I just finished writing Year of the Dog ! It had a massive plot hole that I had to fix which turned out to be more work than I expected. Here’s a snippet: “Hey, Auntie Nell.” He wrapped his arms around her, bussing her on the cheek and breathing in pikake flowers and shortbread cookies. And suddenly he was nine years old again, and her solid presence had made his chaotic world stable once more. “What are you doing here?” He usually took her to dinner on Wednesday nights, but today was Tuesday. The edges of her smile faltered a little before brightening right back up again. “What, I can’t visit my nephew?” She angled around him to enter his home. “Is this your new house? Looks lovely.” Which was a blatant lie, because the fixer-upper was barely livable, much less acceptable to a neat-freak like his aunt. She also left four matching pink and purple floral suitcases on the stoop behind her. Only then did Ashwin notice the cab driver standing slightly to the side of the walkway. “Can ...
Recently a reader commented on my hero’s name, Bayard Dommick, and it occurred to me that people might be interested in how I picked the names of my characters in Prelude for a Lord, especially since many of you know how absolutely abominable I am at choosing character names.
I am proud to say that while it was difficult to come up with character names in this book, each name has a sort of meaning behind them, a “story behind the name.”
Real-life nobility
One thing I absolutely did not want to do was name any characters after real-life nobility, especially if the peer was still alive. I think it would be a little rude to do that since these families are very proud of their family names and titles. So I had to check all my surnames and titles against a Surname index of the Peerage of Britain. I managed to miff the spelling of some names so they wouldn’t match real-life people.
My hero, Bayard Terralton, Lord Dommick:
I had already settled on the name of Bayard’s title, Lord Dommick. It was one of those things that just seemed to fit him, and the meaning of the name “Dominic” is “belonging to God,” which I thought was appropriate for his spiritual arc in the story.
I looked at my hero’s personality. Bayard was a recluse archetype, a bit like Lord Byron or the Greek god Hades. So I looked up the meaning of Hades’ name and found that it can mean “sightless.”
I looked up the origin of the name and found that “Bayard” can mean a blind person. It was also used to describe men of courage and integrity. I also looked at British census records for the 1800s and found that Bayard was used as a first name during my book’s time period.
For the family surname, in the meaning of the name, “Bayard,” there was mention of Pierre du Terrail, seigneur de Bayard (1473-1524), a French knight. So I took “Terrail” and came up with Terralton.
Next, I’ll talk about my heroine’s name.
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