrown in for seasoning.

And, yes, you just /know/ you’ve got the right one when you hit it. It’s like striking a tuning fork and feeling the tone resonating in your belly, in your very bones.

Katie Weiland was kind (or reckless) enough to interview me for the AuthorCulture blog. She asked fun questions, and I replied with what may be considered provocative answers.

In the interview, I talk about the genesis of Ray Gun Revival magazine and my “Adventures of the Sky Pirate” serial novel, as well as the challenges of writing a serial novel, the importance of writing out your million words of dreck, thoughts about the fine line between piracy and obscurity, and the vision I predict for for the future of the publishing industry.

AC: The publishing industry is daily growing more and more digital—something you’ve tapped into with RGR. What do you visualize for the future of the industry?

JC: There was a time that you had to go to a music hall or church or listen to the radio to hear music. The invention of vinyl albums changed that by allowing common people to collect and keep their own collection of music. It was that way for decades. However, today, the vinyl record is a largely historical technology. Few current works are pressed and released, and the only people who continue to seek them out are hardcore fans.

As strange as it sounds, I think we’ll see books as we know them today go the way of the vinyl album; something that was once venerable and ubiquitous that has been bypassed by technology and finally exists only as a rare occasion product. I’m a little surprised that well-meaning government types haven’t already passed regulations to prohibit dead-tree books for the sake of preserving the environment or something.

But necessity if the mother of invention, and I think we’ll see development of as many different kinds of inexpensive digital reading devices tomorrow as we saw portable music players yesterday. I think new generations of readers used to reading content with multiple levels of metadata will find actual paper documents both flat and quaint.

Thanks to Katie and AuthorCulture for the interview, and please do let me know what you think!

…and we shouldn’t, either.

I read an interview conducted by Gamasutra with Doug dating back to 2006, and he talks about what comes first, the artistic impulse (which may create new fans) or the marketing pragmatism (creating content that may play well for existing fans). He was very direct in his opinion.

GS: Where do you feel the fans factor into the decision-making process of a game based off a comic or other intellectual property? Do you think a more independent comic would have a better chance of making good game, since they don’t have this large and potentially rabid fan base?

DT: No, because…I’m going to piss some people off here, but I don’t care what the fans think. I love my fans, but never ever design a game for your fans. When you originally made the thing, the thing that all the fans liked, you made it because it was good, and they came to you, because of what you did. Your instincts lead you correctly in that instance. So to suddenly change that formula, and follow what fans want and redesign something in the image that you think, second-guessing, that they will like, would create a different thing, that isn’t you and probably isn’t good. And you will always lose fans by doing that. Of course, like if I were doing that for one of my characters like Earthworm Jim…you see, I love my fans, but I wouldn’t do that for them. As far as designing the game goes, I follow my gaming instincts and my character design instincts and make the very best game I know how to make. That’s what I’m all about, and there are some guys that lose your trust. Old fans leave, new fans are made. Somehow we survive.

When we have an artistic idea and we remain true to it, people will respond to the artistry and support the project. However, if we then try to pander to the audience we’ve already won by giving them more of the same, we are in effect doing them a disservice instead of a service.

Let fans follow the art, and not the other way around. (George Lucas, I’m looking at you.)