What do you call them?

It can be no fun when you are stuck for a name for your character - so, just how do you come up with that perfect name?

Obviously, you could Google "Baby Names" and pick one out of the thousands of results that you'll get... but there does come a time when you'll eventually need a name for a weapon or a place or even just a last name. For the longest time, I was posting my bio's to Facebook and asking my friends to suggest names for my character - but even that wasn't totally flawless because I have over a thousand friends and it's pretty much guaranteed that some are more creative-minded than others... so I was soon stuck back where I started in that I had just 4 names when I had an whole Fae realm to find names for.

It was pretty much obvious that my book was on the road to nowhere fast. I was reduced to posting my biographies as Facebook statuses and asking my friends to think of names for my characters. On the one hand, this wasn't a bad strategy since I was getting names, but on the other, it was going to create problems down the line because it would only be a matter of time before some friends got bored of seeing the same requests day after day and it was possible that some friends would start to feel pushed out if their names weren't chosen as a character.

There was also the possibility that I was leaving myself open to having my ideas stolen by less scrupulous people - which I didn't like the idea of very much at all.

I was fortunate enough to be friends with a fellow author on a forum... and one day, he came forward with some resources. Although they weren't entirely what I was looking for, I found that I was able to work with them in one way or another simply by mixing and matching what I got until they matched my requirements a little better than what I was presented with.

His first offering for me came up with names and biographies and you can find it here. What I didn't like about it initially was the fact that it gave out a biography with the name and it took me some time to see that it could also be a good idea because you were still free to scrap or build upon that biography.

Of course, my friend didn't give up on me and he kept me in mind. In time, he returned with what I felt was a better generator because it covers other things besides just names. This was to be the one that I was more inclined to use and you can find it here. I especially like the way that it even covers technology and even weapon names.

After all this, I stumbled across NaNoWriMo, which I found to be an excellent source of characters and biographies - although I highly recommend changing them from whatever biography you adopt in order to truly stamp your ownership onto the character... after all, it's important to remember that you won't be the only one who adopts that character from NaNo. NaNo in itself covers most anything you can think of in a book but can be pretty intensive in terms of personalization on anything that you claim from them.