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1 and 15 please?

1) How old were you when you first starting writing fanfiction?

I don’t know exactly? But probably about 14 (around 1997 haha). Though I just wrote it for myself, in an old address book. It would be a long-ass time before I realised other people wrote fanfiction (I thought I was doing something unique and weird and gross), and then read that fanfiction, and then it would be even longer before I put my own fanfiction up. And it wasn’t at all related to what I wrote in that address book.

15) If you write OC’s, how do you decide on their names?

Okay so, some of my OCs already existed in folklore and already had names like Gwyn ap Nudd and the Nain Rouge.

When it’s characters like Augus and Ash. I just made them up. I don’t use name generators. I don’t look for lists of names. I just think of something I like the sound of and then stick with it. It’s normally a very quick process.

When I’m writing within a certain culture, or a fantasy version of that culture, like The Golden Age that Never Was, I’ll then go to a list of Russian names or something. I don’t generally like a lot of the contemporary baby name sites, so I’ll often look for things like ‘historical Russian names in the military in the 1900s’ or some shit like that, or ‘English surnames from the 1700s’ and so on, because that usually gives me like, names that are familiar, but also names that are just to the left of familiar.

Names like ‘Flitmouse’ and ‘Sharpwood’ I pick because I like what they convey about the character and how they sound. That’s a very Charles Dickens way of naming characters, and every now and then that’s fun.

I usually have a collection of names I like, to use for MCs at any point. And as for other characters, it depends on their heritage too. Like I have written a Romansch MC in Tradewinds (will I ever release that who knows) and it was important for me that he have a name connected linguistically, that had a heritage, and he even talks about it within the text. And to find that, I couldn’t look up ‘Romansch baby names’ and instead went on a deep dive that lasted about a week into the language and the linguistic patterning, before I finally had a name I was happy with.

Basically, it really depends on the project, the OC, and how deep I’m going into a real world culture. The easiest method is ‘I make it up on the spot’ lol. I don’t like to spend too much time stuck on names, and it pisses me off if it takes more than two days to name an MC, and it pisses me off if it takes more than half an hour to name an ensemble character. I want it fast.

From the writerly meme!