Name, Names, Names

One of the reasons I'm starting this blog is to chronicle my struggles to complete my novel, "Buster Bungle's Big Top". It's a coming-of-age story about a young man, Neal Pilger, who has just graduated from college. His stepfather has arranged a job for him at Sisyphus Software as a technical writer. Neal doesn't want the job. It seems like such a pointless existence, hence the "Sisyphus" in the company name. He ends up running off to join Buster Bungle's Big Top, a tacky traveling circus, and the adventure begins.

One thing I agonize over is names. I like them to be meaningful, as in the company name above. It may be a little heavy-handed, but I'm satisfied with it. I'm not all that pleased with the protagonist's name though. "Neal" is just what I want, since there is a character who criticizes him for spending his life on his knees and, at the end of the novel Neal starts going by the name of "Ace". "Pilger" is a compromise that doesn't really ring true. It's German for "pilgrim", which is the name I really want, but Kurt Vonnegut, and perhaps others have already used it.

One of the key figures in the novel is a big-cat trainer named Syria Sable. It took me two years to come up with that after trying a number of unsuitable names, like "Circe". She has three cats with which she is very close and I have found it frustrating that I have not come up with names for them that I like. I am currently using "Alpha", "Beta", and "Gamma" as place holders.

Meanwhile, there is an antagonistic character who is called Joey Menace. He was Joey Alabama, but I didn't like that. I don't like his current name any better though. I want something that conveys the menace that characterizes the man, but I don't want to be so direct about it. Mack Mendel is a dwarf clown, and I'm very pleased with the name, given that Mendel was the father of genetics and that dwarfism is a genetic defect. I also intend the allusion to the novel "Mendel's Dwarf".

Jesus, this is worse than trying to name a child, though I think Frank Zappa had the right idea there. How about Joey Moon Unit?