Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Dangerously Verbose

There probably should be a rule about blogging in the middle of the night. I read last night’s work and found it a bit – cryptic…  Unfortunately I’m not feeling very cooperative today, so I can’t promise not to blog at 4:00 a.m. You’re all smart people, bet you can spot them. Go right ahead and feel free to post a critical “Up all night again?” comment when the spirit moves you. I can take it, and if you happen to notice somebody being dragged off to the gallows in one of my novels, with your name, it’ll just be a freaky coincidence.
Speaking of freaky coincidences the town I live in sends me my tax bill every year on New Year’s Eve and the fact that the town bears the exact same name as the forces of darkness in my short story entitled:  Atlinca and the Hamsters that Run It – is pure coincidence.
I keep a file of names to use in stories, it’s a bit of a hobby to collect them. For fun I also have a list with two columns, ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ – because names come in both categories. Before being entered into the main file, names spend time sitting on the list fermenting. I wait for a character to birth out of the names, it usually works that way. Not always, sometimes a story pops out so quickly I rush to find names for everyone. That is when the name file comes in handy. After everyone in the story is christened with a name, they graduate to a brand new file. The Story File. There we find maps, places, definitions, even food and games if the story is set in a world that demands it. It’s not that I forget the details of my stories if they’re not written down, it’s more like once the container starts to bulge and run over with information – I know I’ve got a novel’s worth and it is time to STOP inputting new details and focus on that plot thing.
Here, however, inside The Glitter Globe we get to live plot-free. Sans structure. Let freedom and verbosity reign. We’re just mutating characters tossing in the wind. There are no red pens. And we can start sentences anyway we want. Verbal Calvinball if you will. As a matter of fact, punctuation is entirely optional and most definitely fluid. Dangling participles are for decorative purposes, the music is always live. Critics are absolutely welcome here though, because we don’t want an empty evil column on the name’s list.

4 comments:

  1. I can send you some lovely Welsh names if you would like

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  2. www.behindthename.com God bless the people that made it. (It was down for about a week, and I was so lost.)

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