Over the last couple of years I have been slowly and gradually working on a book series. When I step away and look at it, it's a massive beast that I have barely scratched the surface on, but I feel confident that it can come to be. My wife tells me that planning it out, coming up with characters and story is just the beginning. Sitting down and writing it is the hard part, she says. I think I agree, but I can't be for certain seeing as that the extent of the series so far is a series of notebooks filled with notes, stories, character profiles, drawings, and various other ideas. I have a few references chaotically thrown in and I have just recently expanded to a flash drive to better organize it all in Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. One of my big hiccups right now is character naming (as well as being in school and not being able to devote a lot of time to it). I have a ton of characters and have no idea what to name them. Do they have generic Americanized names, culturally relevant names, symbolic names, or make up some random gibberish/new language and go all Tolkien on them (not something I really want to tackle by the way)? Or maybe I create some sort of hybrid of those ideas without the new language creation seeing as normal English grammar still makes my head hurt.
OK, so you're thinking, "Shouldn't you be writing or working on your book rather than posting about it?" Yes, I should and taking a little advice from my wife, the English major and bookaholic, I'm trying to exercise my brain through a little normal writing. Also, I was thinking I might also throw in a few short stories that connect to or scenes from the book online to kind of get a feel for it and maybe get some feedback. Of course I still need to name a few people first. I don't think anyone would be interested in reading a story that starts out with "After a long journey through Land #4, Main Guy walks into a pub and after glancing around the room, spots his arch nemesis, Main Guy's Nemesis..." That's just no fun and yes, I would have a better start than that, but you get the idea.
So my hope here is to make strides with this thing and at the very least end up on the random paperback shelf at Wal-Mart... that or go crazy.
