Paksworld

If you have over a million words of fiction set in the same world, you’re very likely going to have a lot of characters and those characters need names.   The names have to fit the world, and each other.  In real life, many people may have the same name (which is how the innocent get blamed for crimes they didn’t commit): there are dozens of Elizabeth Moons across the country, with at least one in most states and at least nine in Texas.   But in a book (as I discovered in my first one, when I didn’t know better) readers expect one name per character and one character per name.   They need those names to be easily pronounced (and “easily” varies with the reader) and distinctive.

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