Karen Sandler

Tag: kayla

  • Who Are You (woot-woot)?

    Tankborn smlThis week, YA Highway asks the questions How do you decide on names? Would you ever name a character after a friend/family member/ex?

    Back when I was writing romances, I wanted everyday names for my characters. So I kept a baby names book near my computer. I’d flip through it for my hero’s or heroine’s name, looking for one that seemed to match the character’s personality. When I found the right name, a little bell would go off inside me. I could see the character that much more clearly.

    When I started writing the Tankborn series, I couldn’t use a baby name book anymore. The Tankborn trilogy is set hundreds of years in the future. To set the tone for the world, the names needed to be a little more exotic than what’s on offer in the naming books. Also, I had a multi-ethnic cast and I needed names that would suit them. So I had to rely on the Web, and sites that listed, for instance, Brahmin or Chinese or Zimbabwe given names and their meanings. Here’s one of my fave sites for finding international names.

    Kayla, the name of my main character in Tankborn, isn’t super unusual. At least it isn’t now. When I first came up with it, back when I was writing the movie script that later became Tankborn, I thought I’d made up the name Kayla. Not so much.

    When I wrote the first book, I did make up some of the names of other characters: Tala, Jal, Tanti, Quila. In real life, people make up names all the time for their children, why wouldn’t they in my future world? I used made up names mostly for GENs, sometimes for lowborns. And just as with Kayla, sometimes the names I thought were made up, that originated with me, were actually “real” names (Pia and Risa come to mind).

    For my trueborns, I used real names of various ethnicities. There’s Devak (Indian), my main male character, Devak’s friend, Junjie (Chinese), Devak’s father and mother, Ved (Indian) and Rasia, (Indian). Raashida (African), is an important character in Awakening, the upcoming follow-on to Tankborn.

    Do I ever use the names of real people in my books? Yes, although I don’t match the character to the real person. I just “borrow” the real name because I like it and it works for my book. I borrowed Zul (Devak’s great-grandfather) and Azad (Devak’s dead half-brother) from people I actually know.

    How about you? If you write, how do you come up with those character names? If you’re a reader, have you ever stumbled across a name that didn’t seem to fit the character, or a name that was absolutely perfect?

  • The Trouble With Trilogies

    Back in my romance writing days, I didn’t write trilogies.  The love stories I wrote were one-offs. Although half of my Harlequin books (Counting on a Cowboy, A Father’s Sacrifice, His Baby to Love, The Three-Way Miracle, and Her Baby’s Hero) were all set in the same small town of Hart Valley and had some overlapping characters, there weren’t any connections between the stories. There were two books I did for Harlequin (Their Second-Chance Child and The Family He Wanted) that were part of the Fostering Family mini-series, where the second book picked up where the first left off. Characters from the first book were mentioned in the second, but the main story revolved around a new hero and heroine.

    Then along came Tankborn. When I first wrote Tankborn, I had a hazy idea of possibly writing a trilogy. Then when I signed with my agents and we were getting the manuscript ready for submission, they suggested I write up short blurbs for a second and third book. When we sold to Lee and Low/Tu Books, the original contract was only for the one book, but we later sold them two other books to complete the trilogy.

    So my foray into writing my first real trilogy actually commenced with the second Tankborn book. With book one, I was blissfully ignorant of how anything I wrote might have a ripple effect into books two and three. Although I’d still had that hazy idea of writing two more books, I completed Tankborn and saw it into print before I ever wrote word one of the second book, Awakening.

    And that was when the hand-shackles went on. From the moment I started Awakening, I had to constantly keep in mind the Tankborn universe. The book was already printed, many, many people had already read it, and while most readers probably wouldn’t notice if some little detail wasn’t consistent, someone somewhere would.

    So I certainly couldn’t change the planet my characters were on from Loka to somewhere else. I could not make the sky blue instead of green. There had to be two suns in the sky, not one. And seycats and droms had to have six legs, not four or eight. In other words, I couldn’t fudge or goof. The first book was already in print, there for anyone to refer to and point out my mistakes.

    Still, as I wrote Awakening, I thought it was pretty cool having the Tankborn universe already defined. I didn’t have to re-invent the wheel. If I couldn’t remember whether seycats had stripes or spots, or just how tall a genetically engineered drom was, I had the best reference in the world–the first book.

    So I finished Awakening feeling pretty good about things. My editor and I had a great round of developmental edits that strengthened all my characters and added some complexity to the plot. Then it was time for the copy editor.

    That’s when the oopsies started. For instance, Risa, a very minor character in Tankborn, is a prominent secondary character throughout Awakening. As I fleshed out her character in the second book, I gave her red hair mixed with gray. I didn’t bother to check in Tankborn to see if I’d mentioned what color hair Risa had. But the copy editor did check. And pointed out that in Tankborn, Risa is described as having dark hair. For continuity’s sake, Risa’s hair couldn’t be red.

    This may seem very minor (and it was for the most part). But I was a little sad at the necessity because Risa has a pet seycat (a wild feline indigenous to the planet Loka) and seycat coats are red (with black/grayish markings). I’d really liked the idea that Risa’s hair matched the seycat’s. That had to go away with the change of hair color, which required a bit more tweaking than a simple change from red to dark.

    The second blooper was an incorrect character name. There’s an important character who plays a very minor role in Tankborn, a slightly more important role in Awakening, and will play a major role in the third book of the trilogy, Revolution. I used the wrong name for her throughout Awakening. I hadn’t remembered that one of the last changes we made in Tankborn before it went to print was to change that character’s name. Again, it was a good catch on the part of the copy editor that saved us from using the wrong name and really confusing readers.

    Alas, there is an error/inconsistency that was my fault that sneaked its way into Tankborn. I only noticed it as I was working on Revolution. There’s a shrub on the planet Loka called a sticker bush. At least that’s what I was calling it all through Awakening, what I thought I’d called it in Tankborn. But it turns out that at some point, I decided to call the sticker bush a prickle bush instead. And I wasn’t even consistent at that, because while I call it a prickle bush twice in Tankborn, I call it a sticker bush once.

    So what to do? Prickle or sticker? I realized I liked sticker bush better and made an executive decision to call it that, inconsistency be damned.

    Live and learn. Continuity in trilogies has proved to be a tricky business. I’ll have another chance to play around with this in my upcoming mystery series from Angry Robot/Exhibit A, which begins with Clean Burn. Since it’s not science fiction, it should be a piece of cake, right?

    Right.

  • Tankborn Outtakes

    Back around October 2009, I finished work on a manuscript titled GENeration, a young adult science fiction book. I knew it wasn’t finished finished. I didn’t yet have an agent or editor for the book, but I knew that when I did, they would have their say in further re-writes. But I thought the book was ready enough to start querying agents. It turned out I was deluding myself, but I nevertheless e-mailed out my first query on October 13, 2009.

    I’d been sending out queries for about a month and a half when it occurred to me that having a beta reader look it over would be a really great idea (gee, ya think?). Luckily, I could keep the read in the family via my younger son. He wasn’t exactly swimming in spare time (he was in the third year of his PhD in economics), but he’s a fast reader and brutally honest. He got back to me at the end of November 2009 with suggestions for some pretty extensive changes.

    Of course, I’d already sent the complete manuscript out to a few agents, including the agent who eventually took me on. Hindsight being what it is, this was when I realized I really hadn’t been ready to start querying. Yes, I wish I’d thought to send the book to my son before that first query. But water under the bridge and all that.

    In any case, those agents who had the manuscript were happy to replace it with the new and improved version. I eventually got offers from two agents. The agent I signed with asked for another major re-write before he sent it out. Then the book sold to Lee and Low/Tu Books, and required even more changes including a title morph from GENeration to Tankborn. Tankborn was released in Sept. 2011.

    Along the way, what with all this re-writing and editing, by necessity a lot of material got deleted from the manuscript. As part of the various and sundry editing, there were four quite sizeable chunks that ended up on the cutting room floor. Each of them was at least a few pages long and the content in them was fairly significant. They offered some pretty cool perspectives of life on the planet Loka, where Tankborn is set. Unfortunately, these scenes didn’t do anything to move the story forward. They didn’t “earn their keep” and had to go.

    But I thought it would be fun to put them up on my website, part of some exclusive material that will only be available there. So if you’d like to read what might have been in Tankborn, take a look here. If you haven’t yet read the book, there is some spoilerage, but it is clearly marked. So it’s safe for all to take a peek.

  • RTW – Sayin’ It

    I had to leave early this morning, so I didn’t have a chance to check out YA Highway‘s Road Trip Wednesday until now. The prompt for this RTW is “Write a dialogue between two of your favorite YA characters.” Since it’s so late in the day, I’m going to cop-out a bit and write some dialogue between Kayla and Mishalla, characters from my own book, Tankborn. They definitely qualify as two of my favorite YA characters.

    This exchange is based on something mentioned in passing in Tankborn. It’s from Kayla’s and Mishalla’s past, when they were ten years old.

    Mishalla: Kayla! KAYLA!
    (Kayla runs along the riverbank toward Mishalla)
    Kayla: What? What’s wrong?
    Mishalla: (almost crying) I stepped on a sewer toad. It’s all squished between my toes. Don’t you dare laugh at me!
    Kayla: I wouldn’t, not ever.
    Mishalla: Is it going to poison my foot? Why’d you tell me to take off my shoes?
    Kayla: Better muddy feet than muddy shoes. Your nurture mother hasn’t the dhans to buy you a new pair.
    Mishalla: Better muddy shoes than poisoned toes. I think my foot is numb.
    Kayla: Can you walk?
    (Mishalla shakes her head. Now she’s really crying)
    Kayla: Maybe if you wash your foot off in the river?
    Mishalla: Maybe…Oh, no. The Brigade is coming. Across the river. Two of them.
    (Kayla looks)
    Kayla: We have to go. Now!
    Mishalla: I can’t. I can’t feel my foot.
    Kayla: Then I’ll carry you.
    (she starts to pick up Mishalla)
    Mishalla: Wait! Get the sewer toad.
    Kayla: What? Why?
    Mishalla: I want to hide it under my brother’s pillow.
    (Kayla grabs the dead sewer toad and Mishalla wraps it in her skirt. Kayla picks up Mishalla and runs with her back home).

     

  • Can a Heroine be Weak?

    Mindy Ruiz blogged yesterday about weak vs. kick-ass heroines. In response, a commenter on G+ wondered why a strong heroine has to show her vulnerabilities, but the same didn’t seem to be true for heroes, i.e., that male characters don’t always have those same weaknesses.

    Here’s what I think. Characters in your stories, whether they’re male, female, or some fictional other-gender, have to be complex. They have to be complicated. On the surface they can be simple and seemingly one-dimensional, but as the reader gets to know them, as they peel off layer after layer in the course of the story, the character should become more and more compelling, more and more relatable and appealing (if we’re talking hero/heroine) or more and more repellent (if we’re talking villain).

    So that kick-ass character Mindy was talking about, if she’s able to use her strength and martial arts skill in every situation she encounters, if she can immediately solve every problem that she encounters, your story is gonna be b-o-r-i-n-g. (Side note and confession: I found the first HP book a bit boring because Harry seemed to solve his problems too easily.) If on the other hand you set your heroine up as that kick-ass girl/woman, seemingly invincible, then introduce her Achilles’ heel, whether it’s physical (think kryptonite) or emotional (think Katniss’s sister Prim), the reader will care about what happens to that character and will be more engaged in the story.

    In my opinion, an emotional Achilles’ heel trumps a physical weakness every time. Katniss faced innumerable physical threats in The Hunger Games, but her love and caring for Prim, Peeta, and Gale made her far more vulnerable than did anything thrown at her in the Arena.

    In my own book, Tankborn, Kayla is physically abused more than once by the enforcers. But while those blows are painful, she shrugs them off as part of her life as a GEN slave. Where she’s truly vulnerable is through the threat of having her self ended by the trueborns. She’s terrified of being wiped away, her personality erased by trueborn enforcers. I would think that any of us can relate to the fear of our mind, memories, our entire being torn away from us in retaliation for the most insignificant infraction.

    So your main characters have to be complex. They have to be the actors in the play you’ve set for them. They can’t drift along in the story letting others take action while they stand back and watch. That’s the danger of a “weak” heroine/hero. While they can appear weak, they have to be layered enough to have an inner store of strength  so that they can be the one to change their world.