Wednesday, July 18, 2012

Damn Those Weasel Words!

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain

Monday, July 9, 2012

Chapter Four: Blood on the Sand, of Selling Handcuffs, An Angel Day Novel

Okay, folks. Here's "Chapter Four: Blood on the Sand" of the novel Selling Handcuffs, An Angel Day Novel. 


If you haven't read Chapter Three: The Secret Police State, it's here.

If you haven't read any of the preceding chapters, start with Chapter One: The Stash House.

I finished the first draft about an hour ago. Whew. That was a slog. There's still a lot that needs to be done. I know of one scene that I'm going to cut, and at least two scenes to add, but I wrote what will probably be the last sentence. Yea!

The fact that I finished the first draft means that I'll be posting these a lot more frequently. I was always worried that I was going to catch up to myself.

This chapter includes the First Pinch, which is where we see who the Antagonist is and begin to see what they can do. We see in what ways he opposes our Protagonist and some of his weapons. In this case, the Antagonist has a really big gun.

At the First Pinch, things start to get very serious for the Protagonist, our sniper chick Angel Day, and the casualties begin.

As I said, I'm done with the first draft, and there appear to be nine major chapters plus inter-scenes, like the Prologue: Swan Dive that I posted a while ago.

Thanks for reading!




Saturday, July 7, 2012

Random Name Generators

I've mentioned a couple of times on Twitter lately that, if you know you're going to have to mass murder a bunch of characters, start with a lot of characters so you have some to choose from and some left over afterward.

But how do you name lots of characters?

Random name generators!

Some reasons to use random name generators:

  • Easier on your brain. 
  • Kinda fun. 
  • Easy to deliberately populate your book with a good mix of ethnicities and backgrounds. 
  • Hides your "naming tics," like some authors without knowing it name their characters only sweeping, romantic names, or names that only begin with the letters A-G, etc. 

Some of my favorites: 

Behind The Name : One of my favorites. Includes first. middle, and last names, plus you can restrict the search by gender, by many, many ethnicities (Maori, Catalan, Provencal, Galician, Breten, Frisian, Czech, and Slovak, to name a few), and/or by other categories. Other categories include Goth (excellent for vampyres,) Greek myth, Hinduism, Ancient Celtic, Biblical, Literary, Kreatyve, Hillbilly, Hippy, and Transformer. Includes Native American names that are real names, not like "Little Foot Redfeather" or "Dances With Wolves." Does not have a Mexican ethnicity, which is odd. Also only gives you one name at a time.

Ultimate Random Name Generator : Another favorite. Can restrict search by gender and a list of some ethnicities, including Mexican. Gives you a long list of names rather than one at a time.

Let's face it, you don't have to carefully craft the names of minor characters, especially when they're just going to all die horribly in Chapter 7.

TK Kenyon