Ask an Author: What's In A Name?

(Image: Two of my fancier creepy dolls, specifically Sarah and Victoria.)

Welcome to our $3 reward level, where people ask me questions, mostly about the business, craft, and process of writing, and I answer them as best I can.  Reasons this is a good idea:

* I am an internationally published author
* I release an average of four books a year
* I have won multiple major awards
* I actually make my living doing this

Reasons this is a terrible idea:

* Have you met me
* Like, ever
* I should not give advice to anyone

Now it's time to ask me literally anything, and watch as I flail around in an attempt to provide a coherent answer.  Please feel free to discuss in the comments, and to submit new questions either here or by emailing me through my website contact form.  As a reminder, this reward tier only works if we have questions: please, please feel free to share yours.  If you want to ask anonymously, just send your question in via my website, and say that you'd like me to leave your name off when I answer.  If you do not ask me to redact your name, it will be included, if only because it's fun to see your name in print sometimes.

This month's question comes from Kathleen Sloan, who asks: "Where do you come up with names for both characters and places? I've especially wondered this with SF authors who have planet names and alien species. Sometimes I see names I recognize as friends of an author, or relatives of friends, and sometimes I know characters are a Tuckerization. So where do the names come from?"

What’s in a name? A rose, they say, by any other name, would smell as sweet. And sure, that may be true, but I can guarantee you that if roses were called “stench blossoms,” and didn’t have hundreds of years of good PR behind them, they wouldn’t feature in nearly so many suburban gardens and fancy weddings.

This question really covers two topics: how do you name characters, and how do you name places? Let’s do places first, because it’s simultaneously easier and less straightforward, which is a pretty good trick when you stop to really think about it. Here we go:

Now, remember, this question about how I, specifically, name places. In many of my series (Newsflesh, Parasitology), I don’t have to name places, because they happen very much in “the real world” just with bonus zombies or whatnot. The places I do have to name will often be named after the people who officially founded them, being company buildings. So that’s really cognate to “how do you name characters?”

In the October Daye books, we have a lot more places, and those are drawn almost entirely from Celtic and Western European mythology, sometimes massaged to better fit the specifics of what I need for the series, sometimes lifted wholesale. When I do need to name a new place, I tend to give it a very basic descriptive name, much like the way we used to name places “Whitecliff” or “Pine Valley,” and then translate it into either Irish or Scotch Gaelic, to reflect the origins of my fae. Straightforward and pretty easy, if paradoxically challenging.

In the Wayward Children series, on the other hand, we have infinite worlds with infinite sets of rules, and no common language to name them by. Some of the portal worlds wind up named after basic characteristics, like Prism or Confection. Others are named more poetically, like the Moors or Mariposa. A few are named after worlds out of Earth legends. What world gets what kind of name is very case-by-case, and I have to feel my way along as we go. Much of that comes down to what feels right. The Moors, for example, probably have another name, but it’s not one that’s commonly used by the people from the area Jack and Jill traveled to.

(That’s actually something I’m hoping to go into more at some point: worlds can have more than one name, depending on who you ask. Our experience of the Moors has been processed through Jack and Jill, who went to, well, a gothic moor, where vampires stalk the night and people worship the Moon. The people who live in the forest where the werewolves howl may have a different name. And I doubt the folks who live outside the Goblin Market in the same reality call their world the Goblin Market. We only see a slice of what’s beyond each door, and that slice is inherently limited in scope.)

So that’s places. What about characters?

Character names are incredibly important to me. They often have references or deeper meanings hidden inside them: Mary, for example, was born somewhere around 1922, and has the most popular American girl’s name from that year.  So that’s pretty shallow. But her last name, Dunlavy, is a reference to a song called “Dunlavy’s Castle,” about a haunted castle, and is meant to be a reference to the fact that she’s long, long dead. Sarah is also a case of “very popular first name, significant last name,” with “Zellaby” being drawn from John Wyndham’s seminal Midwich Cuckoos.

October Daye is an unusual case, because she was named after a girl I went to high school with, named October Blaze, who went by Toby pretty much exclusively. The rest of the month names in her family came from her, spinning out into their own entire calendar.

Sometimes names just come to me, and when that happens, I should probably think more deeply about their origins. Dianda, for example, turns out to be named after a shopping center near where I went to elementary school. I named her without consciously remembering the shopping center, and was deeply annoyed and afraid of getting called out for doing something wrong when I realized. And sometimes names are a matter of misspelling--the Luidaeg, for example, gets her name from the Luideag, a figure out of Scottish folklore, whose name I typed wrong when I was first writing Rosemary and Rue. It’s too late to change now, but it was a genuine accident.

Because names are so important to me, I spend a lot of time making sure I have the right name for each character, and get really miffed when I have to change something for whatever reason. I did one anthology where they sold Tuckerizations during the Kickstarter, and without telling me, shoved several into my story without permission. I didn’t throw a public fit, but I won’t be doing any further anthologies with those people.

Names matter. Don’t mess with my names.

So that's that.  Like all of us, I'm stressed and sad and cabin fever-y from COVID, but please, please, ask me questions for January!  I don't want to have to start taking questions from Elsie, it would not end well!  Remember that I'll take questions about anything, and that if it can be answered with "yes" or "no," it's not a great question for this format; also if it's something I can't flog for paragraphs, like "how often do you brush your cats."  If you're tired of this reward and want to suggest a replacement, drop those here too.

Meanwhile, if you want your question to be kept for future use, emailing is better than commenting, if only so I've got a long term copy in my inbox.  But I do see all the questions, and try to remember to copy and keep the really interesting ones.

As a final note, please do not submit questions through Patreon.  Either leave them here to hopefully be answered for this reward level, or email me.  Thank you.