Posted February 13, 2010 at 16:13 (General)
This week hasn't seen too much progress on Book #4. Mainly because I've been dividing my time between polishing to near perfection the manuscript for Oak Cliff and working on the new book.
Since I've decided that this story will pretty much follow the multiple generations of one family, I have diagrammed a basic family tree for my central core of characters.
To do this I first needed to determine when my matriarch and patriarch should meet - 1920s, 1930s, etc. Having determined that I needed to then figure out how many generations we will have that will bring our story up to the present day. Then came the task of naming all of those family members.
I originally wanted my patriarch to be of Italian heritage and so I thought the name Carlo would be nice. But I had to discard that because it is too close to the name of a family friend who would rather I didn't use his name. Not a problem, I thought. There are lots of good solid Italian men's names. Well, I considered using the names Enzo, Giorgio, Sebastiano, Ricardo, Gino, and Alberto. For the moment I've settled on Giancarlo but that may change as the character takes on the story.
Our matriarch is of English-American ancestry and my first thought was to use the name Isabella. Two problems with that name - if we call her Bella that would harken to the character in the Twilight saga of books; if we call her Izzy that would be reminscent of the character on Gray's Anatomy. So scratch the name Isabella. I tried out thenames Edie, Ella, Roberta, Joan, and Holly but settled on the name Olivia even though it calls to my mind one of my soap opera characters. But Olivia is a nice, Anglo-sounding name and so my matriarch is Olivia Anne Winthrop.
Now I need a surname for Giancarlo. The easiest way for me to find a surname is to look at a map and use the name of a place or region, especially for a European surname. I think I've seen every city or town name in Italy and tried each one as a surname for Giancarlo. At last I've settled on the name Fiore. So now we have Giancarlo Fiore.
I have completed the backstories for both Giancarlo and Olivia, constructed their family tree, given them five children, and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Thankfully I won't need a backstory for all of the grandchildren and great-grandkids but I'll need to at least outline the five children and their major offspring.
So, all things considered I guess I did better than I thought this week. Next week I'll be doing more research on the music of the different eras and dance halls of the 1900s-1940s since that is where I've decided that Olivia and Giancarlo will meet for the first time.
Hopefully next time Olivia and Giancarlo will have begun to tell me their story and I can set down the key points in a plot guide.
Posted by Marion at 16:13 2010-02-13 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
