Naming characters

Some characters name themselves. Sandor and Estelle from Soul Shadows, for example. Likewise Raffi and Dario from Chronosphere. Others take a bit more work: Jethro (from Soul Shadows), Lastara Blue (from Chronosphere), Aldo Moon (eponymous hero of that forthcoming book) all cost me enormous amounts of thinking time.

Some names are just perfect the moment you hear them: Molly the Mall Girl, and the genius of 'Art Boy' (I hope we never find out his real name!) from Luisa Plaja's Diary of a Mall Girl. Similarly, Stewart Ross has riffed brilliantly on Turkic and Central Asian names in Soterion Mission, lending his book an instantly epic quality. And when you first hear the names Miko and Drina, you are immediately swept into Rebecca Morton's fantastical sci-fi world of The Last Symbol.

For my villains in Soul Shadows, I deliberately opted for very normal-sounding names: Derek Atkins, Barbara Wallace. Somehow giving them such ordinary monickers made them seem even more monstrous – at least to me. Hannah Arendt called it 'the banality of evil'.

When I run out of inspiration, I sometimes turn to my family. Carl Henrison (Soul Shadows) came from my older brother's first two names (Carl Henry). Or else I'll try and find something subtly appropriate – Paskey and Kaplan, the blackshirts in Ch10 of Soul Shadows, were the names of two redshirts in the original Star Trek series – cannon fodder, in other words!

There's no formula to naming characters. It either works or it doesn't. I sort of know when it's worked. If I don't inwardly cringe each time I type the name, then it's usually okay!