Trivial Pursuit

Since several people have asked me about it, I thought I'd blog about Kate's name. She has lots of them. Or, rather, she has lots of nicknames.

I love nicknames. I think my using them is a wish fulfillment thing, because I never had one when I was a kid—you can't do much with Amy. And since that left me with a weird sense of deprivation, I piled nicknames on my characters. For me, a nickname is a term of endearment. So Vincent got a couple (Jules calls him "Vince" and Ambrose calls him "Vin" – a point that helped me clarify who was who when Jules possessed Ambrose's body). And Kate got a lot.

Here is the deleted part of DIE FOR ME that explains that her name is actually just Kate, not Katya as some have guessed. (It was, as you will see, too long and explanatory, thus it's deletedness!) So for the record…

My mom had named Georgia after the state she grew up in, and gave her the middle name "Frances" after her own Mom's name. In the good old Southern tradition, I got my mom's last name "Beaumont" as my middle name, but my first name was as normal-sounding as they came. "Kate." Georgia got both the exotic name and the knockout looks.

However, besides my mom, no one actually called me Kate. Dad called me " princesse", Georgia called me "Katie-Bean", or just "Bean", and Mamie called me "Katya." All that to say, I answer to almost anything.