Birthday Post and other news

This is where you can post birthday greetings to enter the contest for a chance to win a free copy of Eden Fell. Post away!

So I finally got a major start on writing Chapter 1. This story is definitely coming together, it's only a matter of writing it all down. But I have say, holy hell this story is involved. With each paragraph, each line I write, I'm discovering new dimensions all the time. And I'm loving it :D

I did run into a small snag yesterday while working on Chapter 1. Names. Normally, with side characters, I'll just plug in any name. If I decide I don't like the name, I'll change it later. My trick for finding names is to look up the top 100 baby names for the year when the character would have been born. Now here's the snag. The story is set in the future. The characters haven't been born yet. Uh oh...

I spent some time looking into trends for baby names and tried to find futuristic sounding names. I don't like using names that are long-winded or hard to pronounce or just made up gibberish. When there's a whole story to be read, I don't want the reader to fumble or take too long deciphering a fictional name. That's just tedious.

But! I found a great website that has a long list of names based on the current trends, basically predicting the baby names of the future. Jackpot! And now it's easy to plug in a name as I go along.

I love it when a story just flows and everything makes sense :)