Thursday, August 2, 2012

What's In a Name?

I have probably posted on this subject before, but it bears repeating! Deciding on names for characters is blasted hard. I am the proud owner of quite a few baby name books, which came in handy for deciding on names for my actual children, but the children of my novels require even more effort. Why is it so hard?
Well, for one, you want the name you pick for your main characters to have some kind of deeper meaning, to stand out from the crowd, and in the case of historicals, you don't want to veer so far from the name trends of the time that you alienate yourself. I don't have too many issues with main characters, they seem to come to me with a little name tag on their chest that reads: Hello, my name is:
The real difficulty for me comes in with secondary characters. You can't have a whole story filled up with only your main characters, that would be rather boring, don't you agree? They are bound to come into contact with other people in the course of their adventures. In the case of my latest project, I have to fill up plenty of ballrooms and such with Regency appropriate names, and heaven's mercy, titles. So how delighted am I that I just found this website: Regency Name Generator
Fantastic! Now every time I want to make a random character, voila! I have a name to fit. Hope this resource helps others with my dilemma, you're welcome.

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