Time to talk about names again! I mentioned a while back that my assistant was going through my books, creating a spreadsheet of all the names I’ve used so that I can exercise caution when naming new characters. She’s finished, just in time for me to start naming a new crop of folks for my work-in-progress, and I’m so glad to have this list and not have to dig through my memory to avoid over-using a name.

The results? In seventeen books (my assistant hasn’t yet seen the 18th, which will be out next June), I used 365 different first names, 189 different surnames and 75 fictionalized places. The most used name was “Jim,” which appeared in five different books. (I count Keeper of the Light, Kiss River, and Her Mother’s Shadow as one book, since they form a trilogy). I like the name Jim. My first three boyfriends were all named Jim. Nice guys, too.

Nancy, Maggie, and Brian were close behind. The bold names in the chart reflect main characters. Surnames used more than once include Terrell, Foley and Rose. I never realized that I re-used surnames. It’s funny how different names get stuck in your head and just pop out feeling fresh and new, when they’re actually old and stale.

Now it’s on to a new group of people with a bunch of new names. I love my chart. It’s going to make christening these new folks so much easier!

The last time John and I were on Topsail Island, we were having dinner in a restaurant when John suddenly said, “Do you see that waitress over there? That’s Dawn.”

I figured he must mean the character Dawn in my latest book, Before the Storm. I turned to look at the waitress. She was a little chubby, about five-four, with chin-length medium brown hair and a no-nonsense demeanor.

“Dawn who?” I was perplexed.  

“In Before the Storm.”

“You’re kidding! Is that the way you picture her?”

Indeed, that was John’s image of Dawn. In my own mind, Dawn is tall and lithe, with long auburn hair and, yes, a no-nonsense demeanor that only barely masks her vulnerability.

Our conversation started me thinking about what I see as I write a book versus what my reader sees. I have such a clear image of not only each character, but each setting–every house, every room, every sand dune, every night sky. Without going overboard on detail (yawn), I try to give my reader the same vision I have. Apparently, I sometimes fail! Remember our earlier blog conversation in which some of you told me you didn’t realize The Sea Tender, the house my characters lived in, was round? You came up with your own images, and they worked for you. That’s the important thing. I think as readers, we get very attached to the images we form in our minds. That’s one reason why, when a book is made into a movie, we can have trouble making that leap from the page to film. The people and the setting may not look at all like the pictures we’ve affectionately created in our own minds.

I have a confession to make, though. In Before the Storm, there are two kitchens in The Sea Tender.  It nearly drove me crazy as I wrote the story. For example, in the scenes where Laurel tends to little Maggie’s cut hand and where the teenaged Maggie meets her illicit lover, the kitchen is in the rear of the house and overlooks the ocean. In the scenes where Laurel has post-partum depression and Sara brings over groceries for her, and the scene in which Marcus asks Laurel if she’s comfortable with him moving back to the island, the kitchen is in the front of the house. And they are completely different kitchens. This is very rare for me. Usually I get one image in my mind and it becomes so real that I can’t budge it if I try. The Sea Tender kitchen moved back and forth over time and nothing I did (including keeping a diagram of the house next to my computer) could keep it in place. I only hope my readers were able to get it to hold still.

So, are you visual readers? Do you picture each setting and each character in detail? Or do some of you see only words without images attached to them? I’m curious if different people experience books in different ways. 

Soundtrack of the day: I’m listening to the soundtrack of Blood Diamond on my iPod as I work today. Beautiful, stirring music (and an excellent movie, too).  

I’m not an airy-fairy sort of person. Bucking conventional wisdom, I don’t even believe that “things happen for a reason.” But I have had a couple of unexplainable experiences myself. At times, my logical, grounded mind takes over and I chalk those experiences up to wishful thinking. At other times, I simply give myself over to the mystical. As my friend, author Emilie Richards, once said when I was pondering the possibility of ‘the other side,’ “Who could ever have imagined this world?” Her words still really hit home for me. Most of the time, anyway.

So when people ask me if I believe that Maggie was truly connecting with her father, I tell them the same thing I tell myself: What matters is how it feels to Maggie. That’s the only thing that counts.