Turning Spam into Crown Roast of Pork

The past several months, I’ve been picking away at planning out a new novel. I had intended to write this particular novel for Nano, but my computer crashed four times, so I never even finished my character and setting sketches. However, I’ve spent enough time with the story in my head that I know it inside out.

Since it’s another book in the series my last book belongs to, I also intimately know a good number of the characters. Thank goodness. Mind you, it’s not that I dislike creating characters. Rather, it’s naming them I despise. It stymies me. Big time.

It’s not that I can’t think of names. I can think of a ton of names. But when I chart them out, I discover I have the same problem as the client I complained about a while ago. All my names begin with the same few letters. Or too many end in i or y. Or they all seem to have two syllables. Or they sound too much alike. You get my drift.

And when I finally come up with The Perfect Name, it eventually turns out to be the wrong nationality. Or the wrong generation. Or it’s a name I like, but other people feel it imparts the wrong impression.

To make character naming just a tad less torturous, I’m always on the lookout for good new sources of names. I have two character-naming guides and about half a dozen baby-naming books in my bookcase, plus I have several character- and baby-naming websites bookmarked. I also hang on to old phone books. Someone on one of the email discussion lists I belong to recently said she collects college yearbooks for this purpose. Someone else mentioned the various name-generator programs available on the internet. One I use that has a free version is simply called Random Name Generator, by Kitchona Software, and lets you specify gender and nationality.

But as I was downloading my email this morning, I realized I had a slew of names free for the picking right in my inbox. Just today I got messages from Linda Toure and German N. Camp. I might be wrong, of course, but I believe Ms. Toure, who would like me to provide a bank account into which she can temporarily deposit her $18.3 million, won’t mind if I borrow her name for the character I’ve just been calling “the receptionist.” And Mr. Camp, who suffers from word salad but seems to be offering to sell me medications that he’ll ship very fast, might feel honored if he becomes one of my homicide cops.

I know! I’ll order some Viagra. That should yield enough character names for the rest of this series and maybe even a couple more!