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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Oh, The Places You'll Go (Or Won't Go, As the Case May Be)

As hard as I try, I don't always think things through all the way. My first little forays into writing erotica in college weren't anything outrageous. They were about realistic people doing realistic things...okay, to be perfectly honest, a lot of characters were loosely based on myself, and a lot of the situations were my own fantasies. (Which is why no one I know personally will ever read them.) Everyone has to start somewhere, right?

Years later, I somehow found myself writing more in the sci-fi/fantasy genre. Then the two worlds collided, and I seemed to dig out my little niche in erotic sci-fi/fantasy. I'm perfectly happy with where I've landed, and I'm enjoying my creative outlets and my varying levels of success. Every genre has its challenges, though. As I work on my plans for my next book, I've discovered my least favorite part of this one.

Most of my fiction does not take place on Earth. That's perfectly okay. Why limit myself, right? However, if the action doesn't happen on Earth, that means that it must happen...somewhere else.

I hate naming fictional places. HATE IT. Some of my random stringing together of syllables just sounds dumb, and then when I find a mishmash of sounds I like, there's a 75% chance that when I google it, it will be the name of something in World of Warcraft. Oddly enough, I love naming characters. Maybe I should just outsource the naming of my fantasy worlds.

Should anyone else be suffering from the same problems as I am, here's one thing that's been working for me - I go into google's translator, type in a brief description of whatever place I'm naming, and translate it into some random languages. I pick and choose whatever syllables sound good, swap out a few letters here and there, and play around with it until I stumble upon something that sounds reasonable.

(For those of you who have read Searching the Skies, I believe the planet of Pasurea came from the translation of something like "smug, rich bastards" into some sort of eastern European language. I don't remember exactly. But I'm pretty sure "rich bastards" was in there somewhere.)

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