These make wonderful titles, capture the imagination and begin the character development right there on the cover...
However, is this style of naming be quite as acceptable to the characters themselves? Do they get jealous of other characters, who have their actual names in lights on the cover? Nicholas Nickleby... Anna Karenina... Batman?
And what about the characters whose books are never finished, whose backstories aren't quite completely filled in?
The X Thief's Daughter...
...drinks ice wine in the sub-basement
of the basement club behind the real.
She has nothing to conceal: she says
too many times, as the frost rose blooms within
her chest. Her eyes grow dark. Maybe it's best
the fence does not learn more. The X Thief's
Daughter is complex but direct
in shady negotiations. She sees
the world as chances overlayed
on chaos. What is this whole thing for?
There must be more than this, the normals ask.
So dumb. "What can I get?" She asks instead
and peels the false skin from her face.
The X Thief's Daughter knows her place
is nowhere that she's been, or will go.
The X Thief's Daughter is selectively
obscene, but will practice ritual magic
on a first date. She gets there late
as a matter of course and has rude words
tattooed, in schoolboy Latin,
in ruder places. The X Thief's Daughter:
your mother never warned about.
How could she -- so far outside the bell curve
of parental advisory? She's on
no chart. The X Thief's Daughter
is all heart, all stomach, all pudenda;
a real but ill-defined character,
discontinuously variable
in every field but gender, and has,
always, that unbound variable
in her back-story -- she has no clue
what was the X her father stole
if any, but this is not a problem;
it's an opportunity.
