Having lived in Louisiana for nearly all of my life and having learned to talk here, whenever I come across a word I don’t know I tend to pronounce it French. I got a very rude awakening when I was on Long Island the first time and how I imagined the town names were pronounced, in French, wasn’t how they were pronounced at all! It still amuses me. No matter what language the word hails from, a new to me word with a double “LL” always get pronounced as “Y”. Cuz that’s old French!

I only have one female name on that list. Grace. I highly doubt I will ever try to publish that story though. The subject matter is way too intense for CBA. It would be fine in ABA, but I’d have to take out the redemption theme and then it doesn’t work. No redemption theme means no hope for Peter and Grace, and that makes the story very depressing.

Three names on the male list. I’m lucky enough to be Irish AND Scottish, so I like using Celtic and Gaelic names for my heroes. And Biblical names too. My siblings and I all have Biblical names, so I really love playing on that theme.

My most out there favorite name (which will be used for one of my characters in one story one day) is Kaeleigh.

My other out there (invented) name for the heroine of my SF story (which needs to be rewritten) is Avrina — but I think that works. A person can say it…though most people don’t realize it should be said as if the ‘i’ is a long ‘e’ Av-rena. (Why the ‘i’ then you ask – cause it looks prettier to me (I know great reasoning)

Knowing they were Cajun, I’d probably have gotten Hebert right. I tend to “French-i-fy” the pronunciation of Cajun names, to be on the safe side. And I got Charmianne right at first glance. Yay for me! *g*

I’m dealing with Scots/Gaelic names in my WIP, some unusual (to modern ears) but recognizable 18th century names, and a sprinkling of the classics and the more obscure Biblical names.

Naming characters is great fun. Sometimes they come with their full names attached, sometimes it’s a long search, trying this one on, then discarding it, then another, and another, until one finally takes.

The one time I did manage to work it in was in my small-town fiction piece, when my Cajun girl moves to a tiny town in the foothills of Tennessee:

A smile started to creep into the corners of Kirsten’s lips. “Thanks . . .” She blushed again. “I’m sorry. I don’t even know your name.”

“A-bear . . . H-e-b-e-r-t?”

“That’s right.” . . .

Oh, and I guess I should have thought to mention Charmianne, as to most people it is a very unusual looking name. My aunt—my dad’s sister, who died when I was in college—was named Charmian, pronounced shar-mee-ANN, not CHAR-mee-un, as it looks. I added the -ne on the end to show how the last syllable is pronounced. I thought about changing it to Sh- but it just didn’t look right.

Later, continuing to play with the pronunciation of the name, I have the mayor say:
“I saw Earl Haymes this morning—he said something about a ‘charming bear’ coming into town. I guess I’ll have to seek this person out and make whoever it is feel welcome. . . .”

My hero’s name is Frederich and my heroine’s name is Elizabeth, but I’ve been calling her Lizzy-with-a-”y” as opposed to the “ie” spelling. That may change.

So in the next piece I wrote—which turned into my 10-year, 200,000+ word unfinished epic, I had Ashley (called “Ash”), Christine, AJ (for Amy Joy), Jessica, Kenya, and Elisa along with Robert, Allan, David, Michael, and Brandon, with the only unusual one being one of my guys–Kit, short for Kithen, which was a play on the real name of the guy he was based on, whom we called by his initials, TK.

I don’t think I’d noticed the frequent occurrence of names, but it’s nice to find original or unusual ones. Not too out there, though, as someone mentioned, so that I’m always struggling over pronunciation. My character, Seona, has given some readers problems, so there’s a scene early on where her name is good-naturedly mocked, so the pronunciation is perfectly clear (it’s SHO-nah, not See-OH-nah). It’s an odd name for a slave, but there’s a very good reason for her having that name.

I tried listening to Hood on audio coming home from Baton Rouge at Christmas and I found I couldn’t keep the characters straight because all of the Welsh names were so strange to the ear that I couldn’t remember who was who—or even if it was a man or woman! Maybe if I start off reading it and can visually learn the names (I am a visually oriented learner, after all), it’ll be easier to listen to on audio.

And Jennifer’s right—classic names are always going to be more represented on a list like this. I tend to go with traditional names for my characters, even in my contemporaries, because those will never “age” my story. In my third manuscript (the one I wrote before I started Stand-In Groom), the heroine’s name was Zarah. That’s the most out-there name I’ve ever used. The hero of that story was Kevin. I decided if I did one far-out name, the other needed to be pretty easy on the eyes/memory!