So I'm starting the new thing...

...the YA sci-fi thing I've been mulling over in my head for the last few months. The third character finally told me her name. Now I can use temporary names for minor characters, or more commonly just randomly pick something and stick with it, but names and their meanings and what they say about the character are important to me for the major players; I can't start with one and switch partway through without really derailing things (I've tried it with short stories and have never been happy with the results; the other name just doesn't work, and then the original one didn't work either because I'd futzed with it).

So now I know I'm writing a story about Omesh, Takashi and Rabia, and I have enough of the outline roughed out to finally plunge into Chapter One (as much as I may seem to be a rigid outliner, the fact is that the outline is as much a work in progress as the prose itself, and I play with those index cards a lot as I go. That's why they're on index cards and not, say, stone tablets).

I don't really have a title yet, but I don't like calling things "Untitled" or "Untitled #87" or some such, so for now I'm referring to it as Mitwa. That's from a song in the movie Lagaan, which was the movie I was watching when the crucial thematic elements of the WIP finally fell into place and I realized just what it was I was going to write, what I was going to try to say. (Not that my WIP is suddenly about beating the British cantonment at a cricket match to get out of playing brutal taxes, but then I've mentioned before how far afield my mind wanders when I'm watching stuff...)

If you want to hear it, it is on YouTube (and happily it's the rare Hindi clip I've found there with subtitles).



(If you're curious to check out a Hindi movie and not sure where to start, Lagaan is perfect. I also highly recommend Rang de Basanti (both of these star Aamir Khan) and Lage Raho Munnabhai (with Sanjay Dutt), which is the funniest movie I've ever seen about Ghandhi. I suppose it depends on where you live, but here in Minneapolis you can check all these out on DVD from the public library for free.)

But I digress. Back to Mitwa and the WIP. I particularly latched onto the part of the song that goes:

O mitwa, sun mitwa, tujhko kya darr hai re
Yeh dharti apni hai, apna ambar hai re

Which means "Listen, O my friend, what's this fear you have? This earth is ours and so is the sky." Since my story is of a boy who leaves his farm in Gujarati to go live in a space station, you can probably see why that line stuck out for me. Hence the working title. Which is not the same as a character name for me, this I can change an infinite number of times without caring much. At the very least, I'll probably end up going with something in English. But for now it's Mitwa.

So we can start the meter today:

Mitwa

0 / 60,000 (0.0%)

Because it always starts with zero...