What’s In a Name?

I spent way too much time choosing names for my characters in Existential Thread.  I wanted their names to fit their personalities and I was very interested in the meanings of each name, as well.  It was important to me that those meanings also fit the characters to provide another layer of significance to each.  In other words, I was way too anal.  For those who know me, I can hear you saying, “So, what else is new?”

Despite my best efforts, I made mistakes that had to be adjusted during the editing process.  For instance, Peter was originally James.  James means “may God protect”.  Without spoiling anything for those who haven’t yet read the book, I thought it was a perfect name for James.  All was going well until I was editing the book and read a sentence that juxtaposed Taylor and James.  For the first time I saw James Taylor.  Ugh.  I didn’t want to change Taylor (historical reference to a former president and I liked the reference to a tailor), so James became Peter.

Similarly, I was writing about the Einstein Project at Beagle and realized I had started writing Bagel.  I’m sure I was just hungry and it was a subliminal.  Of course, it didn’t get picked up during the spellcheck process, which just goes to prove that AI still has a way to go to catch up to us.  I had to do a search on Bagel to correct the errors and look carefully at my sentence structures to make sure I reduced the risk of readers making the same mistake.  If I hadn’t, I’m sure I would have had calls from both ravenous readers and an attorney from the bagel brothers.

And you thought writing was all fun and games…