The Commonality of Zenteks

For reasons which I may never understand, I originally posted this in the wrong place!

Wow, [a week and] five days since my last post! I was thinking no more than two or three, but what the heck.

I picked the word "zentek" out of thin air when I wanted to name the class of characters that distinguished my world from others in the fantasy genre. I wanted these seekers of enlightened power, whose life path took them from the ability to control themselves through various internal abilities that ultimately lead to an ability to control everything around them, to have an unusual and unique name. I was looking for a couple of things when I came up with the name: something that would be alphabetically last in any ordered sequence, hence the "z," and something that implied a devout acceptance of life as it is. Zen fits both of these.

The "tek" part was half a reference to technology and half just what seemed like a cool sounding follow on to zen.

How little did I know.

I was introduced to the joy of Google Alerts a number of months ago, and you can probably imagine my surprise at just how common a word "zentek" is in the real world. I get at least one alert every day for it, and most of them are not my own. (Guess I should fix that, huh?)

Most frequently, I get references to the Zentek Corporation out of Minnesota. They even do business that relates to my professional career - computers. If I had any desire to spend half of the rest of my life freezing my tail off, Minnesota might not be such a bad place to do it.

Never mind - I came to California from Michigan for two reasons, and freezing weather had something to do with it.

Second most frequently, I see references to a Professor Jürgen Zentek, who is the Chairman of the Institute for Animal Nutrition in Vienna, Austria. Actually, Prof. Zentek was the first occurrence of the word in an alert that I received.

There's a Zentek House in Bolton (UK?). a Zentek Solutions Ltd., Zentek International, Zentek Technology, Zen-Tek Instruments and so on. If you want to know who these are and what they do, Google is your friend. Someone, or maybe more than one someone, uses zentek as their user name on one or two forums or game sites I've seen in the alerts.

There are a number of people with the last name Zentek listed at one site I saw: Ann, Barbara, Cynthia, David, Edward, James, Joseph, Kathleen, Margaret, Nicholas, Ronald E., Steven and Theodore (and the professor, above).

I also see references to my stories, web page, this blog, and others that actually have to do with this, my creation. I even found a page that included two reviews of my first book that were written by people who did not purchase the book (interesting, hm?) and used pseudonyms to write those reviews. Do me a favor, please, and don't read the reviews. Whether or not they were right, they are, well, let's just say unflattering. I have a fair level of feedback that the book was enjoyable, regardless of its quality.

But I digress.

Despite the frequent appearance of the word "zentek" in references to people or places not related to my stories, I plan to continue to use it. In this context, it is mine, and appropriate.

What I find most curious about this is that the name I originally used for my stories was Legend Hunters, until I decided to do a Google search for that a couple of years ago. I mean, who else would use that name for something unrelated to fantasy epics?

Apparently, at least two books already published have the name "Legend Hunter," not including mine. I began to understand why working titles don't always wind up on the cover of the stories they were meant to name.

"Zentek Ascendant" seemed like a good change of pace, and, at least so far, it's unique, although I'm not sure how much I plan to use that any more.

So, what does all this mean? I don't know - it might be frivolous. My point, though, is that when you create a name for something you think is new, don't be surprised if someone else already has or is using that name in a completely different context.

Even if the name starts with one of the least commonly used letters in the language.

TTFN.