Origins of names in The Shadow Spinner

Coming up with names for the characters always seems somewhat arbitrary to me. After all, the reader won’t really question them, right? Except if one of them gets an awful name. More on that below for Shoku’s original, horrible name!

Hermit

We all have head cannon, fan fiction, and rampant imagination playing in our heads after reading a great story. An imaginary character I thought about while growing up was a hero who had no name, but was just called Hermit, because… he was a hermit. This name stuck out to me for Hermit in The Shadow Spinner because he was also a loner who travelled on his own. More importantly, with his powers of obstruction, he could go by the moniker Hermit the Fog!

N’Halia

N’Halia is, to me, a beautiful name. What can I say, though, I love ‘N’ names that end in vowels. Just ask my daughter, Naomi!

Interestingly, I realized about halfway through the first book, that the spelling of N’Halia would mean that a lot of people might pronounce it <N’Hay-leah> while, in my head, it’s <N’Hall-Leah>. There’s no practical difference but it made me think of the Belgariad series when I learned I had been pronouncing Belgarath wrong the entire time. I still refuse to pronounce it how it was intended, so if you have your own pronunciation of N’Halia, I can’t really complain.

Fahrad

This name really has the least amount of story behind it. I’m honestly not sure what inspired it. It just came to me and I stuck with it. ‘Nuff said, I suppose.

Jix – no Shoku

Haha, yes, I originally named Shoku, Jix. It’s awful, I know. I wanted a name that sounded twiggy, like one that belonged to a skinny, shady guy. I came up with Jix, but thankfully, I had already named Jace as his Champion. Yes – it wasn’t any recognition that Jix would have been an awful name on my part, but rather I just didn’t want two ‘J’ names for Champion and Chosen.

So I needed a new name for the Hidden Sun. I knew that this character would be Japanese (in real world terms – see next post on a breakdown of this for each of the characters). This gave me an easy path to finding a name. I looked up what ’eclipse’ was in Japanese. It translated to Nisshoku and the name was born! That’s why, when he is first introduced, it’s told that his name is actually N’Shoku. In order not to have “N’ ” names, he goes by Shoku.

Araina

I knew that Araina was going to be my physical fighter – the one with super strength, the ‘warrior-class’, so to speak. Growing up, my family played Diablo all the time. I made a barbarian and named him after that class, removing the ’barb’ part. So that would have made his name “Arian” – except that I mistyped it. He was named “Arain” instead. He was the first character my family played that beat the game on the highest difficulty, so the name has always stood out to me for a physical fighter. With my character being a grandma, Araina was born!

Next up

Next post will be talking about the nationalities of the characters if they lived on Earth