Shadow Kiss, third in the Vampire Academy series, is out this week, and I'm pretty excited! I love Rose and Dimitri, and writing about their forbidden romance is really fun--even though it's hard sometimes since I put those two through a lot. I think it's neat that they don't have much trouble when it comes to kicking ass on the battle field and that they find their most dangerous times in affairs of the heart!
A lot of people ask me where I come up with the names for my characters, so I figured I'd delve into that today. The Vampire Academy series in particular has the widest range of names, which is kind of inevitable considering the Romanian/Russian heritage of the vampires. Lissa was actually the first character I named when coming up with the premise. I took a class on Eastern European Folklore when I was in college, and my instructor joked that, "All the heroes are named Ivan, and all the heroines are named Vasilisa." That's not entirely untrue--there are definitely a lot of Ivans and Vasilisas! The Vasilisas are always smart, brave, and beautiful, and it seemed like a fitting name for a vampire princess. In Russian, the nickname for Vasilisa is Vasya, but that didn't feel right. I figured if she'd spent her whole life in the U.S., she'd have a more American name. Lisa would probably be more fitting, but again, that didn't sound right, so I did a bit of rule-breaking and settled on Lissa.
By contrast, I wanted something different for her best friend. Vasilisa Dragomir is a very fanciful sounding name, and I wanted something earthier for my down-and-dirty dhampir heroine. I liked Rose because it's still pretty, but it's also very straightforward and semi-common. Rose doesn't have the same ancestry as Lissa, so she needed a more common last name as well, and Hathaway and its three syllables made a good pairing with Rose's shortness.
A lot of naming characters is simply what "feels right." I literally couldn't write the book until my heroines had the right names. Their male counterparts were a little easier. Dimitri is my favorite Russian name, so there was no issue there. Christian's also American, and even if his family is from Romania, they immigrated long ago and I figured he'd have an American name by this point in his family's history. In fact, most of the St. Vlad's kids have American names since their families have been in the U.S. for so long too. The trick is getting them the right last names. That requires research, and I find myself looking up Russian and Romanian genealogy sites. I makes no claims to knowing much about either language, so I do my best to be as accurate as I can manage. The dhampirs are pretty easy since we all know they're sort of a mix of everything, so I can have fun and give them whatever names they need!