Bringing it on Home

I do not spend much time on names for characters. I also spend a great deal of time on names for characters.

To clear this up, or at least do my duty of making it more muddled, there are times when I let the first name that passes by hold. Sam Delarosa and Eric Parker are perfect examples of the first name chosen as the first that slipped by. Leopold Tarkenfeld was as well known, along with the primacy who appear in these Tales. Nearly all the Sultans have such names. Any name is often as good as any other name and this holds true more often than not. Most characters can survive such and it's easiest this way. Why beat yourself up over a name unless there is reason.

With reason, I'll mention a character who will make her appearance here in this blog shorty though in the story she appears, "The Woman in the Tree", I did not know who she was. I did not know who she was until January of 2020. Before then, she was just the woman in the tree whom none could identify. When I learned who she was, where she hailed from, well, I had to invest seriously in order to find appropriate names in the language of that culture (Sami) and then, amongst those found, hope one sparks and demands its use. That is how Násti Harju came to be, specifically with the irony found in the meaning along. A proper introduction to here will be found three years later in a story called "Hrafns". Sikyatavo is another example of a name researched as are Łitso Gah and Niu.

Some names are researched for ethnic consistency but that search for meaning is moot and thus just chosen by what announces itself to my reading eye. I do get a little bit of a kick from this though for it is only I who knows which is of meaning and which is not. If my plan holds, my audience will always have this point on which to argue. The best I can say is keep it clean and no weapons, please (unless you do the whole gladiator dress-up bit).

Then there are the place-holder names, ones I'll start with in organization and prep and then stick it out. "A Memory of Flame" is a perfect example of this where, with a physical descriptive clue and an appropriate historical time, I hopefully leave my Reader softly whistling "Suicide is Painless" beneath their breath the rest of the day. A Tale titled "Waiting For Ants" saw a trio needing names and those derived from a term 50 years yet coined lent their true ones. In the last story I wrote in 2017, finishing in one weekend while sitting on that delightfully hard chair in the room I stay when I'm chaperoning my daughter's visits to her mother, this proved the case for a story titled "Homecoming".

"Homecoming" is a story with five prominent characters named. There is a 6th, but I did not know her name then. I just wanted to make sure she was seen so that I would not forget her. I needed to remember her, to take her finally out of my first notebook and let her at least be known. Her story will be written on New Years Eve, 2018, in a family-oriented story titled "She Leaves Tonight".

Of those five, two were old friends, Sultans in fact. Another was an orderly at the Pioneer's Home in Prescott, AZ. This is a storied institution who serves those of Arizona mining heritage. His name is one chosen from the flurry that passed through my head when I needed a name. Yup, just reached in and pulled one out that was as good as anything. Just note that regardless how his name might indicate, he is not the Colonel in this story.

It was the names of the two primary characters which I needed and offered place names for my own enjoyment. They were just two bums, hobos who had been palling around for the last couple years since the Depression began. I had not known how they met at the writing of "Homecoming" and while now I do, then I just knew they stuck together, an odd couple who were in such desperate straits that shared the one blanket they had of necessity.

This is a simple yarn about a simple job two desperate men accepted to drive the old friend of an elderly resident of that Pioneer's Home back to the ruins of the old town once his so that he may pass at peace where those he cared most for were lost. All Ernest and Norbert were needed to do was this... take the old, dying man back to his home before he passes, to let him know he made it back and take a photograph as proof in order to be paid. Take that venerable gaunt back to his home and lay him on a bed of straw so his last moments were at least in comfort. They were told to hurry for the old man, confirmed by that odd couple, was at Death's door and payment would be deferred without proof.

I have seen this photograph. I have seen it and I have shuddered at the impossibilities it implies. That old man, a venerable gaunt lay reposed on a broken throne of straw, a fitting seat for a Sultan fallen so far. He is not idle in that image taken in the first rays of light to crest that mountain. Indeed, the details of one of his hands wave in blurred focus. The discerning eye, if looked at close enough or beneath a glass to magnify, will note the profusion of small, grotesque bugs infesting that straw and crawling over the panicked face of the subject. There is terror clearly represented in those eyes strained wide and his mouth is agape in howl, a small contingent of those pests gathered at that orifice and falling forth. Behind that throne, clear in monochromatic glory, is the curious aspect of a child in tattered nightgown, a cracked mask of porcelain upon her face.

 This is the photograph that provided these two the means to their future, the investment required to raise themselves from the stakes this nation had left them when it sank upon its fiscally devastated knees. This was the hope those two held forth as they collected the wages of their sin. This is the haunt that will at last drive these two men back up this mountain and into a nightmare anew... specifically the nightmare of trying to turn a 39 line Renaissance poetry form into a 78,000 word novel of which the fool behind this keyboard is deferring to write blog posts.

"Homecoming" was the 18th Tale of the Bajazid, completed at the end of October 2017 in a cramped little room hosting a delightfully uncomfortable chair. It stands at 4,970 words, a length it did not feel like when writing. Indeed, this Tale moves with a steady pace, so much so that it feels shorter, at least to he whom this story was told to in that cloistered room.

"Homecoming" also marks an omission and an error of consistency for upon its completion, I foolishly decided that since I had met my goal and was now able to lord over a comfortable stack of black document binders, I could and should rest up for the coming year. Because of this, I let two months pass without serious consideration. I consider that an error, one I learned exactly one year later what such time could have conquered.

There was one more project that I worked on following "Child of the Earth", inspired from that story and the beginning of a project I hope this year to finish. That is for the post next though, the concept as it began and the increasing challenges I would keep adding to it.