What's In a Name? Well, Everything.

 The Hazard with Hearts started with a mad rush of writing … then died to nothingness for several weeks.

The names of the characters presented my first difficulty.

The male protagonist’s name was never difficult. My female protagonist’s name posed several

problems. I intended this book as another salute to the vintage gothics of the 1960s and 1970s. I cut my reading teeth on the suspenseful romances of Victoria Holt and Jane Aiken Hodges and other masters of romantic suspense like Mary Stewart and of the Regency World like Georgette Heyer.

For my heroine, the name Victoria Winters tempted me greatly. Several pages in, however, her personality was nothing like that passive Victoria Winters of the TV Dark Shadows series, and no Barnabas Collins or other vampire would take a bite into this story. After the remake of Dark Shadows, the name also “hurt” my sensibilities.

I hunted up another project while I tinkered with this novel’s elements, trying to figure out what my writing problem was. When you write an entire chapter from the heroine’s point of view without using her name once—that is problematic. I had Name Avoidance. The novel was far behind my schedule and creeping toward its paperback publication date.

I can plead the distractions of non-fiction last year. In the back half of the year, I published four nonfiction guides for writers and added a bundle of the four. This year began with publishing three more NF guides and a bundle for that set.

But these are excuses.  

Problems, Problems, Problems!

The Hazard for Spies, the book previous to this one, gave all sorts of difficulties and encountered more trials than a single book should. The pandemic Corona-coaster was the greatest while moving into my dream home—a happy occasion—also gave another emotional roller coaster. H4Spies reached publication in April of this year.

Distractions and disruptions continued, caging my mind with other things while I tried to figure out my disaffection with HwHearts. For writers, that disruptive cage is psychological. We can and must free ourselves from those mental prisons. I repeat that reminder continuously. Yet I kept stumbling into the cage.

Distractions and disruptions can be helpful. I tinkered with other projects and kept unsuccessfully punching into HwH—and “punching” says everything, for no story-telling art is served by punching words onto the page.

As I worked through the project of reformatting the whole Hearts in Hazard series for paperback publication, I discovered my protagonist shared a name with a rather vile young lady in a previous book. After a few hours of contemplation of names, I changed the protagonist’s name to Vivienne.

The next day over 3,000 words flowed out—rethinking early scenes and revising the ones that were punched out, adding more ideas and inserting new scenes. 2,000 words flowed the next day; 3,000, the one after. The dam had broken.

Shakespeare asked “What’s in a name? A rose by any other word would smell as sweet.”

Well, true, but connotation is everything.

A simple change ~ thinking “opportunity” rather than “block”, “chance” rather than “doom”, and “potential” rather than “burden”. These are the saviors of the writer. Changing the character’s name led to changing a few traits of the character—and her new drive changed the trajectory of the back-half of the novel. See? Names matter? Just as the name Montague mattered to Tybalt Capulet, no matter what Juliet wanted to think.

So, here is The Hazard with Hearts, more suspense than the psychological thriller à la Victoria Holt and Dorothy Eden, more like Mary Stewart in a historical era or Georgette Heyer’s The Reluctant Widow.

The Hearts in Hazard series is now concluded—but more ideas for stories are already pouring out. Watch for them! They may surprise you ~ the stories always surprise me.