Naming characters in fiction- intentional or coincidental?

I’m sure all writers have their own methodology when it comes to this particular part of the creative process. They can either pay homage to someone they know or their name means something in another language, which in turn says something about the character themselves or what to expect from their story arc.

For me, 9 times out of 10- I have zero intention behind the names I pick. I just start writing and a name comes to mind that feels good enough to keep.
Phil Collins had been asked in interviews about who Sussido is and his answer was along the lines of “it was a filler word just to complete the phrase until finding something better and nothing came along”.
Sometimes I’ve done the same thing… I start thinking of a character and use a placeholder name until it sticks.

The most recent thing I wrote happens to be one of those rare times I chose the names with intention.
Except for Natalia, all the names of the sirens connected back in some way to something else.
My favorite name of all the ones I picked for the story hands down is Alejandro. Maybe in my top 10 Lady Gaga songs but now it makes me think of a character who went through a lot of changes in the creative process, from a potential villain to an unspoken hero.

The funniest part of this whole process to me— I randomly pick a name because it sounds good and I sort of realize after the fact I might have subconsciously picked it up from somewhere else in pop culture…
One of which i discovered recently and honestly have no explanation for, haha.

My original romantasy story that I wrote in high school- I chose two names intentionally because they reference two of my favorite characters at that time.
Jonas was the main character in The Giver. But I didn’t come up with the name right away. I had someone with dark hair and pale blue eyes- the eyes were inspired by my high school crush at the time. And since the character in the book had those things in common, it felt like a natural fit. Personality wise, both are studious and have to carry a burden on their shoulders but the similarities end there.
Mai, the gossip queen who later becomes a close friend- Mai Valentine from Yu-Gi-Oh! will always come to mind when I write about her. I’ve played around with other names to erase that connection but I don’t know if I ever will.
Nina, Jonas’s future love interest- like with Natalia afterwards, just a name I’ve always liked.

Then there’s their other friends.
Corey and Eric vie to be Mai’s boyfriend and this comes between their friendship… I don’t think I was watching boy meets world at the time but I might have picked those names up from seeing commercials. Their personalities couldn’t be any more different.

Recently I realized with Mai’s friend group- I have Rachel Monica and Bonnie… I might have been watching Friends at the time but I swear I didn’t do it intentionally. This hit me last week and I was like “I can’t believe I did that”… again don’t know if I’ll change the names going forward or not. Their personalities are starting to come together but so far they have nothing in common with Rachel green or Monica geller.
Bonnie is another name I’ve always liked- I have a cousin with that name but I don’t know for sure if I’d met her or not. I also named my second rabbit Bonnie and I had her for 7 years.
(Peter, Jonas’s guardian- another name I’ve liked forever but also I named my first rabbit Peter after the Beatrix potter character… nothing but coincidence there)


So you can kinda see how my mind works… just a series of happy coincidences, but as is the case with all the trivia shows I watch, I can sometimes draw knowledge from the most random places. I'll remember where I got it from a lot of the time, but how I retained it... that'll remain one of life's great mysteries, haha

Facing my Fears: Resurrecting "Jonas"

Not sure if this is something I'll post eventually or that I'm just writing for myself, but I'm writing it to get it out of my head... and hopefully I can figure out what to do moving forward.

I'd been toying around with redoing this project again for a while, but it's been really difficult finding the motivation to start it. 
I'd written in previous posts some of my ideas of what to add, subtract and otherwise experiment with... but it's finding the time and energy to do it. 

I'd been cagey in general about writing fiction since I'd finished my previous project. I spent the past several years working on it from start to finish. I've lived with those characters in my head for such a long time and with some of what they went through, it was hard taking on that emotional load. Things I'd never personally experienced but I put myself in the shoes of those who might have. 

So that's played a lot into things. But I think my greatest fear is the same as it's always been: rejection. 

It's all part of this industry. Some of the greater success stories in the writing community had been rejected dozens, if not hundreds of times. I think I have maybe a dozen rejection emails, most of which said they're not interested. Nothing specific that could really help me in the long run. To cap that all off, I was submitting to agents at a time when NOTHING was going right for me. If I got any job interviews at all, there was no follow-up. All but maybe 3 of the dozen of so positions completely ghosted me.
Thankfully things are a lot better than they were back then and I work for a company where I feel valued and I'm lucky enough they've let me continue to work from home even with everything essentially back to normal from whatever the hell this decade has been. 

I spent a few years after the rejection emails trying to edit and fix things, but I stalled out by maybe chapter 4... nothing ever came after that. I got distracted with actual work and the million other little interests I've sunk my time into. 
Now I'm at that point where I really need to start putting words down on my laptop and seeing what happens. I'd been so caught up in my head, thinking over what might work and ultimately deciding some things aren't going to work or just don't feel right.

So this is my message to myself: start experimenting. Write things down. If it doesn't go anywhere, then there's always other options. If it doesn't feel right, I can try a few other angles.
I have a Word.doc for another project where I'd done a similar thing, but for different reasons. Me experimenting with difficulties a character could go through and how the scene around them plays out...

This could be a similar thing and I could use different headings and so on to help organize things. 
I feel like this is already becoming this year's theme and it's only day 7 (going on 8 at this point)... I need to carve out a time slot, give myself 10 minutes and just do the thing. In fact, I'll set up that Word document right now.