I name thee... on second thoughts, maybe not

Editing, or more accurately, rewriting the YA fantasy novel but I started in about 1989 has, for the most part, been a pleasant surprise.

As I work my way through it, I’ve added several new passages that help with the world-building and character development, and add depth to parts of the story I skimmed over. I've removed a lot of unnecessary and tedious backstory, and I’ve excised some of the absurdly florid bits of adolescent writing that were painful to read. I've polished up the storytelling style to give it a more consistent narrative voice and add a little humor here and there. But for the most part, I've made little to no changes to the plot or the overall structure. Even though I wrote this over thirty years ago, when I was in my early twenties, I'm mostly quite pleased with it.

However, there's one aspect of it which I do need to completely rethink, after one of the members of my writing group commented on it. (Damn it, Howard, you're right, and now I can't unsee it!) It's the names. People, places: they're all a complete mishmash.

The story is set in a very English-ish world, inspired by the New Forest, where I grew up. It's not supposed to be any particular historical period: technology-wise, it's definitely later than medieval, but earlier than the 18th century. In some ways, society is more like a central European Kingdom or Dukedom than anything that ever existed in England.

In other words, it's the kind of setting that was very typical in '80s fantasy: very generic, very non-specific, not historically accurate and yet sort of familiar to readers. It's like those fairy tales where you read about the prince or the Duke, but you don't worry too much about exactly where they're from. Or the world of Warhammer, which was sort of Germanic, with medieval armored knights, guns, magic and monsters.

The world of Dungeons & Dragons was even more chaotic. Nobody thought it unusual to have an adventuring party that included paladins out of an Arthurian romance, thieves from Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or The Hobbit, a Chinese warrior monk, a troubadour who belongs in Renaissance France, and a sorcerer who could have been created by Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance. You’d have half-orcs and dwarves and hobbits and elves, and they (mostly) all just got along. Everybody brought whatever characters they feel felt like playing, teamed up (usually after meeting randomly in a bar or responding to an advert for adventurers), and went out to slay dragons and find treasure. Logical consistency just wasn't that important, as long as we were all having fun.

Diversity was par for the course back then.

And so that's how I wrote my novel - a little bit of everything. So some of my characters have good, traditional English names. Two of my main characters have Welsh names. Some of them have really obscure and inappropriate English names: I have servants and soldiers with high-class names that are more appropriate to the nobility, for example.

And then there are the made-up names. Oh Lord, what was I thinking? They're terrible, derivative, uninspired generic fantasy names. They're inconsistent and drawn from all over the place. There's a little of The Belgariad, a little Tolkien, and a little from… well… just about every fantasy novel I read in my teens and every D&D source book.

Some of the names work, at least in isolation. They’re reasonable names for the character, but they just don't fit in the story I’m telling. Most of them, however, are just plain awful. They ruin the world-building, and they show how immature my writing was back then. (And, annoyingly, some of my names, or something close to them, have been used by other popular writers since then, so it looks as though I'm plagiarizing.)

Before I do anything else, I'm going to go through and rename pretty much every character and place in the whole damn story. This process isn't just helping me address my naming problem: it's also helping me get a much clearer picture of the world I'm portraying. In terms of the setting, I definitely want to retain the feel of Southern England. I want it to feel a little twee and cozy, at least at first, much like Tolkien does with the Shire. But in terms of the world as a whole, I want to lean heavily into a more Celtic feel. Partly as a nod to Lloyd Alexander, partly as a nod to my own Celtic roots, but mostly because the words look and sound so fantastic. (And also a tip of the hat to my other favorite Welsh wizard, Hywel, of Howl’s Moving Castle.)

So, a month from now, most of my characters will probably end up with names that are, if not actually Welsh, something that could pass for sort of Welsh-ish. (Hey, it's fantasy. Things don't have to be 100% accurate!)

Gareth and Maillyn can stay, but it's goodbye to Uncle Jack, Aloysius, Oliver, Lyrin, and Kal Satrakkuk. Hello to... I haven't decided yet.

Dymunwch lwc i mi!