K3 asked Sebastien de Castell:

just curious, but why does the spelling of Dari's name change from Dariana in Knight's Shadow to Darriana in Saint's Blood? It's not a major issue for me, just something I noticed as I read it the second time (I just got it this past weekend a. a side question to add: how do you come up with good names that go so well with the time period? I can never find a good name for the time period I want to set my characters in

Sebastien de Castell How Darriana's name got its spelling is a strange and sordid tale indeed, though not an especially interesting one I fear: Darriana's name was always meant to have two 'r's, but in the final version of Knight's Shadow I sent to my UK publishers, I only had the one 'r'. They corrected it on their end, but the proofs (with the one 'r') had already gone to the U.S. for their conversion (what's sometimes called 'Americanization' because words like 'colour' become 'color' and so on.) So, the US edition had 'Dariana' and the UK edition had 'Darriana'. Once Saint's Blood came out, a certain absent-minded author (me) then forgot to warn his lovely US publisher to change the name to the one 'r' for consistency. Thus did Dariana (who has always been Darriana in most places) finally become Darriana in the United States.

See? I told you it was both a weird and oddly uninteresting explanation ;)

To your second question about names: I base the Tristian language on a mélange of French, Latin, Italian, Spanish (all Romance languages to get names like Falcio) along with a dollop of English and German (to get names like Kest and Brasti). Often I'll consult lists of old names (or translations of specific words) from within those root languages and then modify them to work within the world of the Greatcoats.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Sebastien

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