NANP: The Scent of Names

Joining me on the blog for the first Names: A New Perspective post of January (and the new year!) is Mhairi Simpson, who has been self-publishing some of her work and has also had some of her short stories published traditionally through a small press. She’s also a fellow blogger and a good friend so I’m really excited to have her on the blog today. I’ve only read one of her stories, in the Tales of the Nun & Dragon anthology (review), but I have some of her other work backlogged and I’ll be moving through it quite soon. Its great to see so many of my blogger friends get their own fiction out, through various means, and what’s great is that everyone seems to be doing something different and breaking conventions left and right. Great time to be a reader! Anyways, here’s what Mhairi has to say on the topic of names.

“Names: A New Perspective” 4th Edition

A little over a year ago, I started a guest post series on the blog where I invited two authors every week to talk about names in fiction. I gave them a fairly open brief for it, to talk about what kind of naming conventions they used, what the names of their characters, etc meant, whether they went for certain resonance or what have you. The result was dramatic and outstanding. Every single guest post proved to be well-worth the read, to say the least, and I received tons of feedback from all of you, saying that you liked it.

In August, I posted the last guest post and then took a long break since I had kind of run out of authors to contact at the moment and just wanted to take some time off in general to let the whole idea gestate for a new version down the line. The result of that is this new edition of the series. I’ve spent more than three weeks getting all of this together, and despite some delays at my end, the authors have all been rather understanding, which has been great.

Enjoy the schedule!