The naming of cats is a delicate matter....

~TS Eliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats


Doesn’t matter if it’s a cat or a character, the name is all. Readers fall in love with characters and their names, sometimes going so far as to name their children after a favorite. I know this as fact because I named my daughter for the title character in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of The Shrew. In fact, the first words my seconds-old daughter heard her father speak were from that play, “Your name is Kate, I hear.”

So I fully understand the impact of a character's name on a reader's psyche. Names matter. A lot. And as a writer, if I want my characters to be memorable, I not only need to give them a memorable personality, I need to give them a memorable name. A great name. A name that will stick in the reader's mind long after the last page has been read.

In fact, names matter so much that I will start a brand-new story and only write about 500 words of it before I have to stop and tell the characters it’s time for them to fess up and tell me their names. I cannot take the story further without that piece of information. In every story I’ve written, the name and the character are inseparable. No name...no story.

Isabel in Cabin Fever was very willing to talk. She was named for a hurricane that had spun its way onshore the year or so previous. I saved that name until I was ready to tell her story and she was very cooperative in helping me along. So was Master Richard in Table for Four. I’d seen a drawing of a Dom and sub...don’t know the artist or the title of the drawing (but I do have it on my Yahoo newsgroup...if anyone could help me identify it, I’d be grateful!)...and as soon as I looked at the picture, I knew the character’s name and part of his story. And thus the story was told.

But mostly the characters are nowhere near so accommodating. Usually they are very recalcitrant or just plain stubborn, making me do all the work. In that case, I need to go looking for inspiration. And that’s where it gets interesting because the names come from all sorts of places.

Baby books are often a good source...both hard copy and online versions are useful in their own rights. I have a paperback that I bought long after my own children were named just so I had a resource for those stubborn characters. Adora from Table for Four came out of that book. I specifically wanted a name that denoted beauty (“Adora” means “adorable” in Italian) and yet had a foreign sound to it.

Last names are often found in the phone book. Just open and point. See what comes up and go from there. To be honest, I never use a name exactly out of a phone book, but I’ll take the first syllable of my first stab on the page and another syllable from a second stab somewhere else in the book. Combine them and you have a good name.

I know this one sounds odd...but I have been known to wander cemetaries reading headstones to find inspiration. I found a great name this way, but the man has been notoriously quiet. Every time I give him his chance, he gives me back a bit of his rogueish personality, but he's keeping his story to himself. Sooner or later you'll find Quintillin Cassidy in one of my stories...I love that name and he was a real person in a real cemetary (btw, I gave this inspirational tip to Kara Godwin of Kara's Captain...the story starts with her wandering a graveyard in search of inspiration for a new story. I wrote that scene while waiting in the car for family...and I happened to be parked beside a cemetary with a wrought-iron fence).

But I’ve recently discovered a new source of names...one underutilized by authors, I’m sure. For who wants to give credit to spam email for anything but trouble? No one...much easier to hit “delete” and ignore it entirely. Except you’re deleting an entire population of possible character names each time you erase them all. Let me give you some recent examples:

Someone named Zachary Scott sent me an email entitled, “Ready for Use” spamming me for Cialis or Viagra or some other penis-enlargement offering (don't have a penis, don't want one...although I can attest that they are great fun!). But look at that again...not only a great name for a hero...but he thoughtfully provided the title of the book as well! Can’t you just see him? Standing tall and commanding, his hands firmly planted on his hips, his stance wide. And kneeling at his feet, a beautiful woman, naked...her knees spread wide, her hands palm up on her thighs, her head down, her hair a veil before her face...Zachary Scott and his slave, “Ready for Use.” Voila! Inspiration! And from a spam email.

One of my favorite names to come from spam is “Clinton Hunter.” Don’t remember what he was selling, but doesn’t the name make you think of a character out gunning for a certain presidential candidate? Clothed in black, ninja-like, lying in wait...(perhaps our hero Zachary Scott saves the day?) See what fun you can have with spam?

So names come from everywhere...and they can make or break a character (can you imagine Shakespeare's Katherine if she were named Tiffany?). Authors out there...where do your best names come from? And readers...what are your favorite names?

Damn, What A Bummer

I’ll admit I was initially disappointed. In what? Well, in the mid-January print release of WANTON WINTER, an Ellora’s Cave anthology containing five winter-themed novellas from authors Cheyenne McCray, Daisy Dexter Dobbs, Katherine Cross, Shelby Reed, and moi…disappointed, that is, because it was released after the winter holidays. To me, the timing was too late—I wondered why anyone would be interested in a winter-themed book after the holidays.

But then I got to thinking about my own book-buying habits. I clicked over from author mode to reader-only mode and realized it wasn’t such bad timing after all…

See, here’s the deal. I’m a very fickle person, and I often yearn for what I don’t have. For instance, where I live in northern Wisconsin, it’s freezing cold right now. In the midst of all the snowdrifts, ice coating the roads, and biting winds rattling my windows, I find myself reaching for books on my shelf set in the sultry heat of the tropics, or stories during spring or summer holidays like 4th of July.

BUT (yeah, there’s always a “but” with me *grin*) the key phrase here is “reaching for books on my shelf”, books that are already there on hand, because since I’m lazy, I tend to buy ahead. I don’t want to have to go out and purchase an item when I need it—I'm impatient and I want it to be there when I'm ready. So just like in a department store where I might buy bunches of winter items off the clearance rack in, say, February or March and save them for the next season, I kind of use this same pattern when shopping for books. (Clothes out of style by then? Eh, I’m not one to care.)

Are you getting my twisted line of thinking yet? Confused? Heehee, me too. But let me explain it this way… The summer-set books I’m dying to read in the dead of winter are already sitting on my shelf from previous summer (online usually) buying sprees, while the winter books I’ll be hungering to read come summertime, I might buy now during the cold season in anticipation of the heat. Yep, I lubs me some book hoarding. And since I typically hate to shop, I do a lot of it in one huge seasonal spree, and then when the mood strikes me, there’s no need to drag my ass out (or online) and *groan* shop. All I have to do is peruse my overloaded, sagging bookshelves and pick out a book that will instantly transport me from, for instance, this freaking Arctic I’m trapped in, to the scorching heat of Hawaii.

So see, as a reader, I decided WANTON WINTER’s mid-January release isn’t all that bad because I’d typically buy a holiday- or winter-themed book while it’s still cold. I’d then stockpile it for summer when it’s so sweltering hot I can’t breathe, and I’m longing to escape into a story where the hero and heroine are making wild love in front of a crackling fire, or skiing down a chilly mountainside in pursuit of the villain.

What sort of book-buying habits do you have? Are they hit-and-miss without rhyme or reason? Do you buy based on current seasons or holidays? Or do you ruthlessly plan ahead like I do, buying and then saving books in anticipation of cold winter days or sizzling summer nights?

Titania Ladley is a multi-published author writing for Ellora’s Cave, Samhain, and Red Sage. Upcoming books include FIRES WITHIN (Red Sage - April 2008), BREATHLESS (Ellora's Cave Exotika - April 4, 2008), and KABANA HEAT (Samhain - TBA). Please visit her at http://www.titanialadley.com/ or at http://www.roxanablaze.com/ , her other naughty half's website.