Wednesday Wanderings

Having finished my draft of Surgeburnt, my fiction writing dance card has some free space, and I thought writing some short stories would be a nice change of pace.  I had a couple of ideas at the front of my brain, but they promised to be lengthy, intense, or both, and in my state of mind, I wanted something lighter and easier.  So I decided to write a short story about my Sniffer.

I mentioned this character a while back:  I came up with her as an alternate way to review my wine studies, by incorporating wine knowledge into a loose narrative.  I never wrote much of it and it was never intended to be a "real" story (too much infodumping), but I came up with the framework of an interesting setting and her backstory, and I thought ... why not use it for a short story?

The why-not, of course, is that I never named her ... and now, at the part in a stand-alone short story where I usually just pick a name and roll along, I've tumbled to a halt because I know I'm going to do more with the character, so the name is particularly important.  I'm sure some writers would say, "Just pick a name and change it later," but I can't do that.  As soon as I select a name, it and the character begin to adjust to each other.  Unnaming is nearly impossible for me.

You can imagine the headaches I've had when (ever so rarely) I have had to change a name ...