30 Days of Writing: By Any Other Name...

3. How do you come up with names, for characters (and for places if you're writing about fictional places)?

It's a fairly random process, really. I want my character names to have the feel of recognizable human names, even if names from most human languages don't really work in the context where I tend to write fic. Sometimes I do use names from a culture that seems to fit; for my megaflare_ff story, for example, I'm having to populate Rozarria, and for the most part I'm giving those characters Spanish names, or near-Spanish. I suspect a lot of what I do with naming is similar to what the game writers do: I take a Western name and then tweak it, either changing the spelling or the pronunciation to make it just a little different. I want it to sound like a name, but I also don't want it to be too much like a name that English speakers would run across in the every day. I don't chose names symbolically at all. I just go for what sounds good.

Since I tend to write in established universes, I almost never need to invent place names, which is good, because I think that would be a lot more difficult.

30 Days of Writing: Complete list of questions

Good idea/Bad idea

So there's this fanworks fest just getting underway: Festability, featuring fanworks about disabled characters, canonical and otherwise.

I am tempted to go spam them all with Noojfic.

I am undecided as to whether this is the best idea I've ever had, or the worst, or (given all my other writing commitments, projects, and life stuff in general going on right now) just plain unworkable. But when there's a fanworks festival in process, and half of your OTP is a textbook example of what the organizers are looking for, that's hard to resist...