A Rose is A Rose . . .

But what if she turns out to be Lily?

Or Gretchen? Or Cassandra?

In other words, names are tricky. With the advent of search and replace you can, as a friend of mine did, turn Marcus into Magnus, or as another did, turn Harrison into Michael (or was it the other way around?).

In theory it works. Unsuspecting readers have no idea that it's happened.

But as an author, can you ever get past the fact that a character named Rose will do something that Kelly or Saffron or Betsy would never do? I don't think I could.

I've never met a Michael who behaved like a Harrison. Or vice versa. And if I don't have a name for a person, he -- or she -- doesn't have a personality at all.

Most of the time heroes and heroines appear with names firmly in place. Sebastian, for example, could never be anyone else. The last hero I wrote was a bit tricky because he wasn't intended to be a hero. He was the hero (Elias's) brother, Peter.

That's The Prof's name. I have way too much invested in what that name means to me so I couldn't envision a hero who wasn't a two-dimensional version of The Prof. Ergo, Peter in the book needed an adjustment.

He was happy to comply. In fact, he told me he already had. And I discovered that when he'd left New York for Hawaii to go to university, he'd gone deliberately to find himself, to discover who he was when he was not a part of a large, demanding Greek-American family. The first thing he'd done was to change Peter for another variant of his name and thus begin to reinvent who he was.

He became PJ.

It worked for him. It worked for me. It worked for everyone but the copyeditor -- until she discovered she didn't have to go back through and put in periods after each of his initials. After that she was a happy camper, too, and we all got along fine.

Sometimes, when characters don't come with names attached, I send them away again. I figure if they don't even know their own names, they don't know enough for me to write about them.

But sometimes minor characters don't come with names and I'm obliged to help them out. For this I have a half a shelf of name books. Among the most useful are Names Through the Ages by Teresa Norman and The New American Dictionary of Baby Names. They both take a somewhat historical approach to naming and so help me out with name popularity in times and places.

I've also spent more time than anyone not having sextuplets should with Beyond Jennifer and Jason and its sequel, Beyond Jennifer and Jason, Madison and Montana, not to mention its ethnic spin-offs, Beyond Shannon and Sean and Beyond Charles and Diana.

Let's face it, I'm a sucker for name books. I think it's the potential that I see there. I run across a name and I begin to envision the person who would wear it. And then I think, hmmm. What if ...? And sometimes I begin to see them in action, find them talking to other people whose names I also discover by reading more name books ...

Got any good name books on your shelves? Or good names you'd love to see in a book? As I'm working on my 61st book, I should be running out by now. I have a few on the wait-list hoping that I'll get around to them.

But if you've got a good one and you don't mind sharing, I'd love to hear it. Can't promise I'll use it -- I'd have to be able to envision the character . . . but I'm willing to try.