Today I have been going back and revisiting Houses of Cards for the first time in about 3 weeks. In order to get myself back in the head of my heroine and hero, I’ve been rereading through from the beginning (as prior to the 3 week sabbatical, I had made some major changes). Well I’m 120 pages into the reread and I have a confession to make. I dislike the name of my heroine. Michaela MacLachlan. This was her second name. She had a different name for the first 6 or 7 years of writing, but it was similar to my name (purely coincidentally, actually) and I didn’t want anyone to think that I was writing about myself, so I changed it a few months ago. But this isn’t her name. It doesn’t feel right and it’s been grating on me ALL DAY as I reread. I still don’t want to change it back to the original name, but I don’t know what I want to change it to. I’ve been playing with the Random Name Generator and making a list of names I like, and I’ve got quite a list of fun ones for future and supporting characters–but still haven’t found a name for Michaela. I had great difficulty picking her second name, and I confess I was not entirely pleased with it when I settled on Michaela. So sue me. I needed a name so I could keep going. But as I mentioned in my first post on this subject, I have a hard time writing if the name isn’t right. At the moment I don’t even have any contenders. As I sprained my wrist in the course of some overenthusiastic pruning with my new loppers yesterday, typing isn’t too easy just now, so I don’t feel too awful name searching while I ice it. I hope to come up with something I am happy with before bed.
As an aside, my site hits have suddenly shot up in the last couple of days, and I have no idea why. But thanks for stopping by!