Fuck You, Brain.

So, my 7 year old nephew is hugely into star wars. For his birthday, we got him this crazy huge popup book about star wars. It's the biggest, most intricate popup book I've ever seen. He loved it.

So anyway, we're looking through this monstrosity and we come to the page about the Rancor. Apparently, it hails from the planet Dathomir. This is, I'm sure an insignificant fact to pretty much everyone in the universe, George Lucas included. It matters to me because its the name of a major location in my book, and now I have to think of a new one.

It's really a minor annoyance, but I have to wonder how many of the other names I've come up with exist somewhere else. I really have no recollection of reading the word "Dathomir" anywhere, ever. It's entirely possible, probable even, that I came across it sometime, because I was a pretty big star wars fan back before the prequels came out. I read alot of star wars stuff, like RPG sourcebooks and shitty novels and stuff like that, so I probably did read it somewhere, file it away in the back of my mind, and promptly forget all about it. Thank you, subconscious.

Well, at least it happened in the glorious age of the word processor, where I can just "replace all" instead of going through a manuscript with a fine toothed comb. I'm also glad it happened at a point where I don't even have an actual manuscript to go through.

Probably he most annoying part of writing fantasy and science fiction is that you have to think of names for everything. Everything. You can base them around real places and things, or mythological ones, or just string syllables together till it sounds right. Unless of course, you're a linguist or something. But I'm not, and I dont have time to learn, really. It's tough to get a name that sounds even remotely cool, and even tougher to have a group of names that is internally consistent enough to sound like part of the same language. I guess that's why a lot of authors just add apostrophes to everything until they have names like Xy'tha'lo'b'ta.

So, I guess I'll think up a name, even if its just a placeholder. Maybe I can get away with just changing a couple of letters. Dathongir. Drathomir. I dunno. Anyway, back to the grind. And fuck George Lucas.