Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Best Alien Baby Name Book I've Ever Read


In creating this cast of characters for Intergalactic Gung-Ho Gurus I found that alien names aren't that easy to come up with. Inevitably you end up having the same names (or at least very similar ones) that you've heard used in other stories, cartoons or movies. What to do?

I have found that I like boundaries. With school projects I enjoyed tight parameters on what I could and could not do, what materials I could use and what I was trying to accomplish. It seemed these boundaries worked to squeeze the creative juices better. So for this, I set my own boundaries. 

Looking through different books on my shelf I found The Word Museum by Jeffrey Kacirk. It is full of defunct English words that have great combinations of offbeat definitions and amazingly meaty sounds. For instance Brizzle sounds like burnt and sizzle and it's definition means about that. Eureka! This would be my parameters. All the alien names would come from this book. 

So far, almost everyone of them has (You'll see two characters very soon that came from another idea). It was a lot of fun going through this book and finding the coolest words. The definitions of these words sometimes helped me to define a characteristic or physical trait of the character. 

So if you are looking to name a new born alien, then I would highly recommend giving this book a once over.

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