Things That Go Bump In The Night...

...won't leave me alone. I'm writing this book during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and I'm nearly half-way through it when a secondary character tells me he's a werecougar. WTF? I thought I was writing a straight contemporary erotic romance, and now all of a sudden I have a shape-shifting mountain lion?

Where the hell did that come from? But if that's what he says he is, who am I to argue? By the way, I'm also on the third name for him, but at least he seems happy with this one. Finally. I started out with Jake O'Dell, but the hero's last name is O'Malley and I figured that would be too confusing. So I went with Brock Ballentyne. (I love the name Brock: it's so... manly.)

Nope. He didn't like that. I wrote maybe three pages using that name, when he pretty much stopped everything and snarled, "That's not my name. What the hell kind of name is that for a shape-shifter? That's a rich-boy pussy name." So, even though technically in NaNoWriMo you're not supposed to do this sort of thing, I brought out my book of character names. I knew I wouldn't be able to move forward with the story if I didn't have this guy's name right. I went through Anglo-Saxon names (some good, guttural names there). Nuttin. Moved on to Celtic, then English, then Irish. Still nada.

I don't even think I saw this name on any page, but all of a sudden it was there very clearly in my mind. Kane. It suits him. Tall, rangy but muscular, dark blonde hair worn a little long and several days' growth of beard that tries but fails to cover a delicious cleft chin. (Think Viggo. Yummmm!)

Okay, so I have the first name. What about the last? Ballentyne just wasn't working. It didn't fit him. It didn't fit him being a shape-shifter. (Not to mention that he didn't like it.) I needed something equally brusque-sounding. Two syllables, for a good flow. And it hit me. Maddox. Kane Maddox.

And the writing re-commenced.

Man, I love it when it all falls together.


(NaNoWriMo word count is now 2,190 ahead, only 26,474 to go. And another 600 on the short story, which is going to end up as a short novella, I think.)