Worried Writing

Since I am jobless and I'm a natural worrier, I have been venting my worry the best way I know how: by writing.  So far I have started several short stories and what could quit possibly turn into a novel.  Anyone who knows me knows well that I rarely continue with stories for more than a year so I have no idea how these are going to turn out.  However, I have been going back and looking at all of my old stories and drawing parts of them into my new ideas.  Strangely enough my school work has helped me with creating my fantasy world.  Between learning about ancient Greeks, both the culture and Hellenistic history, and anthropology I have been able to create an almost perfect fantasy world.  the only problem now is the names.  The character names I have, or at least I have the first names, I always have problems coming up with the surnames.  The city names are the hardest part though.

Unlike characters, cities don;t have obvious personalities that I can look at which is very problematic for me.  When it come to characters I look at their personalities and choose a name that has a meaning that is important to that personality, or sometimes to the back story of the character.  The problem with cities is their personality depends on the people who live there, the landscape surrounding the city, the founder of that city, the peoples who lived in the city previously, and possibly the ruler of the city.  Even  most cities in Canada are named after people who are important in society of religion, the landscape or something that was found there.  For instance Kamloops means meeting of the rivers and was named by the first nations group that lived there before Europeans arrived.  St. John's was named after a catholic saint, Regina was named after a noble, Moose Jaw obviously named because of a moose jaw that was found, even Canada itself was named by the first nations that lived here.  The problem I'm having is that I'm writing about a fantasy world.  They don't have the same religions, myths, political structures, language, or heritage that we do.  So how do I name the cities?  Basically I have to make up an entire civilization from politics to beliefs and their history just so I can know what name would be suitable.  Thankfully I can make parallels to this world.  For instance I decided to name the royal city of one of the countries Aletes which is similar to the name of a city on an island described in Egyptian myth which some believe was the island of Atlantis.  Most people wouldn't make the connection right away, and even those who do wouldn't be sure that the city was going to be destroyed right away (which it very well might be, I haven't decided yet).  Therefore it is the perfect name for it.  After the destruction of the city (somewhere between chapters three and thirty four) some will notice the similarity and then understand all the foreshadowing and hints that had been there since the beginning.  Not only is this a cool way to give the reader something to connect the fantasy world to ours, it also gives me as a writer something to base my work off of.

Now that I have gone totally off topic (did I mention that I have a fever and am exhausted?) I think this is where I should stop.  I may even continue on when I wake up tomorrow.  hopefully by then I'll have enough brain cells to be able to decipher this goobly gop of writing and be able to write an explanation for what I was trying to say here.