Status Update: Giant Creatures and Naming Characters

First the good news: If I'm not posting a lot on the blog, it's probably because most of my spare time is spent eating and sleeping. (In other words, I don't have much spare time.) Which means I'm either working on my current novel or reading and studying the plots of other novels (see my last post for more on this).

That leads me to the other good news: My current novel seems to be coming along quite nicely. I'm having a lot of fun with it. It has some fascinating heroes (yeah, more than one), some businessmen who make Bill Gates seem like small potatoes, big creatures, and lots of action (maybe too much; I'm not sure). Oh, and there's some space candy, too.

I have a broad vision for this story, but I'm trying very hard to keep it small. After exploring where I could go with it, I'm coming back to the one spot where the heat really gets turned up. I want this first novel to be about a narrow series of events in the main character's life. Some great backstory in the character's life gets skipped, which is hard to do, but I know that the story has to begin where the present conflict really takes off. Besides, I can't let it scale beyond my skills the way I did last time.

Oh, and I'm trying very hard to avoid flashbacks. That would be cheating.

One interesting challenge has been the naming of characters, especially the protagonist. It's a lot tougher than it sounds. How does Rowling do it, anyway? She makes it seem easy.