At the Beginning

My intro blog talked about how The Messengers of Yesh series began and how in December 2007 I named the characters and worked out the final concept for the series. The actual writing would begin Jan 1, 2008, but before getting to that and the weirdness of life afterward, I want to spend a few minutes on the character names. Nearly every name in the series was chosen by meaning except for very, very few minor characters. At first I used various sites to choose them but finally settled on babyhold.com as my go to site. For surnames I went elsewhere. Here are the names of the main characters with the meaning in parentheses.

Adina(slender) - She's a cheerleader, so I had fun with this one.
Marion(bitter) - He's an ex war vet still trying to shake off the experience.
Deirdre(sadness) - She's a rape victim who's still struggling.
Kayley - Kayley was named for somebody in RL and was originally something else. I had to change it to Kayley. She's the only one of the main characters who is "normal". In the beginning Messengers was a practice writing project, which is the only reason I used the name of someone I know.
Ben/Benjamin - Ben was named after Hawkeye in MASH. The meaning wasn't looked at.
Joe/Joseph - Joe is the every man name. The meaning wasn't looked at. You should never name the main character Joe. It's one of the rules. The original first line was, It was a dark and stormy night, but I changed it after an agent with a very outstanding reputation told me in so many words to go to a fiery afterlife. Maybe breaking two rules was too much. ;)

In the Bible there are two brothers named Benjamin and Joseph. The names had nothing to do with that. There's nothing there to read into my selection of those names. It's just the way it worked out.
Etan(steady, strong) - He's a priest but not like priests on our earth. He's a good guy.
Ceinwen Flannah - Ceinwen, an attractive redhead, becomes the love interest of one of the characters. The name means lovely redhead. This one made me laugh. Sometimes, it's the little things in life that are so much fun.
I should note that even though a couple of characters were named for people in RL they were not based on those people. Ben doesn't live in a tent and make jokes all day, etc.

I had more fun with the minor characters such as the shepherd named Schaffer, which means shepherd. Sure, most people don't know what names mean, but somewhere out there someone is going to know at least one and either laugh or go hmm, what's going on here.

In addition to the names, there are various inside jokes and references throughout the series intended for different audiences. If something is phrased strangely or doesn't sound quite right, it might be that there's a joke behind it or at the very least a deeper reference.

http://www.messengersofyesh.com/

That's MY Toilet Paper

December was as bad a month as I've had in a long time, so there was no bloggage going on. But 2012 is here. This is my year, the year when everything comes together. Things are only going to get better. To celebrate the new year, I'd like to talk about one of my all time favorite inventions: toilet paper.

In 2002 PBS ran a show called Frontier House. The episodes are on YouTube. It was sort of a reality TV show but PBS style. Three families had to live the same way people did in 1883 in an authentic 1883 setting for I forget how long and see if they could survive. I like archaeology and live in reality, so it sounded interesting. They had to leave all modern conveniences behind. All of them.

The show was on a long time ago. I've forgotten most of what happened, but one thing I'll never forget is the toilet paper situation. In the distant past people wiped with things like sticks. The phrase "the wrong end of the stick" comes from that. The wrong end was the poopy end. By 1883 technology had improved. However, there was still no toilet paper. They used rags. Each member of the family had his or her own rag that had to be kept clean by that individual. If I remember correctly, the rags were kept in the outhouse, and each person would pick the right one by sight identification. I'm not sure what they did in the winter. The show didn't obsess over the rags the way I did.

They had no bleach. They had a river and whatever soap could be made in 1883. How many times a day does a human use the bathroom? Realistically, how clean could they get those rags? After thinking about things like that for a while, I walked away from Frontier House with a deep, abiding appreciation for toilet paper that stays with me to this day. Toilet paper is awesome! I would give up TV before I gave up toilet paper. You can have my toilet paper when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

http://www.messengersofyesh.com/

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog! The Messengers of Yesh is a fantasy series that began with an idea in late 1991 or early 1992. I'd finished my first book and was brainstorming ideas for the next one. One of my rough concepts was about a group of college students who get pulled to this world with elves and dwarves and derivative stuff like that, kind of Dungeons and Dragons. It was too generic, and I didn't know how to make it work in a way that would be new or interesting. The whole elves and dwarves/kids go to another world thing had been done to death by the early 90s. Done. To. Death. That's why people do vampires today. :) I put it on the back burner and started on something SF. Life got in the way, and the elf and dwarf book never got written. Every once in a great while, I would think about it, but nothing workable came to mind. I was older and past the D&D phase. The whole concept wasn't where I was going in life.

Fast forward to 2007. In October I suffered a tragedy that had me thinking about my life. In November I had a health scare that turned out to be expensive nothing. Then one day in December out of the blue, the old elves and dwarves book idea just popped into my head but with a completely different take. What if the college students went to a world where God is real? Hang on. I believe in God. I'm not saying God isn't real. But what if they went to a world where God was more obvious in day to day affairs than ours. What would it be like to go to a temple where God was actually there? Hmm, I've never seen that done before. I started thinking about it. I wrestled with the concept, and it changed from that to what would be the final concept. There would be God. There would be religion. But the words God, faith and devil would never appear in the book. Religion would not be what most people are used to. To find out how that works, why not drop by the web site at the top of the page and check out a preview at Amazon.com? ;)

Throughout December I wrestled with this new idea and came up with the names for the major characters and who they were. There would be six students who would not all be teenagers. Some would be older returning students but not too old. I worked out various scenes for the book, etc. I hadn't written fiction in a long time. I was rusty, so my plan was that this would be a trial run to get back into the swing of things. It didn't work out that way, but that will have to wait for a future blog.

This plan for this blog is that it's going to be about the series but not to analyze the series. It's a place to post updates about what's going on behind the scenes in a way that won't clutter up the main web site. I want people who like the series to be able to drop by and get extra info. It's also about the making of the series. Maybe it will appeal to writers to a certain extent because it concerns writing, too. I'm not sure. As I'm writing this, books 1 and 2 are available for the Kindle, but I haven't started publicity. I don't know if people will like the series. Sometimes, I think it's too religious for the secular and too secular for the religious. I don't know what's going to happen with it, but the blog for it starts here. :)