I’m Not Very Good With Names
It’s not just in real life that they are not my strength.
Sometimes it takes me forever to find that perfect name for a character, and I sometimes go through different variations and stages of names to find “the perfect one”. And until then I just have placeholders.
One example would be one who has yet to have a name, or make an appearance. I’m not really in such of a hurry to give him a name as, in the world of the Blood Bound universe, he does not appear until the third book (along with the rest of the Canadian vampire embassy… yes, BB gets into the vampire politics even more from book two onwards, and three is the big one). And so, in conversation, we simply refer to him as “Canadian Lover”, “Canadian Consort”, “Rivka’s Lover” and the like. While he is definitely not defined solely by his relationship to Rivka, the queen of vampires in Canada, (his maker, his lover, his queen and more), it’s just easiest to call him that. My beta sometimes calls him “Callum”, after the actor she insists would have to play him should there be a movie. 1
But the real character that inspired me to write this blog entry was one from The Circled Green, my upcoming NaNo project. When we meet her, in the prologue, she is young, beautiful, and dying. For the rest of the book she is just a presence, a memory, a tie to the past that keeps the husband she left behind from remarrying even though he should, and the one that follows her daughter about, for reasons both good or bad. While the names of other characters (such as Aurora, Ciar, Duncan, Emily) came pretty easily, her name was very elusive.
Eventually we started referring to her as “Dead Mother” and then “Dead Marni” 2 and after a while I began wishing that Marni was actually a suitable name for her, except it didn’t make sense, given her background.
But finally, after weeks and weeks of looking and wishing and referring to her as Dead Marni/Dead Mother, I found something. It fit, it was pretty, and it was perfect. She now has a name.
Sorcha. ♥
- Why do I not just go with this name for him? Callum is the name of one of the MC’s stepbrothers in The Superhero Diaries. The other is Paul. I’m hesitant to re-use names in this fashion, although it’s not completely off the table. [ ↩]
- Yes, after this Dead Marni, the one from Repo! The Genetic Opera [ ↩]
Mirrored from Catherine-Haines.com.