It isn't just one of your holiday games

[stillsostrange]

I'm currently engaged in a delicate flirtation with Salvage. For those of you playing along at home, Salvage is my honest-to-Cod SF book. Protobook. Theoretical book. Something.

She's a world-weary cop with a crooked partner and only a few weeks left on the job. She's a betentacled parthenogenic alien scientist who wasn't even supposed to be here today. They fight crime and attempt to avoid diplomatic incidents.

My current problem--besides not having a plot, of course--is that I don't have names for my two MCs. The human cop is just waffling between a few choices, and will settle on one eventually. The alien scientist, on the other hand, completely stumps me. I don't have a naming convention for the aliens.

Should I conlang some names for them? Have them adopt human nicknames when dealing with humans? I want to avoid either Space Elf naming conventions, or anything remotely close to Japanese Aliens (or J'onn J'onzz, for that matter). But they also need names that I--let alone readers--can figure out, and preferably pronounce.

Thoughts, LJ?

Comments

[anna-wing.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the aliens go through human dictionaries (or better still, literature) and choose words with meanings or contexts that they like. You could then have an alien who is known among humans as "Chocolate Herrings".