An Author's "Mews"

by Lorna Barrett (who also masquerades as L.L. Bartlett)

And the winner of a copy of Lorna's latest release, Bookmarked for Death, is Chris Redding. Chris, please contact me at darlene at darleneryan.com. Thanks to Lorna and cats for joining us this weekend.

Just about every author I know has at least one pet. Most have more than one. Some have more than one species, too. But the majority of us seem to have cats. Or rather, they have us.

I’m currently owned by four cats. Most of the day they lie around the house, snoozing their lives away. This time of year you can find them under incandescent light bulbs or lying with their snoots pointed into the heat run. I swear, sometimes I think they’re going to cook themselves, but cats love heat.

These days, Chester, our dominant cat, seems to be able to find the best source of heat and stick with it. If the sun happens to be out, he’ll follow it to every room in the house. More often than not, it’s just plain gloomy. (We live in Western New York. I think only Seattle has more gloomy days than us. That’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.) Chester’s not much of a lap cat during the summer, but come winter, he might deign to sit with me, but mostly he prefers hanging around with my husband. (It’s a guy kind of thing, I guess.)

Bonnie, terrified over just about everything (except at breakfast time, then she’ll challenge the boys to a fight--and then screams bloody murder if they take her up on it), lives on the heat run behind the couch. She comes out for meals, and likes to watch DVDs with me. (Last week we watched episodes of Star Trek Enterprise and the movie Iron Man. She prefers more quiet shows. And let’s face it, photon torpedoes are a lot more quiet than everything blowing up in a guy flick. After all, I don’t think sound travels through the vacuum of space. Am I right?)

Now Betsy, our little Princess, was very ill with cancer in 2007. She had an amazing recovery (sure shocked the heck out of our vet when we brought her in for her yearly shots this past September), although she’s a bit … crabbier … than she was before her illness. Still, she still likes to do her Betsy things -- hanging out under light bulbs (especially if you’re trying to read -- blocking light is No. 1 on her list of things to do) and moving around the house to check out all the heat runs. (Are you seeing a pattern here?)

Throwing a monkey wrench into the works is my tiny son, Fred. (Also known as my Little Prince.) Fred isn’t the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he’s super handsome and he knows it. He also knows that if he’s in trouble, all he has to do is lie down, roll over and look cute. (And darned if it doesn’t work every time.) Fred will sleep under a light bulb, but has never learned that heat runs got super warm. (See dim-bulb comment above.)

I’d like to say that the cats keep me company as I work on my books, but that would be a big fat lie. No, they’re in the next room with my husband (and that 200 watt incandescent bulb). Hubby also works from home, and did years before I did, so the cats have their routine and they’re not changing it just for me. It’s just as well. Sometimes they come in for a visit and like to sit on my arms as I type. This, of course, makes it very difficult to type accurately--which I have a hard enough time doing without their “help.”

I also have a comfy chair in my office, with a nice light. I like to sit there to edit. Unfortunately, the minute my butt hits the chair, some cat will wander in and demand to sit on my lap. Since I keep my drafts in a big three-ring notebook, there’s nowhere to put it if there’s a cat on my lap. So I have to sit, twisted like a cheese straw, and put the notebook on the chair’s arm. Then a cat will get annoyed, stand up, turn around at least three times, nudge the notebook until I move it to the other arm, and then sit down again. I’ll turn the page, make a note, and the process starts all over again.

Of course, cats have other habits. They’re very clean. With all that washing, they ingest a lot of hair. How often have I been working when I heard hubby’s voice call out, “Someone’s puking, someone’s puking.” Since I write mysteries, it’s up to me to play detective to find the culprit and remove the evidence. (Not one of the perks of working at home.)

But would I ever live without cats? Never.

By the way, my new book, Bookmarked for Death, features a cat. Her name is Miss Marple and she steals every scene she’s in. She’s based on my cat Cori, who lived to the ripe old age of 20.

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Lorna Barrett writes the Booktown Mystery series, featuring Tricia Miles and her Haven’t Got A Clue bookstore. It’s available now. Hop in the car and rush right to your local bookstore. Go on! Do it now!

The Naming of Characters

Sandra Parshall

T.S. Eliot wrote, “The naming of cats is a difficult matter,” and as a lifelong cat-owner, I agree -- but choosing a name for a fictional character takes difficulty to a whole new level. It’s a lot like naming a child. The recipient will live with your decision forever, and if you make a mistake the consequences won’t be pretty.

A baby, of course, is named before the parents have any idea how the kid will turn out. Will little Angelina develop into a tattooed hellion? Will Grace be a hopeless klutz? Or will their names in some way help to shape the people they become? I’m sure that somebody, somewhere, has spent a breathtaking amount of money studying such questions, but fortunately writers don’t have to wonder. We can form the characters, then give them names that suit. We can try out as many names as we like before deciding.

A character’s name has to do a lot of heavy lifting:

It should evoke personality. If a guy is always called Robert, never Bobby or even Bob, what does that say about him?

If ethnicity is important to the story, the name should convey that too. But you don’t have to call every Hispanic character Jose Gonzales. A little effort will turn up less common names that still tell the reader how to see the person.

A name can be a quick way to signal social status. I am not brave or foolish enough to reel off a list of low-class names and risk the fallout, but you know what I mean.

A name can tell us a character’s approximate age. How many toddlers do you know who are named Hortense or Archibald? How many 80-year-old women have you met who are named Britney or Morgan? The internet allows writers to search databases such as www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ (compiled from Social Security records) and www.babycenter.com/general/ to find out what a character born in a certain year might have been named. Because I prefer classic names rather than the trendy concoctions that are going to seem laughable when their owners hit middle age and beyond, I’m happy to note that Emma has been the most popular name for baby girls in the U.S. for several years. We may have Ross and Rachel on Friends to thank for this. (I have a five-year-old named Emma, but although she believes herself to be an unusually hirsute little girl, she’s actually of the feline persuasion.) All those tiny Emmas, though, are growing up with a nearly equal number of girls named Madison. Aiden was the top male name in 2006, followed by Jacob, Ethan, Ryan, and Matthew. What will Madison and Aiden call their children twenty-five years from now?

The classics fit people of any age, but if the first name is a common one, the last might have to do double duty to give the character distinction. Kate is one of the most common names for female protagonists in mysteries, followed closely by all the variations of Katherine/Catherine/Kathleen -- Kat/Cat/Kathy/Katie/Kay. But Kate Shugak is singular, and so is Kay Scarpetta. In my new book, Disturbing the Dead, I named a lead character Tom Bridger, pairing a first name that conveys a solid, down-to-earth personality with a last name that is common among Melungeons in the Appalachians. The name Bridger is also a metaphor for the position that Tom, a half-Melungeon deputy sheriff, occupies between two segments of his mountain community. The reader may never think about this, but I have.

Sometimes a perfect name comes to a writer through sheer serendipity. When Tess Gerritsen was writing a book titled The Surgeon, she contributed to a charity auction by allowing a reader to purchase naming rights for a minor character, a female medical examiner. The reader named Dr. Maura Isles after a real person. The character grew in importance in subsequent books, and she grew into her name, which perfectly conveys the image of an elegant woman who is isolated within herself.

While searching for the perfect monikers for our characters, writers have to keep some no-no’s in mind: nothing that is impossible for the reader to pronounce; no two names starting with the same letter, lest the poor reader become confused; as few nicknames as possible, again to avoid confusion. Short, one-word names always have the edge, at least in English-language crime fiction. Look at a few U.S., Canadian, and British mystery novels. How many names of more than two or three syllables do you see? How many truly unusual names do you see? You could say this is laziness on the part of writers who don’t want to type long or difficult names again and again, and you might be half-right, but it’s also true that a mystery seems to move faster if everyone has a short, easy name.

A name is the most personal thing about a character, and the choice is not one the writer makes lightly. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could exercise the same discretion over our own names? As innocent babies, we have to take whatever label is slapped on us, whether it fits or not. But most names, amazingly enough, turn out to be good fits. How about yours? Do you love it, hate it, wish you could change it? What name would you have given yourself, and why?