Names

When I started planning the book, I had a lot of fun coming up with the names.  Most of them just came to me in a flash; a few, I dithered over for a while.  One of the names that gave me some trouble was the name of the villain.

I mean, you hear the name "Darth Vader," and you automatically know he's trouble.  You've got a hint of the word "dark" and a hint of the word "raider" and a whole lot of bad mojo you can't quite explain.  Or look at this guy:

Other people have already covered what Voldemort's name means.  Throwing the "mort" in there, it's definitely something to do with death.  His name is pretty scary, even before you ever meet him in the book.  But my baseline was this guy:

Captain James Hook - he starts with the respectable and genteel "Captain" and adds a little humanity, maybe even some borrowed regality, with the first name "James."  But what is menacing about him is the "Hook."  That last name came to him after the crocodile ate his hand - it's a Neverland name.  Who was he before?  Was there a before?  Barrie doesn't tell us.  All we know is that he's named for a weapon - and a flaw.  So I wanted my villain to have some kind of danger, like a weapon, in her name.  And unlike the guys named above, my villain was going to be female.  I needed something feminine.

Enter Regina, from Once Upon a Time (my older girls and I love that show!)  She really sells that old Disney glamorous evil queen persona.  I thought of her and how wicked she is at the same time that she's really gorgeous, and Mrs. Scales just came to me.  But she also changed a lot of the planning I'd already done.  I hadn't intended to reference fairy tales at all in my space book.  But naming Mrs. Scales convinced me that they belonged.  After all, I started asking who she was and how she got her name, and the answers I got were all fairy-tale answers.

Find out the answers I got in Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death!  You can try the first chapter for free here, and you can buy the ebook for Kindle and Kindle apps here, or for Nook and Kobo and other e-readers here.