The Breeze of Dusk with the Scent of Musk

Novel Names and Forward Citations

Since my novel tells a Chinese story, I wanted to use Chinese names for my characters. I know a few Chinese names based on my knowledge of some Chinese friends. In choosing Chinese names for my characters, I used the aid of these websites which list a myriad of Chinese names for both men and woman: [W-11][W-12][W-13][W-14][W-15][W-16].

I used general abstract names for the Chinese cities and provinces in the Chinese Empire instead of using real Chinese cities and provinces and there are two main reasons for doing so. First, city and province names evolve over time and they are not constant. It is not suitable to use a modern Chinese city name for an old city that existed hundreds of years ago with a different name at that time. Doing so will make my novel contain historical errors. Second, some characters in my novel are evil and I did not want to associate evil with specific real cities in China. Such associations are undesirable because they distort the images of those real cities in the real world.

Forward CitationsTraditionally, people cite works or literature from people preceding them in time, not people coming after them by hundreds of years. In my novel I violated this norm by using the concept of forward citations which is citing books or works from the future that were not available at the time of the story of the novel. To illustrate, the story of my novel occurred 1300 years ago but one character in my novel cites Arabic poetry for poets who were born hundreds of years after him. Also, I used self-citations where I cited my own books or poetry. I did not want to be confined to the era of the story of the novel in order not to be deprived of citing valuable literature that was produced in subsequent eras.