This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

December 14, 2007

To: Headmaster Richmond and the Board of Directors, Alabaster Preparatory Academy

I, Frankie Landau-Banks, hereby confess that I was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds.
So opens one of my favorite books of all time, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, by E. Lockhart.

Recently I mentioned Marie Rutkoski's super fun post about good book boyfriends, bad book boyfriends, and what you can tell about a potential book boyfriend from his name. Marie and I got into a conversation over there about our favorite male character names and what they mean -- which, of course, devolved eventually to Spike, Angel, Jayne, and Mal, but anyway -- then, this past week, I reread The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. I can't BELIEVE that I forgot about Alpha and Matthew when I was e-chatting with Marie! Talk about two larger-than-life boyfriends with names that matter.

This is the place in the post where I pause …

"Which stars?"

"All of them."

"You meanallthe stars, inallthe galaxies?"

"Yes. If he calls for one of them, someone has to know which one he means. Anyhow, they like it; there aren't many who know them all by name, and if your name isn't known, then it's a very lonely feeling."

-A conversation between Meg and Proginoskes in A Wind in the Door, by Madeleine L'Engle

I wonder if my characters feel lonely until I've named them? How patient the characters must be whose names I keep changing! Sometimes I forget how much they depend on me, for everything.

Proginoskes and Meg are both Namers. Here's something else Proginoskes says: "When I was memorizing the names of the stars, part of the purpose was to help them each to be more particularly the particular star each one was supposed to be. That's basically a Namer's job."

Here's a FAQ about Fire. (In case you're completely spoiler-phobic: since I'm t…

This article makes me sad. And mad.

Changing topic... I've been having some great exchanges with my Korean translator for Graceling, Yoon Hoh, as she works through some of the trickiest parts to translate. At a certain point, I realized that you guys might find this stuff interesting, so I asked her permission to share some of it. I never really thought about the challenges of translating before, but... well, here are some examples:

First, there are the words I made up for the book. The first time Yoon contacted me, it was to ask me to explain what "borderlords" and "underlords" are.

I was able to explain borderlords pretty easily -- they're lords who live on a kingdom's border, i.e., Lord Davit is a Middluns borderlord because his Middluns estate is right near the Nanderan and Estillan borders.

But... underlords? *...* What the hell is an underlord, and why did I make up such a silly word? I had to go back to the text -- thank goodness, I have the pdf…

The gorgeous image on the right is a composite Hubble/IRTF image of storms on Jupiter. I got it here and you can read more about it here. Lest you be impressed with the ease with which I fling around high-tech telescope-y terms (like telescope-y), be assured that I have no idea what I'm talking about. But I like the pretty pictures.
A piece of news: Graceling is one of School Library Journal's Best Books of 2008. yAt!
And now, a few more FAQs.
Spoiler Status: The following FAQs are spoiler-free.
1. When you start a book, what is it like? Is the book just sitting in your head, mostly formed? Where does it come from? What a great question. For me, when I start a book, I've got parts of it formed in my head -- pivotal, dramatic tension between characters that hasn't necessarily formed itself into clear scenes with dialog and action yet, but that will form itself as I continue to mull it over. I guess what I have at the beginning is the feeling of my characters, and the…