Good afternoon! Today’s author blog hop question is:

Characters- Are the names of your characters in your novels important? What about the titles?

Goodness me! Yes!

Every character I write must:

1. have a name that “fits” in with the story theme – Can’t be too posh if the girl lives in a slummy area, unless of course it’s about a girl from a good neighbourhood now living in the slums…
2. be a name I can relate to
3. not remind me of another character (mine or someone elses)
4. not remind me of an old school chum or anyone I know*(There is an exception to this, which I will explain another time!)
5. be a name that sits “right” on the tongue. As in – it’s easy to pronounce and doesn’t look odd when written down. There’s nothing worse than stopping at a name trying to work out how to say it.
6. not start with the same letter as any of my other characters, unless of course they are very different (more syllables for example) or they are names of  “known” characters  — Greek gods for example 🙂 What I mean is I don’t like books with lots of similar names like Carrie, Carlie, Charlie, Kerry, Keely, Kayleigh LOL You get the gist?
   

And if I can’t get the name “just right”

1. I’ll get blocked and struggle to move on forward – the same goes with a title. Even if it gets changed later it must fit what I need whilst I write it.
2. I’ll get moody and snarly and start acting like a Cahnnox. A huge, frightening creature native to Black Ice Training Ground. LOL In which case you’ll need to leave me outside and let me stomp around until I stop bellowing, calm down and behave once more.
3. You think I’m kidding, yeah?