Apparently, all of the Macmillan titles, including WHERE ARMADILLOS GO TO DIE, have for the time being been pulled from Amazon.com over a pricing dispute.  The struggle over the future of the publishing business has already been affected by the iPad and the thing isn't even available for purchase yet.  All Macmillan books appear to be available online through Barnes and Noble.  For those who live in Houston and want the best mystery book-buying experience available in the physical world, Murder By the Book is open on Saturday's and they've got signed stock!

This evening I was thinking about color agnosia, which is a disorder inflicted on people who have suffered damage to a particular part of the brain. Its victims have lost the knowledge of color, even though their retinas still register different wavelengths of light.  As a result, their brains perceive a world of black, white and shades of gray.  Like television back when I was a kid.

I suddenly realized, that's the perfect metaphor for use in the scene I will write tomorrow morning, in my current work-in-progress.

It is not just perfect. It is poetic.

A neuroscientist once told me that creativity is seeing the underlying connections between seemingly unconnected things.

I do love these little "Eureka" moments.

Ishmael.  Woodrow Call.  John Grady Cole.  Othello.

How do writers decide on the names of their characters?  I suppose everybody has a different approach.

For minor characters, I shoot for names that are fairly simple and ordinary.  But this approach has its risks.  I once had a character in an unpublished manuscript named "Ken Jennings," only to be told by a reader that a real person by that name had become famous playing a televised game show with great success (I, of course, didn't have a clue about this).  I changed his name to Mason Porter, since the character was a mathematician and one of my son's friends (a PhD in math) was so named.  (I asked for, and received, permission first).

I often fall back on the names of people I know, not because I am modeling the character on them so much as I know the name is relatively common.  Plus, I can spell it.

The name can't be too common, though.  One of my best friends is named "Bill Smith" and I have in fact based a character on him (again, in an unpublished manuscript) but I changed name of the character to "Will Smythe."  "Bill Smith" seems too much like an assumed name, even on a real guy.

In ARMADILLOS, two characters are named after actual people whose loved ones paid for that privilege at an auction sponsored to benefit the Houston Grand Opera.  In fact, the HGO has made more money from those naming rights than I've made from the book.  (Anything for the HGO.)

Jeremiah Spur came by his name because I was looking for something strong and Texas-sounding. I hit on the last name "Spur" because there was once a President of the University of Texas at Austin named Stephen Spur (this would have been in the late sixties). That's a pretty fair name for my protag, I think.

But no character-ever- will have a better name than "Hannibal Lecter."  Just part of the genius that is Thomas Harris, eh?

Got a note this morning from a good friend of mine who is reading a re-written version of a manuscript I first finished in '02.  He says I need to change the name of a character that has been in the book from the beginning because in today's world it would bring to mind untoward solicitations in airport restrooms.

The character's name?

Larry Craig.  That name will have to change, for sure.

Politicians.  No evil is beyond them.