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Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Superseded

I had a character name issue crop up that was interesting because it was something I've never dealt with before. Those of you familiar with my blog know that I don't pick my characters' names. They come in and tell me what their names are and I have to deal with it. I used to argue with them and I always lost, so I decided to save the energy.

So this character comes in and her name is Claire. This is normal. It's a nice name. It's all good.

Until it wasn't good. The problem was that every time I thought of Claire, I didn't see my heroine. I saw a character from a television show I used to watch as a college student. Honestly, I couldn't get to know this heroine at all because she was eclipsed by this other fictional woman.

Finally, I had to talk to her and convince her she had to pick a different name. After working our way through quite a few lists of names, she decided on Selah. I breathed a sigh of relief.

That lasted until I updated my Word document with her name and noticed how close it was to another heroine in this series idea. Too close. The other heroine had her name first, so it was back to the website to browse names again. This time she picked a new name rapidly and it's close in sound to Claire, which makes it doubly good since that was her first choice.

She even acquired a childhood nickname in the search and she doesn't like it. :-) You know I'm going to have fun with that.