Since sending off my sample chapter to the conference, I've been concentrating on worldbuilding for my Dreamwalkers project. In some respects, I don't have a lot to do because the world is based on heaps of previous projects, but on the other hand I have to decide which bits to keep, which to modify and which need inventing entirely from scratch.
These last few days I've been focusing on sorting out the names of countries. I have a couple that I wanted to keep, but the rest needed replacing. At first I thought of digging out my old notes and seeing if there were any other names I'd forgotten, but in the end I came up with a bunch of new ones, using a simple method. You see, an awful lot of European place names, especially on the continent, come from the Celtic and Germanic tribes who lived there before the Romans came along. So, all I had to do was to pick some tribe names and "warp" them in a different linguistic direction.
For example, there's no point in "Frenchifying" the name of a Gaulish tribe that lived in France, because that place-name probably already exists. Instead, I took Iberian (Spanish/Portuguese) tribes and turned them into "French" names, whilst the names of British Celts and obscure Germanic tribes became my "North European" place-names. I even changed one of the more northerly "French" names to a form consistent with the northern French dialect Gallo (spoken in Brittany), to give a more multilingual flavour.
I'm pretty pleased with the results, which have given me several countries and a number of city/town names. Now I just need to get on and work out the details of the government that my characters are plotting against!
