By Kayla Matt
I may have mentioned parts of this story and the entire thing in earlier posts. Since the Callindor family is appearing Allure of the Gypsies, I’m going to share the story of how they came about. At least, how the famous surname appeared because I never planned on Luke’s family appearing in the story.
Legends of Windemere is based off a Dungeons & Dragons game that I got into during my Freshman semester of college. I can from a goofy, hack ‘n slash gaming background, so this was my first deep character. I made a half-elven warrior and immediately went for the Ranger class. For a name, I scrawled ‘Luke’ on the top of my character sheet and that’s where he stayed. He was simply ‘Luke’ for a full year before we reached a fork in the road of the game. That fork was nearly everyone leaving the game and the gamemaster deciding to investigate Luke’s background.
Prior to this, I never mentioned the reason for Luke running away from home and nobody asked. Now, I was being given pieces of information to run with and told that I needed to put some extra work in. Primarily, I needed to create a last name over a weekend or it would be done for me. I didn’t like the idea of such a personal thing being taken out of my hands. I thought all weekend for a name. Combed through student listings to see if anything caught my eye. Combined words to see if anything made sense. Luke Morningdew? Luke Wolffang? Dear god, there were some terrible ones and I ended the weekend with only a vague idea.
It gets fuzzy here because I sort of remember having it on the tip of my tongue, but the name didn’t really coalesce until I got to the game session:
Luke Callindor
That game sessions Vixen Callindor, Ilan Callindor, and Talos ‘Doubleblade’ Callindor were introduced. Luke’s life was never the same.
So, anybody have an interesting story behind a fictional character’s name?
Legends of Windemere 
I like the name Callindor. I often question character names, but this one just seems ‘right.’ 🙂
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It does. You need the natural flow of a name, which some authors don’t do. Though, I goes flow works differently for everyone.
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I agree with Chris – Luke’s name flows very well. D changed his name on me mid-book. Throughout the first series, he has 3 names – variations on his own, but updated for the time-period. But his “official” name Dubh an Suile turned out to be a title he’d been given as opposed to the name he’d been born with. Pain in the arse.
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I’ve had a few secondary characters who change names on me because they didn’t fit. I do like the idea of a character with different names in the same book. Especially if the character has a long history and there’s a story behind each name.
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Well, my origin story for Varrin isn’t quite as fun, although it does say a lot about my delightfully poor memory. I actually started off writing him as “Vallin”, and then at some point in the first draft I just got it into my head that his name was Varrin. So when I went back to re-read the draft and encountered this mysterious person named Vallin, I had to actually skim through the rest of the draft and figure out what the heck was going on!
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Haven’t done that yet. I do have to decide on if one character is going to keep her name. Two of my heroes have ‘D’ starting names and they’ve had those names since the 90’s. With all the name sensitivity I’ve seen this year, I’m wondering if it’s going to be a problem.
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Hmmm … I mean, as long as the rest of the names past the D are different, I don’t see it being a huge problem. I mean, in Harry Potter you’ve got Harry and Hermione as main characters … so as long as they’re different enough it should be good!
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True. That’s actually pretty similar to this. One is a ‘Del’ and the other is a ‘Dar’.
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interesting. Most of my character names come out of a sounding session. That’s where I say the name out loud to see how it sounds. Like Michelle, sometimes I forget who the hell is who. Need to write things down somewhere else.
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I do that nowadays. Back then both parts of the name came under game related time constraints. Glad that I have more time these days.
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I’ve chosen names for the Drow and Elves from the Welsh language and the more prominent names have meaning relevant to the story if any one wants to investigate… the same is true for the Orc except the names are Sanskrit, Dwarf names are Norse, Kobolds are Aramaic, Human are Cornish for the most part, for examplehe Drow Queen Rianon is a Welsh name that means Sorceress
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That’s a good system. I used it for a few future ideas. The fun part is when people learn the name meaning and they read the book again to see how much it explains.
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