This is part three of a series of answers to questions I receive from fans of The Chronicles of Henry Roach-Dairier. This segment’s question answers how I chose names for my characters.

First, I’ll say that when I started with the book that became New South Dairy Colony 50, I never thought I’d end up with four volumes and a lot more characters than I needed in the first one. The original title was to be Antstory, as a pun on the word “history.” Second, I like alliteration. I was using four main varieties of ants: harvester, carpenter, dairying, and fire ants. The letter “A” is used among all the varieties. I began with Adeline and her mate Henry Harvester. Adeline was supposed to me my heroine in the first draft, but her daughter Henrietta took over. I liked the sound of Henrietta Harvester. I caught a lot of criticism from critique partners over that choice, but by then she was “alive” in my mind, so a name change was unthinkable. The reason that she was named after her father, rather than her mother, only came to me toward the end of drafting To Build a Tunnel, in which Adeline and Henry are the main characters.

Antony (with the t not the th spelling) came naturally—it was much later that I gave the name meaning within their world: All Ants. Antony was created over coffee with a friend who said that Henrietta needed some competition over the essay that wins her the mentorship in archeology. Then I had to create some backstory for Antony and ended up starting the book with that—on maybe the tenth draft.

I’ve had the most complaints about my roach names—too similar with all the “r” alliteration. So, I added the soft “g” sound for the skinny (German roach) variety, although some of my large variety roaches have names beginning with G. Gabriel is one of the few roach names with a “hard” g, and one of the few names with a “human” meaning. Archangel Gabriel is God’s messenger, and Gabriel Roach ends up being the messenger to the ants in To Build a Tunnel. Rex (Latin for “king”) is another name with human meaning, and it went well with his extreme desire for power over others.

I was perhaps halfway through the fifth draft of New South Dairy Colony 50 when I bought a baby name book and found a wealth of names in my chosen alphabet letters to be able to stay with the alliteration idea through the entire four volumes. Adding the list of characters to the beginning of each volume in the Fifteenth Anniversary Editions helped—at least according to more recent fans.

Still confused? Try reading one of Dostoyevsky’s Russian novels in which you have several variations of one name for the same character! A professor I had in college for a class called “The Social Revolution in Literature” advised us to have a clean notebook page on which to write each character’s name and quick description, with room to put the variations, and use it as a marker before beginning to read any Russian novel.

One thing I did not do: use any politically prominent name at the time I conceived and wrote the initial drafts—which was from 1992 until 2000, and then years later when Henry made me write The Inception of the Combined Colonies. My use of the name Donald came way before Mr. Trump was on anybody’s political radar, so please don’t try to match any of my characters to a particular human being.

Next time: Were there some words I chose to use and not others, and how did I invent words I needed?