This summer, I joined a writing group, led by a published novel writer.
It was the jump start I needed to get my ass back in gear on the book I’m writing.
One of the biggest hurdles I encountered this summer was naming my characters. Noel, the group leader was not a fan of my character names — too cutesy, I think.
His suggestion was to pull names from the phone book. I, however, live in Los Angeles — the book’s locale Cleveland. As Cleveland has no large Latino or Korean population as my neighborhood does, the names from the phone book weren’t really working out.
The best solution I found are on-line name generators. They gather first and last names from the U.S. Census and the Social Security Death Index and spit out random names. This has been a great little tool. You can generate hundreds of names at a time, male or female, common or obscure.
Little did I know, however, that these tools were used for nefarious purposes . . . . I just learned that they are primarily used by spammers to generate realistic sounding names . . . so you’ll open those dreaded e-mails that sell you 28 million e-mail addresses or endless supplies of Viagra or V*agra as it’s often spelled these days.
When the book gets published, I hope you’re not reading about a character, get a niggling feeling, check your e-mail, and find out some Cleveland mom is selling you prescription meds.
foleydog
Vortigern
