Game of the name - Kandy Shepherd

I can’t start writing a book until I get the names right—not just the human characters, but also the animal characters.
Would my debut novel LOVE IS A FOUR-LEGGED WORD be quite the same without a very small dog with the very big name of Brutus? And could the little black pedigree poodle who is his illicit love be named anything but Coco?

In my new release for Berkley Sensation HOME IS WHERE THE BARK IS (out yesterday!) I created a cast of quirky dogs, as the heroine Serena Oakley owns a doggy spa and day care. The “star” dog is an enormous black mutt with plate-sized paws I called Mack.

“Why’d they call him Mack? Because he’s the size of a Mack truck?” the hero, Nick Whalen asks Serena when he first encounters the dog. “That, too, I guess,” Serena replies. “But he’s got a serious fast food habit.”

Yes, Mack’s name was just right.

Nick’s dog Bessie, a purse-sized Yorki-poo, isn’t his at all. He belongs to his great-aunt, an artist. I figured the aunt named Bessie after the American artist Bessie Pease Gutmann because (in the “back story” I created for her) she had one of Guttman’s sentimental paintings of a little girl with a little dog in her bedroom when she was a girl. That information never made it into the book, but I was happy because I knew why Bessie was named Bessie.

And of course I thought long and hard about the name of Serena’s doggy day-care business. But how could I go past Paws-A-While, especially when I could abbreviate it to PAW?

Serena was the best friend of the heroine in my first book. She had a few name changes before I settled on Serena. Lucky I persisted with it because she ended up with her own book. Imagine if I had to write a whole book with a heroine whose name was a compromise because she was a secondary character in another book?

Maybe I sound a tad obsessive about names. Perhaps that stems from my own name, Kandy. It’s a common enough name in America. Not so growing up in suburban Australia. It was a very unusual name—and what kid wants to be burdened with that?

I was born in Sri Lanka, of expat parents working there for an American company. The story goes, when my mother was pregnant, she went up to visit the ancient capital of Kandy and thought it would be a great name if she had a girl. I used to wish she’d stuck with her first choice of Marguerite. But then, I guess Kandy turned out to be not so bad a name for a writer of contemporary romance!

I named my own daughter after a cat—or so my family accuses me. Lucy has al always been one of my favorite girls names. So what if I gave the name to my lovely tabby cat when I was twelve years old—and to my daughter many years later? It’s a beautiful name! (That her second name is the name of her great grandmother, great aunt and also a much-loved Border collie doesn’t really enter in to it!)

Tell me about why you chose the name of you child, pet, or even your business for a chance to win a signed copy of HOME IS WHERE THE BARK IS.