Author: Joe Guy (---.io.com)
Date: 07-29-2003 20:07
The Writer's Digest Character Naming Sourcebook, by Sherrilyn Kenyon. Maybe the best source for real-world names, and a nice alternative to baby-name books. Organized by nationality (mostly -- there's also a section just for names from Arthurian legend) with alphabetical lists of names, along with their meanings and variations. Also includes some introductory chapters on naming for genres which have some useful bits in them.
The truth as I see it: As gamers, we already have a library of resources ten times better than anything Writer's Digest seems capable of publishing. Mostly, they seem content to provide hollow dream-rag material for people who'd love to write but can't really bother.
Kenyon's naming book is one of many such examples. Yes, it's a good quick-and-dirty resource, but it's dirty indeed, with a couple of obvious errors and even more glaring omissions (no section on Asian names, despite the Chinese proverb cited on the back cover)!
Writer's Digest books are a lot like RPG supplements. They're good as far as they go, but there are always other books, right next to them at the library, that do a much better job (and that are a step closer to the source material on the ancient food chain of research separation).
For much better name resources, look at things like the “Beyond” Books by Linda Rosenkrantz & Pamela Redmond Satran ... or any of Dr. J.N. Hook's excellent books on language, specifically material like "How Our Surnames Came to America ..." for a volume-over-specifics resource, just hit the foreign films on the Internet Movie Database and comb the credits (more likely to hit errors that way, but the sheer number of names makes it a useful risk if you're just doing it for home-gaming instead of getting paid for it).
So, again, not dissing the WD books per se. Just pointing out that to settle for one is to settle for second-best when there's usually no need to settle.
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