Tag: character names

2020-01-10 Newsletter Author’s Note

This author’s note originally appeared in the January 10th edition of my email newsletter. To sign up for my newsletter, click here.

So right after we got home from the holidays, Mrs. Vasicek had her ultrasound, and we found out that we’re having a baby girl! We are super excited! She looks really healthy so far, so hopefully everything goes well and we get to welcome her into the world this spring.

Right now, we’re in baby name mode, and I have to say it’s a bit different from picking character names. You would think I would have some experience in this area, being a fiction writer and all, but no. My number one name choice is Æthelflæd, but Mrs. Vasicek has soundly vetoed it, which is a shame because it’s such a good namesake: lady of Mercia, daughter of Alfred the Great, and a formidable woman in her own right (yes, I’ve been binge listening to the British History Podcast).

In all seriousness, though, it is really awesome that we’re having a baby girl. I grew up with three sisters, and I’ve often thought that I’d be able to do well raising a daughter. Now we’ll find out!

We’ll probably give our baby a name from our extended family, though that doesn’t actually narrow things down very much. On the Czech side, I’m rather partial to Ludmilla (Lilly), but sadly Mrs. Vasicek has vetoed that one as well. Neither of us are keen on our grandparents’ names, so we’ll probably go back a little further, or save one of those for a middle name.

One thing we probably won’t do is resort to the Utah Baby Name Generator, though it is a real hoot. Tim Urban also has a really fun blog post on baby names up on his blog, Wait But Why. I’m sure if we’re indecisive for long enough, people will start to come out of the woodwork and tell us all sorts of crazy things about names and naming.

What are some girl names that you really like? We’re very much open to suggestions. Who knows? Even if we don’t end up using them, they might show up in my next book.

I suspect that Mrs. Vasicek will be on the fence right up until the month the baby is born, at which point she’ll make a firm choice and won’t be swayed from it. So until then, I guess I just need to maintain a firm grip on the Overton window, though it may have already slipped out of my control.

Æthelflæd…

BSH blog tour and other random updates

Just a few things to get out of the way before returning to other things:

I’ve started the blog tour for Bringing Stella Home, and the first post was on my friend Kindal’s blog; you can find it here.  He asked me to blog about music and writing, so I shared some of my thoughts on that, as well as some of the songs that helped me to write Bringing Stella Home.  Kindal is an aspiring writer like me, and he’s got a lot of good stuff too, so you should definitely check him out!

Also, as part of the blog tour, I’m giving away free copies of my novella Sholpan at every stop along the way.  If you would like to pick one of those up, feel free; the coupon code on Kindal’s blog is good until next Thursday.  And for other updates and periodic giveaways, be sure to sign up for my newsletter in the sidebar.

I plan to keep more of a schedule for this blog tour, with posts going up every Monday and Thursday.  This coming Monday is at Mike’s blog, who is a frequent commenter here, and the blog after that is The Villain’s Worst Nightmare, where I’ll discuss the Hameji.  Good stuff–I’m looking forward to it!

I’m booked for the next couple of weeks or so, but I’m still looking to expand the tour, so if you would like to have me on either for an interview or a guest post, please let me know!  I’d love to come on as a guest blogger, no matter the size of your blog.

Also, for those of you who agreed to be first readers for Star Wanderers part I, I actually have a few changes I’d like to make before sending it out to you, which I’ll probably get done before the end of the month.  I’m almost a third of the way through another major revision for Desert Stars, so that’s taking up most of my energy now, but that shouldn’t take more than a couple weeks, and I want to get Star Wanderers ready to submit before the end of the quarter.

My next release, for those of you who are interested, will be a collection of journal entries and blog posts from the 2008 Jordan study abroad.  I’ll probably do it under a pen name, just to distinguish it from my science fiction stuff; how does J. Michael Waszik sound?  The original Czech spelling of Vasicek is Wasziczek, which is an insanely cool name but impossible for the average person to pronounce.  It’s the Z’s–you can’t get enough Z’s in a name, especially an Eastern European name.

In totally unrelated news, I noticed that this blog just surpassed 1,000 comments…and I was the 1000th commenter.  So yeah, I guess I owe myself a new car or something (but I’ll probably have to settle for a flashing GIF).

Anyhow, that’s it for now.  Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you around!

Looking for alpha readers and planning the next project

Worlds Away from Home 2.1 is going along well.  I had a hard time switching from Bringing Stella Home back to this other project, but I’ve got some good momentum going and assuming no major interruptions, should be able to do about 3k words a day for the rest of the week.

Then again, if I get interrupted by work, that might be a good thing…

The second draft is going to be pretty rough, but good enough to start sending out to alpha readers.  Anyone want to volunteer?  It’s basically a far future love story on a planet with desert-dwelling tribal nomads who drive micronuclear powered dune buggies and centuries-old arcologies under giant continent-sized domes.  Earth is an ancient, mythical legend, and roving bands of starfaring nomads stand poised to crush the galactic empire.

I hope to be finished with the second draft by March 1st, and I’d want to get feedback no later than the end of April.  If you’ve been one of my alpha readers before, or if we’re friends IRL, let me know if you’re interested.

So earlier today, I was thinking about the project I want to do after WAFH–a sequel to Genesis Earth.  I’ve been toying with the idea of releasing GE as an ebook, but I don’t want to do that until I have a sequel in the works.  Anyhow, I was thinking of ideas for the title, and out of the blue, it struck me:

EDENFALL.

Kind of plays on the subtle Adam and Eve theme of the first one (and no, Genesis Earth isn’t technically a sci-fi Adam and Eve story…but it kind of evokes one).  I like it because it fits well with my ideas for the story, which basically center around shattering the Edenic paradise that Michael and Terra reach at the end of GE.

I’ve got a lot of ideas for this book, and I think they’re reaching a critical mass.  Just last month, I came up with a great name for the main female protagonist: Estee.  She’s the eldest daughter of Terra and Michael, and kind of takes after her mother’s personality.  The male protagonist will be a young soldier from the military force sent out by panicky Earth officials to neutralize any threat on Icaria–which gives the commanders of the expedition a broad mandate to do whatever the hell they want. As you can imagine, conflict ensues.

I know how this story begins, and I know how it’s supposed to end (and thereby set things up for an awesome third book in the trilogy), but I have no idea how to build things up to the crazy twist ending.  It’s going to require some serious worldbuilding, and that’s going to take some time.  Daydreaming is such hard work, after all.

Anyhow, I should be ready by the time I finish WAFH 2.1.  As an experiment, I’m going to write the rough draft entirely in longhand.  Am I crazy?  Perhaps.  But I also want to spend some time in the Utah wilderness for inspiration while I’m writing it, so pen and paper is probably the best medium for that.

So those are my plans.  To close, let me link to this awesome cover of “Something About Us” by Daft Punk.  Now that’s some sweet theremin action…enjoy!

الثريا والرواية

So today I was working on my novel, Worlds Away from Home, and I decided to change the name of a minor character from “Soroya” to something that sounds cooler.

I’d given the rest of her family Arabic-sounding names, because they’re basically far-future Arabs living on another planet (their tribal name is Najmi (نجمي), which means “of the stars”), so I wanted to give her an Arabic-sounding name.

Well, when I looked up female Arabic names at Behind The Name, guess what I found?  “Soraya” is an actual Arab name–in fact, it’s a variant of “Thurayya” (ثريا), which means “the Pleiades.”

Ha! Isn’t that perfect?  “Pleiades of the stars.”

To make her name cool, though, I changed the spelling to “Surayya.”

Semester endgame

Seven days!  Seven days! And then the semester is over!  Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, in the course of those seven days, I’ve got three major papers to write. It’s going to suck.

But then it’s over!

Thank goodness.  This semester has been pretty crazy–not in terms of work, but in terms of motivation.  A lot of the classes I took (especially MESA 350) are basically just repeating the things I already know, which is really boring.  When you’re bored, you don’t have much motivation to do the work, and when that happens…well, let’s just say that bad things happen when that happens.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, as the case may be), there’s nothing quite as motivating as last minute panic.  The work will get done.

Unfortunately (and this is definitely unfortunately), the end-of-semester crunch will almost certainly take time away from my writing.  Just when things were going so well, too.  The revision of Genesis Earth is coming along VERY well–I’m not only enjoying it, I think I’m making some excellent fundamental improvements on the story.  Of all of the novels I’ve written or worked on, I think this one is the most promising.  If I didn’t have any other obligations, I could almost certainly finish this revision in a week–possibly even less.  I’d really love to get into it.

Also, the other day I had an idea how to revive Hero in Exile and turn it into a workable story.  Hero in Exile is the working title of the novel I started last fall, but after I got 70,000 words into it, I realized that the story I was writing and the story I had in mind were incompatible with each other.  I put it all away, recycled some of the basic ideas, and used those for Bringing Estella Home.  Well, now that I’ve put Bringing Estella Home on hold (ironically, after getting 70,000 words into it), I just had some really interesting ideas how I could make Hero in Exile work!  It would require throwing out my original outline almost completely, but I could use almost everything I wrote previously–basically, tell the story that I was writing instead of the story I thought I was writing.

Except I have to change the name of the main character.  “Tristen” just isn’t a good guy’s name–at least not for science fiction.

So now, I’m considering picking up that story and putting Bringing Estella Home on hold for a while.  I’m going to be really busy these next couple of weeks, but after all the craziness has settled somewhat it’s going to be a very interesting question.  Honestly, I have no idea.  It could go either way.

But it’s all academic until the semester is finally over.  But dude!  SEVEN DAYS!!!!  And then…FREEDOM!!!!