Names, Names, Names

Where do names come from? What do they mean? And more importantly how does a name affect your destiny? I was listening to CBC Radio on Saturday and they have a lovely show about the English Language called
And Sometimes Y. The topic this week was Name Games, and one of the specialist on the show spoke about how names affect who you become. For instance someone named Sasha might be more likely to go into the arts, or be a more gentle soul than say, someone named Viper. Or someone named Arthur may become an artist (or a writer). Obviously all sorts of factors contribute to the building of our characters, but your name is something that "points" to you. That's how they described what a name does.

Anyway it got me to thinking about how we authors name our characters. In Dust I called the evil rainmaker, Abram Harsich. I chose Abram because it's a biblical name, Harsich because it had a "Har(d)" sound and by adding "sich" it sounded kind of Eastern European. I wanted the name to "point" to the fact that Abram had been around for a long, long time. In my current project one of the evil characters is Miss Hakkadottir. Scary, eh? The good guy is Modo. I sometimes spend ages searching out names for my characters. Other times they appear out of the blue. Anyway, it's one of the (many) fun parts of this whole writing craft. Who else gets to name so many people?

Art

Oh, and on another note found another nice review of Megiddo's Shadow at Relish Now. "Edward Bathe’s journey from teen to young man is a three-tissue read." That's good, right? I hope I get some kind of royalty from the tissue company!