Writing Fantasy

[Estella Brandybuck]

Just a question to ask everyone here: What's everyone's opinion on having lots of book projects occuring in parallel? I'm nearly a third through one novel, have begun the first chapters for another two and am currently formulating ideas for a fourth. It's difficult, but I still feel I need to get the ideas down as soon as possible or I'll forget them. I'm curious to know your thoughts on this.

I do the same thing. I find that putting them on the computer makes things easier because then I can use floppy disks to separate them - for example, I have a blue disk for my original story, and a green disk where I put all my fanfic material. And I do the same thing you do, which is to write everything down as it comes to me so that I don't forget it.

Also, how do people pick the names for their characters, places etc? Usually I use name generators or name-meaning websites, but sometimes I get dumb names out of them. What does everyone else think?

Hmm... names always seem to come to me. But I agree with what Meela said about using normal names and just twisting them around a bit. For example, I took one of my friends' last name, Jetton, took some letters out, added some letters, and got the name Jeteiryn. You could also take a regular name and change the spelling to where it still sounds the same but looks different, like what I did with Ryan, changing it to Ryon.

And hey, if worse comes to worse, you could always just close your eyes and hit the keyboard a bit and see what happens. Like this:

*closes eyes*

liughn;;ioug

Okay, ignore the two semi-colons... [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img]

I can get the name "Liuno" out of that, or maybe "Luhnig"... If I add letters, I can get a name like "Liunel" or "Niora"... I dunno, something like that. [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] I guess my best suggestion would be to just play around with sounds, see what is pleasing to the ear (or perhaps not-so-pleasing, if you want a villain's name).