Every author has the unfortunate duty of naming her characters. I say “unfortunate” because I’ve never felt comfortable doing it. My characters are usually born with names – maybe even born from names – and sometimes those names are weird. Back when I did comic books, and before I had a kid, my husband used to shake his head over my stories and say, “You are NOT naming our children!”

There are a few characters who have been with me such a long time that I don’t remember anything about naming them. Josef, Earl of Apsig, is one. He wasn’t always an Earl, but he’s always been ready to step into the story wherever I need a jerk, a cad, or sometimes even a bad boyfriend. He’s like my utility infielder. Need somebody at jerk base? Josef, you’re up.

There are others, though, whose name origins I remember quite clearly. Here are a few:

Lars – I first conceived of Lars while watching the documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey. I thought that was a really interesting film — particularly coming from my classical music background. There was a segment on the classical origins of heavy metal, and that got me thinking. Surely, in every era, there have been people who would have been metal fans if they lived today. What were they doing back then? Playing bagpipes? Pipe organs? How did they get their loud music fix? And thus, a character was born, my Medieval Metalhead, and I named him after Lars Ulrich, the drummer for Metallica.

Abdo – Abdo was named after George Abdo, one of the great early recorders and popularizers of raks sharqi bellydance music. And he is a dancer, yes. And it is not a coincidence.

Orma – Orma was named after this grumpy guy I used to work with, whose name was actually Norman. And to be fair, I didn’t know him that well. He may not have been in a bad mood every day; he was never anything but polite when I talked to him. He just looked grumpy, all the time, and this fascinated me. Owner of a grumpy face. I think that’s a song by YES.

Glisselda – Glisselda has been with me a long time as well, but I remember looking for the most over-the-top spoiled princess name I could come up with. One of those names that seems to encapsulate a personality already, that’s shorthand for something. Because what can you do when you have a name like that? You either live up to it, or you fight it with everything you’ve got. Unexpectedly (to me, anyway), my Glisselda seems to do both.

All right, I could go on, but I’m sick and should be napping. Let’s do this again sometime! I only have, oh, forty million characters, ha ha ha.

I kid. Four million, tops.

In about 2006, I read several books on Sensory Processing Disorder. It turned out to be irrelevant to the real-life challenges I was facing at the time, but I still found the literature fascinating. I had already started thinking about brains; this gave me another angle for consideration.

Sensory Processing Disorder is, in essence, a difference in brain function, but it’s more complicated than I’m going to make it sound. I’m giving you the parts that interested me most. I encourage you to read more about it on your own. Knowledge is good!

The brain receives far more sensory stimulus than it can meaningfully handle. Right now, all your senses are potentially stimulated; there’s street noise in the background, the feel of your body in your clothing, an odd smell coming from somewhere behind the sofa, the decaying taste of whatever you last ate, and the position of yourself in space (proprioception). If you were intensely aware of all of these things all the time, it would be too much. In order for you to function in the world, your brain has to decide what’s relevant to you right now and what isn’t. Your brain rejects certain inputs as unimportant.

SPD brains prioritize differently. In the case of hypersensitivity, the sensory information is felt very intensely and won’t turn off. Think of the itchiest sweater you ever wore; now imagine that you were always aware of all the clothing on your body, and found it just that irritating. It can happen with any of the senses. Conversely, a brain with SPD might have hyposensitivity, wherein the brain doesn’t let much input at all get through. Sometimes kids with hyposensitivity will be stimulus seekers, making lots of loud noise, for example. Sometimes they’ll appear inattentive; sometimes they’ll fall out of chairs because they’re not aware of where their bodies are.

Any of these brain differences can be so extreme as to be debilitating and require theraputic interventions, but the intensity may fall anywhere along a spectrum. One can be hypersensitive in one area and hyposensitive in another.

I saw myself in these descriptions. I remembered being unable to look people in the eye as a child (a common symptom of visual hypersensitivity). The best analogy I can give you is that looking at faces was like stepping from darkness into a bright sunny day; it was so intense I could barely force my eyes open. I would sneak glimpses little by little until my eyes adjusted, and then I was ok. Conversely, I had terrible proprioception, and was always falling over and scraping my knees. My ability to walk in a straight line is due entirely to years of ballet lessons, where I finally learned how to keep track of all my limbs at once.

I suspect we all have sensory differences, that no one is entirely neurotypical, but we live in our own heads and have nothing to compare our experience with. My high school friends and I used to debate things like, “Do you think the colour blue looks exactly the same to me as it does to you?” We considered ourselves quite the philosophers. We could get a lot of mileage out of a question like that because we thought there was no way to answer it, short of literally seeing blue through someone else’s eyes. The existence of sensory processing differences, however, suggests to me that maybe we do each see our own blue – and I find the idea exciting.

And that brings us – of course! – to the question of dragons’ brains. If dragons acquire human senses when they take human form, what differences will they experience? That question is like a massive taproot; a thousand more questions sprout from it. I’m going to have to stop right there; this subject sees a lot of play in the book, and I don’t want to spoil it. But I encourage you to notice yourself noticing — and not noticing. It’s an interesting exercise.

(I know, I said I was only posting three times a week. Apparently I’m starting that next week.)

It took me eight years to write Seraphina. More accurately, it took me eight years to write four distinct novels, three of which were called Seraphina. The first was called Theodosia. I started writing it when I was pregnant with my son, but I started thinking about it a couple years before that.

When I was a wee lass, just twenty-nine years old, my parents got divorced. It was a shock; I’d sooner have believed the Law of Gravity was being repealed (in fact, for a time I was certain it had been). I found my feet again, eventually, and as the dust settled I was left with an idea: what would it be like to marry someone with a terrible secret, and then to learn it only after they died?*

*NB: this is not what happened to my parents, exactly. This was just some residue I found on the ground after the explosion.

I didn’t get to work on it right away, though. I’d just won the Xeric Grant and was putting together the collected edition of Amy (and oh, was it ever lucky I’d finished Belondweg Blossoming, because I was in a very different place than when I began it!). I didn’t get a chance to start writing until I was nearly 31, when I was pregnant and about to move across the continent and in the mood to write a dismal novel full of family secrets and futility.

I wrote Theodosia by committing to e-mailing a chapter a month to my sisters and Josh (who was an honorary sister). That’s a slow way to go, 10-12 pages a month, but I was writing in 15-minute stretches while the baby napped (he was never a very good napper). There was a father, Claude, whose wife had died in childbirth — revealing her terrible secret! The child, Theodosia (called Dosey), wasn’t told the terrible secret because of course the best way to deal with such a thing is to continue keeping it secret at all costs! No one must know! And then Claude married into a family of gangsters who would want to know the secret, and there were other secrets as well, the keeping of which eventually exploded Claude’s second marriage. Poor Claude, he just never learned. Then Theodosia, having finally learned all the secrets, decided to keep them.

When I got to the end, my REAL sisters were kind and supportive and give me a dog biscuit for having finished. Josh, that phoney baloney sister, said NO NO NO you can’t end it that way. You’ve written a tragedy, woman! Dosey’s just going to go out and make all the same mistakes as her father!

Yessss, I said. Isn’t it gloriously dismal? It’s like Ibsen, with dragons.

But then I thought about it some more and realized he was probably right. It was depressing. I brightened up the ending, had Dosey leaving home and her father advising her not to be a bonehead like him, and then I called for beta readers on my blog. I was shocked how many volunteers I got.

And that was the beginning. Poor, sad Claude has been with me the whole time. The father-daughter tension is still there, but not as front-and-centre as it was. As tends to happen, my preoccupations changed over time. I’m never able to write the same book twice.