Tag Archives: Tom Jones

Female characters : fun and games with female names

Joanna is having a giggle over female characters…

Charles Dickens had great names for female charactersSomeone, somewhere recommended my old blog on Naming Minor Characters and it resulted in hundreds of hits last week. When I checked, I saw that most of it was about male characters. Certainly the game at the end was about males. So I thought I might do another version focusing on female characters instead.

When I look back at the literary canon, I see more interesting male names than female ones.

There aren’t many female characters with names to rival Mr Pecksniff or Scrooge in Dickens. But search around, and there are some. What about Lady Dedlock in Bleak House? Since much of the plot revolves around the deadlocked court case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce, the name seems very appropriate.

But there are others, even better. What about this pair of chancers? Continue reading →

In Praise of Dirty Drafts

This week I have been remembering the first draft of my first book. Well, the first book I actually completed.

First draft libraryI remember that it was written by hand, mostly while I was waiting for books to be retrieved from the stack in a very famous library.

The leather-bound tomes, the scholarly hush, the dust dancing in the sunbeams, the academics concentrating all  around me…. oh, I remember them as if I’ve only just walked in from that day with my book bag stuffed with notes and my head full of my characters.

First draft cafe napkinOr sometimes I wrote that first draft while I was waiting for an old friend in our favourite coffee shop.

When inspiration struck there, I sometimes scribbled the idea down on any old scrap of paper — including a cafe napkin once or twice.

By now, dear Reader, you will have realised two things: Continue reading →