On Made-Up Names/Seeking Advice on Cat Behavior

[dr_pretentious]

Here's a declaration I mean with all my heart just now, though someday someone will probably move me to break it:

I Will Never Make Fun of the Made-Up Names in Anybody Else's SF Ever Again.

It's not just the difficulty of coming up with names to replace the X,Y,and Z placeholders for names of minor characters that I left all over the old draft of my novel that's moved me to make this rash declaration. It's the panoply of wacky names my students have. At the tutoring mill where I take the hard cases, the weird cases, and the Shakespeare cases, most of the students are upwardly mobile recent immigrants from the developing world. They have names like Tauseef and Syeda. Possibly Imtiaz and Soumya are the equivalents of Bob and Cathy in the distant hometowns of my students' parents, but I still have the odd feeling that I'm wandering through the backstory of somebody else's lame sword and sorcery draft whenever I look at my roster.

Back in the day, at Rutgers, my friend Erica used to talk about "my Cardassian student, Taryn Marac." Taryn Marac was a perfectly ordinary Rutgers freshman, but something about that name inevitably made one imagine her with a prosthetic forehead. And she was only French Canadian.

And now, for something completely different...

As I write this, the new cat is wandering around my study. He's an excellent new cat, or would be if he were the only cat in the household or, perhaps, one of three or more. Dan and I really enjoy his company. Our elder cat emphatically does not (though she was getting lonely after the even older cat died). Cat the Younger bullies Cat the Elder relentlessly in his bid to steal her long-held territory, and Cat the Elder now hides under or behind things pretty much all the time. It's heartbreaking. It's been going on for weeks. We've tried everything we can think of. Every print source we can find offers useful step-by-step instructions for various ideal methods of new-cat introduction, but not one of those sources offers any troubleshooting advice that can help if the introduction's already in progress and has gone off the rails. I'm having trouble finding an animal behaviorist in New Jersey. Yes, the situation has degenerated enough, we're ready to shell out the bucks for an animal behaviorist, if we ever manage to find one.

Anybody out there who knows anything practical about this kind of thing?

Or, failing that, does anybody want a really excellent young cat?

Comments

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

I Will Never Make Fun of the Made-Up Names in Anybody Else's SF Ever Again.

the internet is forever.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's why I started with the caveats. I suppose you could prod me into forswearing myself right away, but I wanted to lay the groundwork for it years in advance.

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

hedge all you like. but someday, when you've escaped editorial control and have become fond of giving lesser authors unsolicited advice ("y'know what your problem is as a writer? lemmee tellya..."), we'll remind you that deep in your heart, you know better.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Re: Names: And yet, all the names you've come up with sound perfectly reasonable to me. Good point about the volume of "new" names around. I used to find the American habit of giving children surnames as forenames bewildering, and the habit of giving whole generations the same names even weirder (T is a 4th; I used to rag him about pretentions to the throne). Now it is just something people do.

Re: Cats: Oh, hell. Poor Sonya. I have no ideas, but boundless sympathy.

[blackbear88.livejournal.com]

It took my cats well over a month to get accustomed to one another. Then they got along for about 6 months, until the male kitten got his growth and exceeded the adult female cat's size by a factor of two. They've been hatin' on each other ever since.

My only suggestion is to spray the younger cat with water or whatever when he's bugging her; feed them seperately; give the older cat lots of reassurance and encouragement, and be prepared for the fact that while they may tolerate one another, they will never like each other. I'm never having different sexed cats again. Mine are now 10 and 9 years old respectively, and they still have screaming fights about once a week when someone oversteps the boundries...

--Cathy

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

Oh, please. Some of them scream to be made fun of, and not just the ones that are litterally made to be silly ("Slartibartfast" comes to mind). But actually, I find that the ones that should be made fun of the most are the ones where they use names like "Bob" in inappropriate settings.

As for the names of real people which sound like they come from sci fi/fantasy: do you plan to use them in your fiction? I like doing that, especially if they sound cool.

By the way, hi! This is Charles from Vassar. Cathy told me about this blog.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

It's so good to find you here! It's been Way Too Long.

Yeah, about Bob...I thought immediately of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series. He's got characters with wacky names like Daenerys Targaryen alongside characters with unfortunate modern variant spellings that indicate modern mispronunciations of old names, like Catelyn, and perfectly reasonable made-up names like Gray Worm (for a character who used to be a slave and has kept his slave name), alongside a Robert. And actual Robert. And numerous Jons. It's been a constant distraction to me to have a mundane name like Robert equally embedded in the same world with bizarre Rhaegar. And if I'd first seen the name Ashara Dayne in print and been told it was the name of an obscure 1980s pop singer, rather than a tragic heroine in a fantasy epic, I'd have believed it. Now, I love this series. I read it in great gasping gulps. I cheerfully throw money at George Martin, and anticipate throwing more money at him for the next three volumes. But I find his naming of characters to be perplexing. I can't tell whether he has an underlying logic to it all (which he certainly does with the plot), or if he's just throwing the first name that comes to mind onto the page and then not bothering to change it in revision.

Not making fun of him, mind you. I'm not an oathbreaker yet. Just perplexed.

I can't make fun of Slartibartfast. It's such a perfect accomplishment in silliness, to a degree I probably can't ever aspire to.

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

(Oops! I meant to put this all in one.)

As for cats: I wish I could help. My experience with cats ended by 8th grade or so. Good luck on them, though!