What’s in a name?

I’ve been asked how I came up with the name Degan (pronounced DAY-gan), one of the main characters in my novels. I chose Degan’s name many years ago when I was still just writing for myself. For the longest time, no one knew I was working on a novel. Heck, even I didn’t think I was working on a novel. I was just writing because I found it therapeutic. But I still needed names for my characters.

At that time, I started reading about the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), a six-nation confederacy of Indians who dominated the western New York-Great Lakes region of the U.S. long before we were even a country. Many of the Haudenosaunee names were quite long, so I simply picked a name at random out of a book, then shortened it by taking the first five letters which gave me “Degan.” It is NOT an authentic name for a Haudenosaunee woman. But by the time I was seriously thinking about publishing Shaman, my beloved character had had the name Degan for so long, I couldn’t imagine her with any other name. (By the way, here’s some useless trivia: the whole time Margaret Mitchell was writing Gone With the Wind, she had actually chosen “Pansy” as the first name of her main character. Yep, Pansy O’Hara. It wasn’t until the publisher got hold of the manuscript that the name was changed to Scarlett O’Hara.)

Anyway, back to Degan. Keep in mind, when I first started writing, I never dreamed that my little notebook of scratchings would ever be a published novel. Never! My husband and I were together for a number of years before I let him read anything I’d written. I had no confidence as a writer and even the idea of someone reading my work made me so nervous. So I figured if no one else was ever going to see my work, it didn’t matter what I named my characters. It’s funny how real characters become, and that’s what happened with Matt and Degan. To me, their names are part of who they are, so I’ve kept them, with sincere apologies to the Haudenosaunee.