Sadia asked Gena Showalter:

How do you think of names for your characters? And I haven't read the Lord of the Underworlds series yet but I'm assuming that's it's set in a fictional land. How do you think of names for settings? How do you create a fictional world?

Gena Showalter For the paranormal romances, I usually look through baby books, or Google things like "warrior names" Then I take the names I like and play with the spelling and pronunciation until a character jumps up and says, "Yes! That's me!"

The Lords of the Underworld live in Budapest, but they visit fictional realms. To create the names, I play word association games. In the upcoming release The Darkest Promise, the hero rules a realm called Grimm and Fantica. Because the realm is like a creepy version of a fairytale, I gravitated to the word "Grimm." Because the hero is so sexy, I gravitated to the word "fantasy" and twisted it to fit my needs :)

To create a fictional world, I try to ground the reader in reality first -- use things they know and recognize as a foundation -- then introduce the...odder things :)

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