Names Part 1: Near Future

Reminder for near future sci fi writers: if your story is set like 50 years from now, and your characters are adults, they will have names like Brooklyn and Castiel. If your characters are teenagers, their parents will have names like that. - Shared Memory From Sept. 19, 2016

Disclaimer: The following post is based almost entirely on the US and could be wildly wrong for anywhere else. Please take with 325mg of salt.

I made this post over a year ago, and in retrospect Brooklyn seems to have been something of a flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. That's a little sad for me, because I like the name, but I digress. To understand the concept we're exploring today, you need to start with two basic facts.

1. In the US, about 75% of people have names that are in the top 1000 for the year they were born. Since 75% of everyone is way more than 1000 people, that means that even names below the Top 100 will belong to a lot of people, and feel like normal names to people who have them or are of an age group with those who do. (As an aside, if I ever hear someone suggest that Stephanie was a "rare" name in the 1920s again, I'm going to throw something. It was like 128th whatever year Steve Rogers is supposed to have been born. There were plenty of Stephanies. Not as many as there were Stephens, or even Steves, but it wouldn't have sounded odd to anyone.)

2. Your idea of what constitutes a "normal" name is heavily informed by the year you were born. This is a little less true if you mostly grew up around Catholics, because of the rule about needing the name of a saint somewhere in there. (I know that rule isn't like, universally observed, but it has a certain norming effect nonetheless). If you grew up in the 20th or 21st century (and if you grew up before that, please email me, I'd like a word), you encountered two groups of names while your languagebrains were still squishy. Those of your immediate age peers, people within at most 5 years of your own age, and those of your parents, probably the generation immediately before yours, although obviously some people's parents are from the one before that, or the other end of their own. That's going to be your default for what normal is, especially your age peers, because you probably interacted with a lot more of them. Someone 5 years younger or older than you has a slightly different sense of what is a normal name. Someone twenty years older or younger than you might have a totally different one.

So let's talk about that thing where 75% of people have names in the top 1000 for their birth year. If your name is anywhere in the top 10, you were likely Jennifer S. or Connor Y. for at least a year in elementary school. If your name is in the top 100, you likely had a nickname to differentiate you from the other 5 or 6 of you at your high school. (I went to a high school of about 300 people. We had 8 Alexes and 8 Megans, not counting an Alexandria who didn't go by Alex.) If your name is in the top 1000, you probably didn't get strange looks or asked to spell it, unless it was a Zack/Zach situation. If you're in the 25% of people without top 1000 names, you're unusual, although obviously unusual is relative and whether you're a Shiloh or a Z'ev depends as much on where you live as exactly how rare your name is. (No, I don't know how to pronounce Z'ev.)

Anyway, this has Implications for near-future sci-fi and, to a lesser extent, any young adult fiction in contemporary settings. Most name trends are cyclical, so in the far future you can do whatever you want, and obviously in second world fantasy none of this is likely to apply. But if your story is set between 2025 and 2070, and you have teenagers or young adults named Jennifer, it's going to feel very strange. (That's not an arbitrary example. There were fewer Jennifers per capita born in 2016 than in any year since 1945, and its popularity shows no signs of picking back up). Obviously there's some room for having teenage Jennifers in the mid-late 21st century, because naming trends are not absolute commandments. But it's pretty common to see near future sci-fi written by Gen-Xers or Baby Boomers where, due to an entirely reasonable desire to avoid weird, made up names, everyone is called Jennifer or Amy or Natalie, and it just sounds wrong, unless there's a reason for it. (If your dystopian government feels that human civilization peaked in the 1950s, it is not at all unreasonable to have all your characters have names that were popular in the 1950s). 

Figure out roughly when your characters were born, and if it's a past year, look up what the most popular names were and extrapolate accordingly. If they were born in the future, look at patterns and try to extrapolate. Month names tend to be popular one at a time, so was 2045 a time for Aprils? Junes? Was it perhaps a time for Septembers or Februarys? Names associated with scandal and bad things tend to lose popularity for a while and pick it back up eventually, at a rate proportional to the severity and how strongly the person's first name was connected with it. There probably won't be a lot of Adolfs yet in the 2020s, and I doubt there will be many Donalds either, but we might start seeing more Monicas again. In the US, names from countries we were recently at war with also see a substantial dropoff. (The popularity of the name Adolf actually started to decline after World War One). 

This is actually also something to consider in second-world fantasy with a large cast. If you have more than 50 named characters subject to the same naming conventions, you will probably have some characters with the same name. Consider which names are common and why. If there are named historical figures, won't some people from the same place or culture be named after them? Depending on the size of their influence, might characters in *other* cultures be named after them, with differences in pronunciation and spelling depending on language differences? Actually, names in second-world fantasy really ought to have their own post. 

Wednesday update?! 10-18-2017

It's possible that going forward these will just be Wednesday updates, since apparently that's the day that they end up happening.

Reading
Not a whole lot. I have now listened to all three of the Bone Street Rumba novels, although not in order. Got partway through the audiobook of Another Fine Myth, which I have not read before, and then got distracted. I'm partway through Magic's Child. The ongoing lack of explanations is becoming frustrating. I should probably just get through the damn thing, but I have no idea how it's going to get to any conclusion under than "magic is evil" in the page space available without resorting to a massive exposition dump. We'll see, though.

Writing
Nothing but more worldbuilding notes. Fleshing out all kinds of details of the protagonist's home country, so that I don't have to be making those decisions on the fly while actual plot is happening. Trying to work out some details about what role magic plays in different jobs.

Publishing
I read a few more pieces of slush, including one that I was hoping would be a lot better than it was. I don't have anything that I can extrapolate out to a general observation about publishing, but I will say this, for writers: Your basic idea is boring. Be specific. Particularization will get you everywhere. 

Worldbuilding 1: Languages

I've been going back and forth for a while now on whether to do a post about Vulgarlang. I've found it immensely helpful as a worldbuilding tool, but I worry about seeming like I'm advertising something. But it's been an immensely helpful worldbuilding tool for me, and I've only used the free version anyway. This also seems like a good opportunity to talk about worldbuilding and choice paralysis, especially in epic fantasy.
There are a couple approaches to worldbuilding an epic fantasy story (I'm using the term broadly here: it's in a world that's not this one, there's magic, and the technology is usually less advanced, or at least very different). You can start in one place and build outward, you can build from the top down, or you can start with "Like [Existing World] but..." and address the implications of whatever the differences are as you go. There is such a thing as a generic epic fantasy setting, although it looks more like D&D and less like Lord of the Rings than most people outside the genre seem to be aware of, but there are always gonna be differences. In any case, starting something and then messing with it is to some extent a different process than what I'm talking about here, although some of the same difficulties certainly apply.
When you're creating a world from the ground up, you have to make a lot of decisions. Big decisions like what the continents are shaped like (you did remember to have more than one continent exist?) and whether there's a common language that most people speak. Fantasy specific decisions like are there dragons, and how does the magic work. Incredibly small decisions like what do they make knife handles out of. (In my protagonist's home country, mostly apricot wood). I'm realizing I should do a whole series of posts on this, because different kinds of decisions require different processes, at least when I do them. Anyway, one of the things you have to do is make a shitton of linguistic decisions. How do people's names sound (in each of the different cultures that you have)? What are the norms around last names, middle names, and nicknames? Terms of address? When you have things that don't exist in our world, are you going to make up names for them, or approximate them in English? (Or whatever language you're writing the story in, but I'm gonna just say English going forward). How are you going to keep them feeling consistent without making up an entire language (or several)? Should you just make up a language? Should you finish that before you start writing?
Some people are probably not affected by this problem as badly as I am, because most people don't seem to share my difficulties in making arbitrary decisions. And if your able to make a few arbitrary choices early on, it can simplify things considerably. You just decide on impulse or instinct what to call a few things, or what some of your main characters' names are and maybe what they mean, and that gives you some parameters for what words sound like, and a few roots to build on. (For an example of what I'm pretty sure is an incomplete language managing to feel consistent anyway, you might look at the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time, and particularly the words and phrases in which "shadar" or "shaidar" appear.) But I'm really bad at naming people, and even worse at naming places and things. I have enough linguistics to be kinda perfectionistic about how a constructed language ought to work, but not enough to know which of the things I do know about it would inform that stuff, especially given that a lot of how living languages develop is the result of crazy random happenstance which I would have to invent, because I'm constitutionally incapable of just saying "Oh, yeah, this word works differently because of random circumstances".
So I would need to build an entire language, if not in its whole vocabulary then at least all the grammar and syntax and a lot of root words, and most of those decisions would be totally arbitrary because whether the preferred word order is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object isn't gonna inform or be informed by much else in the worldbuilding, and it would take months and be exhausting.
And this is what makes Vulgarlang so damn useful. Basically, it makes random languages. The full version apparently gives you quite a lot of vocabulary and is more customizable, but I don't use it because if I needed a bunch of words and that level of control I would just build the whole thing myself. The free version gives you like 200 vocabulary words, but it also gives you the rules. Word order, what sounds exist, what word ending you use to get from a verb (so like, from "paint" (v) to "painter"), what sounds can or can't go together, emphasis patterns, a bunch of stuff that I want to have exist so I can build from it, but have no particular reason to create.
(There is nothing wrong with constructing a language yourself from scratch, but it can eat up months of writing time, and trying to do it has absolutely caused me to stall out on projects).
This is especially useful in my epic fantasy novel. If I only needed one language, I'd probably just break out the linguistics textbook and do it myself, even if I had to make some dice-rolly tables to randomize arbitrary decisions. (I love dice-rolly tables). But it's a big world. I'm gonna need dozens. Not in their entirety, but enough for names, place-names, plausible grammatical mistakes when people are speaking unfamiliar languages. Different cultures use different elemental magics, so there's gonna be terminology confusion.
So like, the lesson for the day is that it's ok to offload massive piles of work that aren't central to the story, if you have a way of doing it, and in this case I do.

Tuesday Update On Wednesday 10/10/2017

One of the things this blog is for is so that I can get a feel for what actually affects my ability to write, versus what's just unpleasant or time consuming. (Even in a really busy week, I can hit my minimum goal of one non-update post every week if I'm able to think and write at all). This past week was one of the roughest on record, and was apparently of the former sort. I'm yet another week behind on just about everything, I have bruises that I don't entirely know how they happened, and I didn't even think about blogging. I did actually get some writing done, but that was earlyish in the week.

Reading
Well, I finished the audiobook of Ashes of Honor, and...yeah, that's about it. I think. Unless finishing the audiobook of Empire of Ivory was sometime last week as well. Aside from work related stuff, the only reading I've done of an actual book was getting a ways into Magic Lessons. The world is still intriguing as hell, but the ratio of "And then another thing went wrong, delaying any further explanation for dozens more pages because Plot" to actual explanations is becoming frustrating. Also, Mere's secretiveness around some things makes sense, but she's secretive about everything, and that doesn't make sense, unless not only the character but the text itself is drastically misleading us about her motivations. At least it's a quick enough read that even when I'm stuck for hundreds of pages without an answer, it still doesn't need to be more than a day if I actually sit down and read.

Writing
Apparently I only did about an hour and a half of writing last week (94 minutes), but I got a bunch of worldbuilding work done, figuring out details like what colors are associated with what elements, and what they do about dead people. I don't even know if anyone is going to die in the book yet, but I like to have as much of things worked out in advance as possible. Of course, all of this is still only for the culture the protagonist comes from, but I probably won't build the others too intensely until I'm closer to having them actually show up in the story. I will say that starting on the ground in one spot and building out seems to work a lot better than a top-down approach.

Publishing
Very marginal progress reading slush. Little bit of movement on a project I'm not at liberty to disclose. 

Tuesday Update on Wednesday 10/4

A non-update post was supposed to go up over the weekend, but either the Blogger app is misleading me, or I messed up the post scheduling. Anyway. 

Reading
I read Magic or Madness over the weekend. It's Australian YA fantasy. Ever since, I guess probably Lovecraft, there's been this idea that using magic can make you go crazy. I've never really liked that; first of all, it strikes me as nihilistic, that this very cool thing is inherently damaging, and moreover damaging because we are unable to handle it, and I dislike the idea that magic is like, alien to humans, because most humans believe in magic more than they don't, if you scratch the surface. But also, alien things aren't what make human brains go wonky. Something totally unfamiliar and hard to understand will provoke curiosity or fear, but it's not... destabilizing, the way that, say, watching our fellow humans do horrible things for completely normal, human reasons is. (That's not meant to be Topical; I've had a thing about it for years now). Anyway, Magic or Madness neatly subverts that. If you have magic, not using it will make you go crazy. Using it shortens your lifespan, but that's plausible, if none of the magic users know how to use energy from outside themselves. 

Writing
I have a rough draft of the first chapter of my fantasy novel. It's not done, but it exists. Of course, there's a bit where it still just says [transition] in brackets, but I firmly believe it's better to do that and keep moving forward than to let yourself stall out on a promising piece because you don't know how to get your characters from one place to another.  I ended up dumping the flashback scene that was supposed to somehow help me with that, although obviously I still have what I wrote of it, and it's possible it will turn out to belong there after all. Total writing time last week was 4 hours and 48 minutes, bringing the total for the 20,000 hours project to 22.61 hours.

Publishing
It's literary award nomination season, so I've been finding out about deadlines and stuff. The Pushcart Prize has a really unhelpful website. Haven't read as much slush as I'd like to have. 

ETA: Post that was supposed to go up on the 29th has now been posted, and apparently postdated.