Meet Our New Puppy! + "How Do You Write a Character Who's Smarter Than You?", Writing Videos, Book Rec, and more...
Rachel and I adopted this busy little puppy and she’s (finally) napping right now, so I figured this was my one and only chance to write a quick email update today!
Our new puppy’s name is Chaely, which is the name of a summer friend Rachel made on the beach in Nantucket when she was eight years old. It’s a name I’d never heard before, but my father-in-law recognized it because of its Latin origins (the Latin version is pronounced the same way, like the name Hayley but with a ‘ch’ at the front): coeli.
Rachel and I are both big into etymology and ‘onomastics’—one of my favorite words! it means the study of the origin and significance of names—so we did a little research on “coeli” before we made our final decision.
In its Latin form, it’s mostly associated with heaven.
There was a 17th century convent called Santa Maria Regina Coeli alla Lungara in Rome and there’s a musical chant called “Regina Co/aeli” that you might hear around Easter. Once you start looking for coeli’s, you’ll still see a lot of churches that are called “Regina Coeli” (which means Queen of Heaven).
Coeli also means sky, though—and, funnily enough: weather!
We only stumbled on that last definition after we decided that our new BFF was definitely a Chaely (this is the preferred puppy spelling in our house). I’d fallen in love with the name because Rachel’s debut YA novel, Night Swimming, is set on Nantucket—a place that means a lot to her—and those sweet and fleeting summer vacation friendships feel so much like puppy love that “Chaely” just seemed like a perfect fit…
But to have written three books about extreme weather and then find out (after the fact) that your puppy’s name is Latin for “weather”—that’s the kind of coincidence that starts to feel a lot like fate!
How Do You Write a Character Who’s Smarter Than You?
I visited a local day camp called the Young Writer’s Institute last week to lead a writing workshop and talk about books and publishing with a group of 5th-7th graders. While I was there, one of them asked a question that I’m still thinking about.
How do you write a character who’s smarter than you?
I love this question so much because it sounds like a Zen koan—it’s the perfect paradox for a creative writing class… but it wasn’t framed that way. The camper was trying to write an evil super-genius and wanted some practical tips, because she didn’t feel like she was really equipped to speak from that point of view.
Which I also loved.
It’s always good to know that you don’t have an evil super-genius in your creative writing workshop.
So we talked a little bit about research, and how you can learn new things that inform how you write your characters (and what they know and how they speak). We also talked about how, as a world builder, you have ultimate control over lots of little tricks that can make a character seem smarter than they actually are.
But the funny thing about that question—how do you write a character that’s smarter than you?—is that I ask myself a variation of it whenever I’m reading a passage from one of my books.
A finished book is so much more polished than the drafts I spend most of my time with. There’s so much rewriting and revising and editing and copy-editing that goes into a novel that when one of mine is finally published, when I’m holding that shiny new copy in my hands and reading it aloud to a class—with the distance of time between me and all the rough drafts and revisions—it almost feels like I’ve written a whole book that’s smarter than me.
Come Hike With Me, Part 2!
Before we adopted our puppy, I was still taking a lot of long hikes in the woods with my GoPro and posting “writing videos” to YouTube. The puppy’s too small for long hikes right now, but I did post a few new videos since my last Substack and you can watch them on my channel:
Summer Reading Book Rec!
My favorite Middle Grade book from last year just came out in paperback!
The first couple of chapters of the sequel—publishing this July!—are in the back and I wanted to read them by the pool, but we ended up giving this copy to a kid who kept cannonballing instead. The publisher comps Super Secret Super Spies to Stuart Gibbs and James Ponti (auto-corrected to James Pointy first and then James Ponyo 😂) but I think it’s more like Daniel Pinkwater meets Mission Impossible (with illustrations by the guy who does The Last Kids on Earth). Highly recommended!
The other day, we took Chaely to meet some buffalo.
There’s a herd of them in the park by our house, which is a long and kind of weird story dating back to the first half of the 1900s; I’ll probably write about it sometime!
Anyway, we met a woman and her kid while we were there.
She said, “my dad delivered one of those calves!” (you can see a couple of the babies in the picture above). I asked if he was a big animal vet or something, but she said no… he mainly does landscaping and tree trimming in the park and one day he just ended up being the closest person around when one of the buffalo went into labor.
Which is so incredibly cool… but I’m definitely going to think about that guy often, the patron saint of “I’m pretty sure this wasn’t in my job description!”
On the drive to the Young Writers’ Institute I remembered that I actually went to a creative writing day camp like the YWI when I was about to start middle school. It was held the week of June 20th - 30th in 1994 at the University of New Orleans…
And I remember those dates exactly because I still have the shirt!
So fun to think of some of the kids that I talked with last week growing up and writing their own books. More fun news to come from me soon—but I think I have to take this puppy on a walk now!
Until then,
Your friend,
P.S. For more about me and my books, check out www.nickcourage.com… and if you’ve read and enjoyed Snow Struck or Storm Blown, please do leave a review wherever you usually post those (positive reviews help a lot more than you might think)!