BoM/TWS Message Forum

I'm definitely the opposite in that for the most part I don't even think of any special meaning when deciding names. For the most part I'll just go through lists of names (given names and surnames) and try to put names together that I think sound nice. Like with Alex Day for example, no thought went into it beyond thinking that it just sounds kind of pleasant and it's only retroactively (while writing the chapter that explains it) that I decided it'd be kind of funny if Alex was short for... nothing.

If I'm coming up with names for characters that are, in some manner, foreign in origin I definitely try to do more research to make sure it seems fairly authentic. In that sense I've long realized I screwed up and that Jelena's last name should probably be Petrovica and not Petrovic but that's also something that I guess can be explained away as Americanizing it a bit since things like that aren't really done here.

In that respect the hardest character I've ever had to name is Seyha Keo (a girl on the Eastman swim team mentioned in a couple of chapters in the branch with Ursula I did) because I decided I wanted her to be Southeast Asian, decided on Cambodian-American and then had fun introducing myself to the wackiness that is Cambodian and specifically Khmer naming conventions.