I like Deb.

Fabulous hostess too.

Welcome! Welcome to Antediluvea! Come to the casino, and play with the dinosaur bones!

Hoo boy. I think ghost stories are probably easier.

David, dear, if you would come over more often while there's still Tuesday nights, I could feed you and you could make that assertion on the basis of more than, what? Two visits?

I've got files and files full of scraps of paper with scene fragments, people's names, snarky dialogue bits, etc.

Me too!

He thought I was fascinated by him and taking great notes. Nope, but I got lots of chapters done in his class.

BWAH! My secretary, when I worked for a law firm after coming back stateside in the early eighties, was the daughter of a very good and pretty prominent poet (Diane DiPrima). She'd cover for me as I locked my office door, turned my monitor away from prying eyes, and wrote (in rapid succession) "Eyes in the Fire", "Hibernia" (the one Bantam retitled "Fire Queen", the dumbasses) and the first chunk of "Plainsong."

Moral of story: getting paid to write is good, even if they don't know that's what they're actually paying you for....

I cheated on my one big project -- I had stumbled across a teeny Turkish-English dictionary for travelers, so I transliterated a bunch of English NJ placenames, more or less, taking into account that I don't know how Turkish actually pronounces some letters and vowels, and left off all the circumflexes and accent marks. And some placenames that would work in any language, like Red Bank or High Point, I left as is.

For most short stories, though, all you need is a bare handful of names/places at most, or you can leave them unnamed as necessary.

David, dear, if you would come over more often while there's still Tuesday nights, I could feed you and you could make that assertion on the basis of more than, what? Two visits?

It really is a lovely salon, filled with tasty bits and good, smart, kind people.

My secretary, when I worked for a law firm after coming back stateside in the early eighties, was the daughter of a very good and pretty prominent poet (Diane DiPrima).

Didn't she host a local TV show? About rap music and community hoo haw? Really pretty? Mixed race?

That was my secretary's half-sister Dominique. Dad was LeRoy Jones (Mr Baraka, these days, I believe).

My secretary was Dominique's older sister Jeanne. All white. Also dropdead gorgeous.

A very successful Australian author once confessed to me that her breakthrough novel was written while she worked for the National Australia Bank. She was employed as a typist, and she was just very fast. They gave her a pile of typing every morning, she finished it by twelve and ... just didn't tell them.

I'm trying to work out what time of day to write at, even as we type. My most productive time of day is mid-afternoon, 3 to 4-ish. I've heard a theory that the time of day that you were born is your most productive time of day for the rest of your life. However, not coincidentally, this is the time of day that I'm usually at work (afterschool programs having a tendency to happen around then). So I'm thinking midmorning. Elevensies? But I'm trying to start up a daily songwriting habit, and I'm not yet sure about it.

I love to write longhand, though I no longer always do it. But if I do, it must be pencil, or a damned fine pen. Nothing interrupts the creative flow like blotty ink.

I am able to be creative in text, though, and my most recent short story has been composed entirely whilst road tripping. Which is a good deal of my life, so, shiny. This may explain why one of my main characters is hitchhiking, and the other playing pinball.

Somewhere in this house is the poem I wrote on the back of last week's shopping list. Dunno where, though. And also, the stuff I wrote at Woodstock (the second one, the one that was neither genuine nor filled with fire) is inexplicably (ha) muddy.

I have never had problems with names, but that probably has its roots in rpgs. I never have trouble coming up with screen handles that don't have numbers in them, either. Commonly, I bastardize names or sometimes just words from other languages, Biblical names, historic names. I recombine suffixes and prefixes from the preferred time period or culture: Aeolyta, Melosyne. If I'm world-building, then I like to think about the cultural history and environment. What do the people value? What is their aesthetic?

Place names can be harder, but you can apply the same principles. Also think about the history that time moves through. How did New Hampshire get named? North and South Carolina? Zanesville was named after Zane Grey. Who was important to your citizens?

You'll end up with all sorts of backstory, but it's handy to have anyway.