Monthly Archives: September 2012

What’s your faerie name?

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Yeah, this happened within a few months of posting the blog entry below. Thank you, Joanne. @2013 ANVidean

Yeah, this happened within a few months of posting the blog entry below. Thank you, Joanne!  ©2013 ANVidean

The certificate says:

“It has been proclaimed by the fairy power vested in Twig the Fairy
by the state of discombobulation and fitting out, that your official fairy name
is hereby declared
Rula Ghillie Gardenia Mossyroot.”

………………………………………

Today, I was thinking about character naming. Honestly, I’m not that good at names. So, in dealing with this challenge of mine, I discovered a fascinating and fun site. It’s a name-generating Web page substituting your name for a fairy’s.

Here’s mine … “Gossamer Moonglow. She is a messenger of the moon goddess. She lives in spiderwebbed wonderlands and insect grottoes. She is only seen in the light of a full moon. She wears dresses made of cobwebs and gossamer and has bright blue butterfly wings.”

Ah-h-h, I like that.

Most people envision fairies like this: tiny, cute and winged. [As expertly illustrated by Mark Pate. (www.markpate.com)]

That name did serve as a source of inspiration, but doesn’t necessarily fit the mood for my books. You see, the fae in my Delfaerune Rhapsody young-adult-fiction, trilogy in-progress do not fit the mold of your typical fairy. Mine, in the Celtic fae tradition, look more like elves: they grow extremely tall; embrace glamour (magic), not wings, to fly; and,  therefore, require unusual names.

So, in the first book of my series, “The Song of the Ocarina,” I’ve given my Dark Fae monikers which emulate bad-boy rockers like Mikk, Axyl and Janys. My Noble Fae have natural names like Fern, Glenn and Whillo. Key characters also use Maori surnames, as my setting is Queenstown, New Zealand.

I’m looking for more inspiration. So, might you visit the fairy name site and come back here to share your name and description? Pretty please?

Breaking Benjamin, Linkin Park, Ten Years and Brahms inspire novel-in-progress

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Music and word lovers, join me in the journey where music enhances fiction! If you have a favorite artist/song and would like to see it potentially worked into my novel-in-progress, comment here with the artist name, song title and a bit about its style/genre/lyrics.

I’m mentioning inspiring artist’s songs in The Song of the Ocarina. It’s one of the elements readers liked most about my first novel Rhythms & Muse. (“Look Inside”–even just its first and second pages–on Amazon and you’ll see how songs play into and enhance the plot.)

Allow me to share a few songs mentioned in Ocarina, the first book in my Delfaerune Rhapsody young-adult series. (It’s a trilogy about 7′-tall, wingless, Celtic Fae saving the world in New Zealand.)

• Linkin Park’s “Papercut” relates to a moment when Lark, the heroine, feels a loss of identity.

• Lark, also the faerie realm’s musical prodigy, plays Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” on the piano in her bedroom after returning to the faerie realm from the human world.

• When Noel, the hero, sides with his estranged Dark Fae family, Breaking Benjamin’s “Crawl” will inspire the mood.

• Uncle D’s “True Kiwi Way”is a little New Zealand ditty mentioned when Lark meets her kiwi “familiar.”

• Lark’s Noble Fae sister sings 10 Years’s “Through The Iris”  with her Dark Fae boyfriend.

• Brahms’s “Lullaby” is the first song Lark plays on the ancient magical zither when she holds it again for the first time in three years.