This morning, I had a chance to see the beautiful cover for Elizabeth Bunce’s forthcoming novel, Starcrossed. I was pretty excited because her CURSE AS DARK AS GOLD was my favorite new fantasy the year that it came out. The plot for her new book looks interesting and unusual, but I was a bit horrified to see that the main character is named Celyn. This is too close to Calyn for comfort.
So what to do? I had a tough enough time coming up with Calyn in the first place. I’ll definitely keep Calyn for this draft. Maybe this isn’t anything to worry about. But I’m guessing that STARCROSSED will be another hit. I know that I plan to grab it on its first day out.
UPDATE: My most excellent agent Erin Murphy made the following point: “… it seems like books come along all the time with similar names in them–look at Katniss and Katsa in HUNGER GAMES and GRACELING a couple of years ago.”
Now, believe it or not, I’m not as needy of an author as the previous paragraph might suggest. Really! But I do believe that there are times when it doesn’t hurt to shoot an editor or an agent a short email. There were a couple of other scraps of information that I had been planning to mention at some point or another, and this seemed like a good time.
Kristin Wolden Nitz 