People. People. Please for the love of all that is good and holy will you stop using initials to maintain the anonymity of the characters in your tales?
For example: “I have a friend. We’ll call her L. And a friend who we’ll call D. L and D. had a daughter Z. Z and her boyfriend M met when they were at a school named H. Now one day Z and her friend Y ran into M’s friend V and they all…”
And then I’m supposed to keep track of these letters and who they represent thorough 6 paragraphs of plot?? No way pal, ain’t gonna happen. It is completely impossible to follow random initials through a story. Think of your favorite magazine or based-on-a-true-story book. “Names have been changed to protect the innocent," not “Names have been initialized to make it fucking impossible to tell what the hell happens in the first place.”
I promise…no…I swear no one is going to think you actually have friends named Zebulon, Mordecai and Latayna if you use those names instead of their real names of Zach, Mike and Lisa. Hell I’ll even let ya call your buddy Zach “Crazy Motherfucker” and Lisa “Slutbitch From Hell”. But please please indulge me and assign fake names instead of initials so we can actually follow what is happening in your clever yet insightful story, instead of having to create our own little crib sheet to keep track of the frigging characters.
Thank you.