Character Names with author Joselyn Vaughn

Hey, all!
Fellow Avalon Books author Joselyn Vaughn is on a blog tour for her new book COURTING SPARKS and my blog is one of her stops! So please give her a hardy commenting welcome and you'll be entered in to win one of her books!
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Naming your characters is like naming your children.

You want them to have just the right name. Sometimes it just comes to you and sometimes you read baby names books until your eyes cross.

With character names, often I will settle on one and it will stick. I can't change it even if I really don't like it. Unless I find the name that works much better. So I do the find and replace in MS Word and get burned because I didn't tell it to change whole words only. I've only done that a handful of times. Oy.

One of my favorite tools for researching names is the Baby Names Wizard. There is a
The book is also great, especially for writers. With each name, it provides a graph, a brief history of the name in pop culture, and sibling names. It mentioned that my daughter's name was referenced in a song about a girl getting whatever she wants and another one about a transvestite. (No wonder it took some convincing to get my husband to like it.)

The sibling names are boy and girl names that would fit in a family. So if you have a son named John, you might like Mark for a brother. In the back of the book, there are a bunch of lists, sorting the names by region, culture, heritage, sound, style, unpopularity, etc.

When trying to pick names for our youngest, we paged and paged through this book. We found a girl's name easily. (It was my second choice for our first daughter when I didn't think I could sell my first choice.) Boy's names on the other hand were awful. We couldn't find the one that was just right. Part of the problem was that I had pulled character names from my baby names list. For a while, we debated about changing Noah's name in Courting Sparks because we both liked it--rare occurrence for a boy's name. Our searching mostly consisted of me reading our names I liked and him repeating them in a way that made it obvious he didn't. Sigh. About a week before the baby was born, we found one that was acceptable to both of us. Then we had a girl. Figures. But now I have a great name for just the right character.

I've found it's much easier to come up character names. I don't have to run them by my husband first. :)
How do you come up with character names?




COURTING SPARKS
Dusting off the ashes of a failed relationship, Daphne Morrow decides she is ready to date again. But when her scorched prom photos are discovered to be the ignition point for a small forest blaze, marking her as the prime suspect for the arson, she finds they're not the only part of her past sparking interest. After a friend's wedding provides a romantic interlude with her longtime friend Noah Banks, Daphne tries to explain away her attraction to him: the atmosphere of the wedding, his resemblance to her ex, his heroic efforts as a volunteer firefighter. Still, their desire just won't sputter out.
When the arsonist strikes much closer to home, Daphne fears she must risk Noah's friendship to find the culprit and clear her name. She'll know their love is real if his interest isn't put out by her need to uncover the truth.

** Click Here to Read An Excerpt **


To Learn More About Joselyn Vaughn and her books:
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- Facebook -

CONTEST:
Joselyn will be giving away copies of CEOs Don't Cry and Courting Sparks during her blog tour. The more you comment here and her other blog posts throughout the tour, the better the chance to win!!
For Joseyln's blog tour schedule, click HERE.

Good luck!!