How Blue Got Her Name
Blue, in the novel The Door to the Sky, is a woman with goddess-like power over the air and sky. That her name is "Blue" seems almost obvious. What else would her name be?
Funny story...
I plotted The Door to the Sky in September 2006 just after plotting
The Summoning Fire (though before *writing* The Summoning Fire; I was saving TSF for NaNoWriMo that year). And, as I had done when
I plotted The Summoning Fire a few weeks before, I started with a structure.
Here is that structure:
The simple description of the structure is: "Three converging storylines".
Just like with The Summoning Fire's spiral, each line is a primary character viewpoint, with a few, related secondary viewpoints.
Can you guess which storyline is Blue's?
As I wrote notes about the "Blue character" and how her story arc would go, I fell in love with the name. I resisted at first, then embraced the name. Once I had done that, the name showed me all sorts of ideas that I had not considered before. I can't imagine the character with any other name now.
"Red" and "Green", on the other hand, never clicked with me as names. So those became "The Traveler" and "The Tyrant/Savir Agrata", respectively. After all, the sturcture was just an outlining tool. Not a naming tool.
Except for Blue.
-David