This is something that’s been different for pretty much each story and book I’ve written, but… I guess there are a few things I can discuss on the topic. The genre of the story really does a lot of informing on the types of names I use for characters.

For stuff set in modern, urban areas, I often just use friends’ names, with permission of course. I’ll often modify them if needed, just to add some space between the character and the real person, but not always. 

This has worked for fantasy and sci-fi stories. Most of the fairies in Starsigns are named for friends, with their names just modified somehow. Eviekins is named for my friend Evie. Noblereed is after my friend Nobilis, and Lambria for Briana. You can probably see the echoes of their names in there. Surnames and nicknames informed the elements of the character names not present in the first name of the real person. Eviekins, for example… well, that’s just straight up a nickname I use for Evie. Noblereed and Lambria both include part of the real person’s surname.

In The Deadly Studies, the whole first volume Luc Bertrand: European Assassin, takes place in various places in Europe. In that case, it’s modern-day urban fantasy, and I wanted more normal people names. Knowing the second half was going to be set in the United States, I wanted to make a real distinction in the people around Luc geographically. A lot of the random people you only saw in passing were throwaway names pulled from baby name and regional surname lists. But there were some who were again named for friends. In the case of them becoming characters in the Europe portion of the series, the name was simply localized. It’s been some time since I worked on it, so citing specific examples isn’t too easy, but I do recall a character named Guillaume who was named after a friend whose middle name was William.

For my current in-progress LitRPG novel, since the majority of characters are identified by gamertags or their AI designated names, I’ve asked a lot of my gamer friends for permission to legitimately use their gamertag in the book. A few I’ve had to make small modifications to, but… the few names you’ve already seen in what I’ve released so far are friends. Of the four primary characters— LiveBeans, TheSniper, MushroomSurprise, YetiEnigma— three of them are my friends. LiveBeans is made up because I wanted her to be more of a blank slate than to be colored by a friend insert. But Snipes, Shroom, and Yeti are friends of mine from the gaming world. All three usernames got small spelling changes, but that’s it. I have a list of gamertags for player characters and another for the AI NPCs so their names have a distinct difference from the real players. Most of the names on both lists are friends’ usernames (again, collected with permission). Not all, but most. A few are ones I came up with that I liked the sound of. But it was interesting how many of my actual gamer friends had tags that suit the criteria for AI names over player names.

Some other things I’ve done to get names:

-For out-there fantasy or sci-fi names, get some printed text (newspaper, book, advertisement, whatever) and see what the last syllable of a word and the first syllable of the next word make. Even just from this bullet point, I see the names “Tasyor, Perbo, Randsee, and Keeven. Literally from straight taking syllables from words (fanTASY OR; newspaPER BOok; whateveR AND SEE; maKE EVEN- to illustrate where they came from). Maybe not a great source, but one that works in a pinch.

-I think I’ve talked about it in other posts, but just modifying real names is totally valid. Change a letter or a sound to update a name. Monica becomes Ronica. Jonathan becomes Jarnathan. Maria becomes Saria. And yes, I just used three character names from IPs that are not mine: Robin Hobb’s The Liveship Traders, the film Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and the video game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. 

Wherever you get names, get them. They can be everywhere. There’s a place for John Smith. I’m sure there’s also a place for K’zyynth’fri’traxessanstiano… 

But… be judicious in apostrophes. Please. 

The short answer here is yes, but… I don’t know so much that it’s a “gotten in the way” as “assisted badly.”

In 2007, when I first moved into an apartment with my best friend. About a month later, we got a pair of stray kittens from their coworker. The kittens were sisters, a grey tabby-tux and a standard tux. I ended up with the standard. She had a little mark under her nose that looked like a mustache. I named her Moiraine Damodred Grappin, after Moiraine from The Wheel of Time, and her nickname was Rainey. Her sister was named Jenny by my best friend. 
Rainey lived until 2023. RIP. I miss her a lot.

But the thing with Rainey was that over the almost exactly 16 years I had her, she saw me through everything: moves, relationships, jobs, everything. And that little cat saw a lot of what I’ve referred to before as the “Golden Age” of my writing productivity. She also saw the burnout after.

Rainey was my girl. Granted, I had another cat, Cersei, for almost the same amount of time, but… Rainey was my shadow. She was absolutely the type of cat who behaves more like a spouse or owner. She wasn’t the stereotypical type of cat that you think “that cat has staff, not owners.” No, Rainey was a hardass, but… she was a caretaker. That girl saw me through surgery recoveries, illnesses, depression, and heartbreak. She was smart as hell and… I really can’t say enough about how amazing she was.

Anyway, the specific behaviors I most think of with her “assisting” with my writing comes from… probably the 2009-2012 or so era of my writing. At the time, I was in an apartment on my own (in the same complex as my best friends, who had started a family) and my main computer at the time was a laptop. I didn’t write at my computer desk often. More often than not, I was on my couch, with a background noise movie or music on. That was my spot for gaming, writing, pretty much everything.

As much as Rainey loved being a lapcat, she understood the limited lap access that came along with computer being there, and she was happy loafing next to me. Cersei did, too, but Rainey was more regular of a couch companion.

Back in the days before I got Scrivener, I used WordPerfect over Microsoft Word, but I also tended to do a lot in Wordpad, mostly because .rtf files were easy to format and move between computers, since I was very much not in the world of shared folders and files or anything back then. File transfers were email attachments. 

And I printed my novel outlines so I could reference them most easily. Working on a small, single laptop screen… yeah, I wasn’t much of a pro at keeping multiple windows open or switching between them yet (that wouldn’t come until later in 2012 when I started working at a call center. But I digress). So I’d have my outline printout beside me, usually sitting on the couch, so I could glance at it quickly without having to deal with clunky touchpad mouse controls.

Well, the place I set my outline just happened to also be Rainey’s spot.

There were plenty of times she was a paper stand for me. All things considered, she was decent at it. A purring, fuzzy, cuddly paper stand that put up with her lot in life.

She was there through everything from Empeddigo to The Deadly Studies. 

I was just barely starting to peek out of burnout in September 2023 when she passed. I like to think she would be proud of me for still writing and still chainmailing. Because she saw the onset of that too and… very much put up with metal rings everywhere.

You were the absolute best, Rain-cat. 

Of all the writing advice I’ve gotten and even given, it’s easy to get bogged down in fine details about grammar mechanics, language, plotting, or anything. So many think there’s some sort of master ruleset that if you can just follow it, you’ll be a hugely successful author and the world will adore you and the words will come easy and…

Simply put, that’s not fair to believe. And it’s not fair to perpetuate. 

I’m not going to go into advice like that. 

There are two pieces of advice I’d consider the most valuable ones I’ve ever heard, and they’re pretty closely linked in theme, so I want to discourse on the two of them. What’s great is that they’re very simple sentences, super easy to remember, but they don’t pull their punches. They might seem brusque or blunt, but… the more I’ve thought about them over the years, the more they’ve made sense.

The first is “You can’t edit a blank page.” The second is “You have permission to suck.”
12 words total. The best writing advice I’ve ever heard. So let’s discuss a little.

You can’t edit a blank page.
This really is one of the most important things to keep in mind. You can think about writing all day long, every moment, but… unless there are words on a page, all you’re doing is thinking. Prepping, planning, postulating. 

But at the end of the day, you need to have words on a page in order to have a written story. 
So it’s literally advice to just write. Put words down.

There’s all kinda of studies on the effectiveness of practice, quality vs quantity, how to maximize what you can do in a given amount of time. There are exercises (I’ve done plenty of them on Patreon), practices, techniques you can do to focus. You can do word sprints, focused tasks, whatever, but they all boil to the same thing: writing words.

Write words. That’s really all it is.

You have permission to suck.
This one is the one that really seems almost rude. I didn’t react well to it when I first heard it, probably around 12 or 13 years ago.

Thing is, it’s largely the same advice as “You can’t edit a blank page.” 

Part of the problem with a lot of art—and life in general—is the tendency to only see the finished product, not the steps to get there. We see the final performance of the dance number, not the hours of rehearsals. We hear the concert, not the years learning to play an instrument, the repetition of the parts over and over again. We view the sculpture or painting without seeing the lump of clay or marble block or blank canvas. We read the final draft and don’t see how much it’s changed from the first. 

We are constantly comparing the best of things to our own worst efforts. People see NYT Bestsellers and think they could never write something like that. I’ve been so guilty of this myself: thinking I needed to have each word perfect from the outset.

But that attitude doesn’t do anyone any service. It’s paralyzing attempting to start, disheartening if things don’t seem perfect from the start, and it facilitates over-criticizing yourself. If you’re expecting a finished product from the start and you don’t get it… how much easier is it to give up altogether? 

No, what this advice teaches is that ANY words are better than no words. They can be as bad as you want, but you’re allowed to write badly. Write smut if you want. Write self-indulgent self-insert fanfiction. Write as badly as you want to, just write it. Make it real, and if you want to after that, you can work on making it better.

You know, tying it back to editing. You can always make something better with revision and work.

It just has to exist first. In whatever form it does, just make it exist.

That’s really it. As much as it sucks, it’s simple. This is how we practice. We make words. We make sucky words. And then we make more. We make them better. And eventually… the sucky words are less sucky in general. Our bottom line improves and… we keep writing. We still suck.
But we accept it. 

And then we edit it.

I eked out more writing time in September than I expected, but still less than I’d hoped. Seeing improvement thought!

LitRPG book (working title Subscription Life) - Finished Chapter 3 at 1866 words, and I’ve gotten Chapter 4 done, at 1364 words. That’s 1932 for the month on this, which I am pretty pleased about.

You’ll notice I didn’t put in anything about a rewrite of Chapter 3. That’s because I had gotten to a point that a lot of what I’ve already written for chapters 1-3 felt like backstory/buildup to the real action of the book, and I do NOT want a prologue and 3 chapters of buildup. I DID write Chapter 4 as a whole new Chapter 1, and I’m progressing that way, so… we’ll see how things move forward.

What I have in chapters 1-4 is good info, and I’m sure bits and pieces will inform what I write going forward and some pieces might end up in flashbacks or things like that. Absolutely not wasted effort!

Collaboration Project - No movement yet.

Criminal From Birth sequel - Still with editor. Still mulling over the title.