Ambika asked Camille Peters:

Hello, I always saw that you had very nice names for your countries, places, and people — how do you name them?

Camille Peters Thank you for your sweet words! ❤️ I actually had a rather difficult time coming up with names for my kingdoms, and in the end, I based most of them on foreign words, which I tweaked to make them sound like a real place. (For example, The Kingdom of Sortileya is based on the French word for spell/enchantment, sortilège.) The ones not based on a foreign word I brainstormed with some of my friends. 😊

As for the names of my characters, I wanted to use less common names because I feel like it gives my stories a more fantasy feel, so I frequently peruse baby name lists for names that are unique but not too unusual (though I later found out some were more popular than I realized, like the names Aiden and Liam); some I get from books I've read. A few (like Anwen and Nolan) I originally used for minor characters (ones who later became Reece and Farrell in Voyage), before renaming those characters because I'd fallen in love with the name and wanted to use it for a main character. ☺️

I have a list of character names far longer than I'll ever use, and I frequently agonize over which to use for a main character and which to use for a minor character. In contrast, I don't have near enough names for future places I'm creating, and I'm often struggling to come up with more. But the entire process, though challenging at times, is very fun. 🥰

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