Sandi Kahn Shelton

“One of the best things about being a novelist,” said my friend Beth the other day, “must be that you get to use up all those names you couldn’t give to your kids. Or your dogs and cats.”

She’s right. Picking a name for a character is even more exciting than picking our child’s name, mainly because when you’re naming somebody in a book, you already know the person. You are the only one who knows at the outset of whether he’s an Alessandro or a Jake, whether she’s a Gwendolyn or a Bertha. And even more wonderful is the fact that people just accept whatever name you pick. Nobody says, “What kind of a crazy name is that? Why did you give him THAT name?” like they do when you’re naming a baby.

When it’s a baby, people feel entitled to having their opinions heard about whatever name you picked. My friend Diane, who named her daughter Maisie (surely one of the best names in the English language) spent the first two weeks of the child’s life politely explaining her decision to people on the phone, and then spelling it for them.

But I digress.

This is all to say that I have reached page 125 of the novel I am writing, and suddenly I realized my characters have the wrong names! Does this ever happen to you? You think you know a person well, and then it turns out they had a different name and personality altogether?

The main character was Cate until Friday when she suddenly became Annabelle, not the same kind of person at all. I don’t know why, but when she was Cate-with-a-C, she was a little bit timid, more likely to be walked over than she is now that she’s Annabelle. Before, when she acted out emotionally, the characters around her just reacted with, “Oh, stop it, Cate! You’re always so exasperating.” And now that she’s Annabelle, the people around her seem to know that she’s a little bit flamboyant and surprising.

Some of the minor characters asked for name changes, too, once Annabelle got her true name. Annabelle’s daughter, Tansy, requested something a little more…ordinary. She’s not as airy and drifty as you’d have to be to wear the name Tansy…so she’s now Sophie, and she’s much happier, thank you. Annabelle’s former lover, Dmitri–he turned into Jeremiah…and the contractor’s baby mama blossomed into a Chantelle.

Even more fun, I looked all these up on The Baby Name Wizard: Name Voyager, which you should go to right this minute and type in your own name, all of your friends’ names, and any name you’ve thought of giving your characters and all your children and dogs. It gives you in marvelous graphic detail all you need to know about the popularity of any given name from the 1890’s to the present.

You’ll learn, for instance, that the name John was in the top 10 of names through every decade until the 1990’s, when it started to slip. It’s now reached a new low of being the 20th popular name for boys in 2006. It’s one of the most fun, time-wastingly addictive web sites you’re ever going to come across…and if, like me, you happen to be writing a novel, you can totally justify being on there for hours because you’re researching your characters.  

Tell me: is naming characters (and children) fun for you, or has it been a major source of stress? And do your characters (or children!) ever insist on new names after you’ve gotten to know them better?

At last there’s a game on the internet that actually helps somebody.

It’s a vocabulary game called FreeRice, and if you click here, you will find yourself in a flurry of doing good.

You get a vocabulary word and four choices for its definition–and if you get it right, voila! Not only have you just donated 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program, but, you smart thing you, you get a harder word next time.

A little tally keeps track of all the rice you’ve donated–and meanwhile, if you’re like me, you get quickly hooked on moving up (and yes, sometimes down) the vocabulary ladder. There are 50 levels, but most people don’t get beyond 48, so the site says.

It’s amazing how quickly the rice piles up.

I used to have to play Spider Solitaire before I could truly settle down to a day of writing–but now I’m all about the rice.

I don’t think I’m the only one. My friend Karen says her friend had to delete FreeRice from her computer because she was unable to get her novel written. And Karen herself, a true person of self-control,  has to limit herself to donating 800 grains of rice so that she can get on with her life.

The game started on Oct. 7, 2007…and just yesterday alone 383,730,260 grains of rice were donated.

The number of grains that have been donated since it started?

FOUR BILLION, NINE HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE MILLION, SEVEN HUNDRED SIXTY-THREE THOUSAND, FOUR HUNDRED NINETY.

Whoever thought procrastination could really help out?

So many of us have transplanted ourselves across the country so many times that we don’t know anymore whether we’re Southerners or Northerners.

I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, to parents who were both from old-time Southern families. When I was growing up we had to say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” and eat grits for breakfast. When I was 12, I moved to Southern California, where I discovered that saying “yes ma’am” was considered a sarcastic act that could get you in trouble with teachers. And grits? Nobody out there had heard of them. (I was just as glad.)

Just about the time I’d adjusted to California culture, it was time to move to the Northeast, where I learned to talk about tag sales and bubblers and eat grinders. The cheese that people put on pizza? That’s called moots here (rhymes with foots.) Oh, yeah–and the other weird thing: you have to ASK for it on your pizza. Pizza doesn’t automatically come with moots. Just don’t call it mozz-a-rella when you say it. People laugh and point.

Anyhow, when I came here, people laughed when I talked, saying I talked Southern. And my Southern relatives were horrified whenever I would talk to them: “You sound just like a Yankee, honey. You need to come back HOME.”

So which was I? Dixie or Yankee?

If you’ve got the same problem, you don’t have to sit up nights trying to figure out which one you are. Go click on this link and take The Yankee or Dixie quiz and you can find out once and for all just who you are, based on nothing more than the words you use. (Don’t worry–there’s no quiz about the Civil War or red states vs. blue states.)

It’s all about if you say aunt or ant. Do you call athletic shoes sneakers or tennis shoes? Is a drive-thru liquor store a party barn or a brew-through? (They have DRIVE-THRU LIQUOR STORES?!?)

I’ve lost a lot of my Southern dialect these days, but I still scored 55% Dixie, just from my leftovers.

I’m not sure my Southern relatives would be all that pleased.

This comes, thanks to Dorothy Thompson, who posted it on the Yahoo writers page. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner, too–the times I’ve talked to her on the telephone, I LOVE hearing her accent. That’s the thing I miss, living up here in the cold north: those soft Southern sounds. And, of course, the utilitarianism of the word “y’all.” It really is a word that can’t be replaced with “youse guys.” I’m sorry. It just can’t.

Just when it seemed we didn’t have enough procrastination possibilities, now scientists have come up with a whole new area of tests we need to take time out to administer. We need to study our dogs’ tail wags.

I know. It’s too much.But today the New York Times New York Times reported that there is a new study that says how your dog wags his tail shows how he feels about you.

Apparently, if he loves you and appreciates that you’ve been feeding him all these years and letting him sleep in your bed while you’re at work (oh, you didn’t know he did that?)–his tail will primarily wag to the right when he sees you.

If he’s not all that into you, he’s going to give you the left-direction tail wag.

Who knew that tails are like Ouija boards? But that’s what the scientists have discovered, and they ought to know.

Golden retrievers, of course, have no choice but to love us. It’s built into their molecular structure, and they are powerless not to try to do everything they can to express that great love by slobbering on us, lying down where we are trying to walk, and putting as much of their fur on our clothing as they can.

Even so, I needed to test this out. It’s important when you’re home writing a book to take time out for the Important Things in Life.

Jordie is nearly 12–which is about 5,198 in dog years–so he probably would have been just as happy to forego this kind of testing, but it had to be done. He got up and came over when I called him, wagging a straight-down-the-middle wag. Very non-committal, I thought.

“Come on!” I said to him. “You and I are better friends than that!”

He collapsed so he could think it over better, which is when I took his picture. This it not the picture of Dog Love, in my opinion. It is a dog saying, “Why did you wake me up to get me to wag my tail?”

So I sat down next to him and reminded him of all the lovely, yummy tissues he’s taken out of my trash can, and of the times I’ve let all 75 pounds of him sit in my lap when he’s needed to watch television, and of the times the two of us have hung out in the hallway in the middle of the night, during scary, nerve-rattling thunderstorms.

I got two wags, one sort of right-leaning, the other middle-of-the-road.

So then I had to bring up the big guns, his favorite food: carrots. I explained again how I’m the provider of carrots right out of the refrigerator, and how the Other Adult in the Household doesn’t think a dog should be rewarded with a carrot for, say, every little thing he does, like breathing and allowing himself to be petted behind the ears. And how I disagree with that and think that dogs should get carrots whenever they want them.

“Carrots!” I said. “CARROTS!”

His ears perked up and he gave me about 200 big wags to the right. BINGO! It was love.

The phone rang just then. It was Stephanie, calling between classes from New York to say hi. “What are you doing?” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “Actually, I’m running some tests on whether the dog loves me, based on his tail-wagging direction.”

There was a rather long silence. “Oh,” she said. “Well, as long as you’re keeping busy.”

Technorati tags: dogs, tail-wagging, New York Times

Marmaduke is asleep on the floor, having binged until he passed out. His owner-man explains to a suit-wearing houseguest and his jowls that this is Marmaduke’s version of photosynthesis.

I may be slowly losing my mind, but this site, called “Joe Mathlete Explains Today’s Marmaduke” always, always makes me laugh. Often we’re talking tea-out-of-the-nose laughing.

A guy named Joe Mathlete includes the day’s Marmaduke cartoon which he painstakingly dissects and analyzes in 500 words or less. While the cartoon itself has never once been funny, the explanation of it can make you lose muscle control for a time. 

That’s all. Back to work now.