un/Fair by Steven Harper
Publication Date: September 6, 2016
So when Ryan November wakes up on
his eleventh birthday with the unexpected ability to see the future, he braces
himself for trouble. But even his
newfound power doesn't anticipate that the fair folk--undines, salamanders,
gnomes, and sylphs--want him dead, dead, dead.
Ryan races to defend himself and his family against unrelenting danger
from the fairy realm so he can uncover the truth about his family history--and
himself.
Except as Ryan's power grows,
the more enticing the fairy realm becomes, forcing him to choose between order
and chaos, power and family.
And for an
autistic boy, such choices are never cut and dry.
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How do you name your
characters?
That's actually quite a process. Readers hang a lot on a
name. They form a mental image of a character based on the name,
long before they get a description or personality. The name is the
first impression, and I don't take it lightly.
I usually look at a long list of first names and see what grabs
me. I make a list of five or six, then test them out to see which is
the easiest to type--a major consideration. Once I've settled on one
I like, I move on to the last name. The last name should generally
have a different number of syllables in it, so if the first name has two
syllables (like Ryan does in un/Fair), the last name should have
one or three. The last name should be easy to say, spell, and
pronounce. It should also be memorable without being so weird that
it yanks the reader out of the story. In Ryan's case, I settled on
the last name November fairly quickly. It fit all the requirements,
it sounds cool when you it aloud, and it has the bonus quality of sounding
vaguely supernatural. Win!
I avoid names that end in -s like Ross or Bess because phrases like
"Ross's shirt" or "Bess's sword" look awkward and are
difficult to say in an audio book.
More than once I've auctioned off the right to name a character for
charity. When a secretary at the school where I teach was diagnosed
with breast cancer, her finances were devastated. The teachers
started a pool so she could get by. I announced a bidding war for
the right to name a character in my then-current steampunk novel (The
Impossible Cube) with the proceeds going straight to help Linda the
secretary, and it raised a huge amount of money. So you can
sometimes find characters lurking in my novels who are named after real people.
Minor character
names are pulled out of a metaphorical hat. I look at the keyboard,
choose a key, and type a name starting with that letter. Usually it
works, and I don't have to drop everything to look up names while I'm writing.
Giveaway Information: Contest ends September 23, 2016
- One (1) winner will receive a scrabble tile book cover charm (US ONLY)
- Five (5) winners will receive a digital copy of un/FAIR by Steven Harper (INT)
Steven Harper/Piziks is the author of multiple fantasy and
science fiction novels written for adults, notably the Clockwork Empire and
Silent Empire series for Roc as Steven Harper and movie novelizations and tie
ins for Pocket Books as Steven Piziks (IDENTITY, THE EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING,
GHOST WHISPERER: THE PLAUGE ROOM). He’s
also the father of an autistic son.
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