There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. – Ernest Hemingway

There is something to be said for those first moments of writing a new novel or short story, those moments when you simply let your fingers run free across the keyboard with no goal except to get the idea on the page. It is exhilarating. I wish sometimes that I could live in that moment forever. But I can’t, and neither can you if you want to get your work published.

There are many details to attend to after you get the skeleton of your new baby underway. Not the least of which is naming your characters. This may seem an easy enough task, a matter of preference, even, but it isn’t.

Let’s look at three different coming out stories, those of:

Florence and Bertha.

Pamela and Tammy.

Harper and Alexa.

In…