Writing Ramblings
I was confusing myself with my lists of character names, trying to remember who was related to who, and who was named after which relatives, so I thought I would try to put everyone on a family tree so that I could see them all at once. It ended up being kind of a mess. The problem is that most of my characters come from a single family - the Royal Family of Cyrius - and because they're royal and like to claim that their line is descended directly from their god, they've done a lot of interbreeding within the family. So, I've got cousins gettin' busy with cousins, a lot. At least one uncle marrying his neice. And a singular case of half-siblings having two sons together (they don't know that they're half-siblings, so it wasn't on purpose, and is actually an important detail in the story).
Needless to say (but I will anyway), family tree programs don't like things like that. So the mess that's resulted in the program insisting that 'this person' who is so-and-so's child can't possibly be married to this other person because this other person is so-and-so's brother so 'this person' must actually be two different people even though they have the same name, is actually more convoluted than the lists that I started with.
I'm a little worried that my cast of thousands (it's not really that many... right now there's about 80) is going to make reading my work kind of like slogging through LotR or Game of Thrones, books where there's a ton of names thrown about, and the reader really doesn't know who any of them are, because there's too many to keep track of. This may especially be a problem because all of the names are unusual (no James or Johns or Marys) so they may not stick in the memory as easily.
I am consoling myself with the reminder that my story does follow multiple generations, so all these characters aren't getting introduced at the same time. And only a few of them are major characters. Most of these 80 some names are minor background characters or one-off mentions, and the mental development I'm putting toward them is just for my own benefit. So maybe it won't be too bad. Still, I need to be aware.
Needless to say (but I will anyway), family tree programs don't like things like that. So the mess that's resulted in the program insisting that 'this person' who is so-and-so's child can't possibly be married to this other person because this other person is so-and-so's brother so 'this person' must actually be two different people even though they have the same name, is actually more convoluted than the lists that I started with.
I'm a little worried that my cast of thousands (it's not really that many... right now there's about 80) is going to make reading my work kind of like slogging through LotR or Game of Thrones, books where there's a ton of names thrown about, and the reader really doesn't know who any of them are, because there's too many to keep track of. This may especially be a problem because all of the names are unusual (no James or Johns or Marys) so they may not stick in the memory as easily.
I am consoling myself with the reminder that my story does follow multiple generations, so all these characters aren't getting introduced at the same time. And only a few of them are major characters. Most of these 80 some names are minor background characters or one-off mentions, and the mental development I'm putting toward them is just for my own benefit. So maybe it won't be too bad. Still, I need to be aware.