Fan Mail!

 

 

This week I got one of the greatest gifts a writer can get: 
a packet of fan mail.

My friends, family and fans are great people, and they are generous with their praise and opinions, so this isn't the first time I've gotten fan mail before.
But this is the first time that I've received a whole packet of fan mail: 19 pieces of it at once!


Mrs. Blaine, a fifth grade teacher Sundance Elementary School in Los Lunas, reads to her students for fifteen minutes a day, every day, right after recess.  Lucky me: she's just finished reading them my Civil War novel, and as a follow up she had her students write letters to me. 


The letters were interesting: full of kind and encouraging words (things like "the detail in the book puts a little movie on in my mind" and "this is my new favorite book"), advice (one boy wrote "I think you might have to take all the violence down an notch just saying." In this time of violent video games and graphic news programs, it's nice to know that violence still bothers some kids), and lots of questions (Did Sarah and Martin get married?  Did Micah survive?) The most frequent question was one I had never expected; what kids wondered more than anything else was who, Union or Confederate, was responsible for the death of Beatrice the cow.


I am writing responses to each child's letter. I hope that their teacher will be able to arrange a class visit for me; I would love to show these students pictures of the Gettysburg battlefield, the farms and orchards mentioned in the book, and of some of the minor characters. Then I can deliver the responses in person. 

Naming Characters

 

 

I recently answered an email from a fan who wondered where I got the names for the characters in Code: Elephants on the Moon. Since he wondered, I thought perhaps others might wonder about this as well, so I'm answering his question here. 

I've got to admit I don't work too hard at naming my characters. Most of the times, as crazy as it sounds, they name themselves. Unlike characters in a play, who do what the script demands, characters in a novel-in-progress often take on a life of their own. My characters tell me a lot about themselves. As I ponder plot, my characters reveal their personalities, some interesting character traits, their looks, and even their names.  Sometimes they haul off and do things that change the direction of my story in ways that I hadn't intended.

The name of my main character, Eponine is French, but it comes from the Breton word Epone or Epona. This works well for a girl whose red hair suggests Breton blood. Bretons are Celtic in origin, making them more closely related to the Welsh and Irish than their French and Norman neighbors. Epona is the name of the Celtic horse goddess, a fact that makes the name even more appropriate for my character. It is also a name with a literary heritage. Victor Hugo used the name for one of his characters in Les Miserables. 

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Galopin. Public domain from wikicommons.

Eponine's horse is named Galopin, which is also a name I didn't make up. In French, a galopin is a monkey or scamp, neither of which describe the personality of the sway-backed, dish-faced Breton horse in my book. The British have had a championship horse named Galopin, who was a much better-looking horse than my character. There is also an early French science fiction writer named Arnould Galopin, who is kind of the Jules Verne of the French speaking world. He was not an inspiration at all in the naming of my horse. Mostly, I named my horse Galopin because the word sounded like the English word 'galloping' to me.  And because the horse told me to call him that.