Jo Newton
asked
Atom Yang:
I loved your newest book and one of my favorite things about it were the names of your characters. Where did you come up with them? It's not everyday I hear the name Pyotr or Nestori.
Atom Yang
This answer contains spoilers…
(view spoiler)[Hi Brandy! Thanks for your question. To understand Pyotr and Nestori's names, we should back up to Herc's name--which, for those who haven't read the book, is short for "Hercules."
HERC & PYOTR is part of MLR Press's award-winning series of natural disaster romances, Storming Love--and the particular disaster I was invited to write a story about was meteors striking Earth.
So I not only researched meteors and the damage they could do, but also disaster movies of the 70's and later--and wanted to pay homage to these movies.
In METEOR (starring Sean Connery and Natalie Wood), the US and the USSR have to join forces to blow up a giant meteor heading toward Earth. They originally had secret "Star Wars" type missile launchers in space aimed at each other, and they had to aim these Weapons of Mass Destruction cooperatively at the meteor. The US's missile system was called Hercules. The USSR's was called Peter the Great (and Pyotr is the more Russian anglicization of the two, so I picked that spelling).
As for Nestori, it's Finnish (a close neighbor to Russia and also allowed me to feature Finnish and Swedish American culture to some extent) for the Greek name, Nestor--who was a mythological companion and friend to Hercules.
Jason is also Greek (he was a hero, but he did his wife Medea wrong) and Pihla is the Finnish word for "ash tree," which is what they originally believed the First Woman was made from.
I do my best to offer names that aren't Christian-oriented, only because they're so common, and try to branch out into different cultural names and naming customs. I also enjoy mythology and symbolism, so I try to have the names all have some kind of meaning in my stories.
I hope that answers your question! Thanks for asking it! (hide spoiler)]
HERC & PYOTR is part of MLR Press's award-winning series of natural disaster romances, Storming Love--and the particular disaster I was invited to write a story about was meteors striking Earth.
So I not only researched meteors and the damage they could do, but also disaster movies of the 70's and later--and wanted to pay homage to these movies.
In METEOR (starring Sean Connery and Natalie Wood), the US and the USSR have to join forces to blow up a giant meteor heading toward Earth. They originally had secret "Star Wars" type missile launchers in space aimed at each other, and they had to aim these Weapons of Mass Destruction cooperatively at the meteor. The US's missile system was called Hercules. The USSR's was called Peter the Great (and Pyotr is the more Russian anglicization of the two, so I picked that spelling).
As for Nestori, it's Finnish (a close neighbor to Russia and also allowed me to feature Finnish and Swedish American culture to some extent) for the Greek name, Nestor--who was a mythological companion and friend to Hercules.
Jason is also Greek (he was a hero, but he did his wife Medea wrong) and Pihla is the Finnish word for "ash tree," which is what they originally believed the First Woman was made from.
I do my best to offer names that aren't Christian-oriented, only because they're so common, and try to branch out into different cultural names and naming customs. I also enjoy mythology and symbolism, so I try to have the names all have some kind of meaning in my stories.
I hope that answers your question! Thanks for asking it! (hide spoiler)]
More Answered Questions
About Goodreads Q&A
Ask and answer questions about books!
You can pose questions to the Goodreads community with Reader Q&A, or ask your favorite author a question with Ask the Author.
See Featured Authors Answering Questions
Learn more
Mar 28, 2016 12:32PM
Mar 28, 2016 05:43PM