I Googled One of My Characters and....

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Word Jedi

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This is a funny one, actually.
My main character's love interest needed a name, so a catchy name popped into my head. At least that was over, right?
Wrong.
I Googled her name, after banging about 50 pages of notes and a twenty page outline, and discovered the name is a very popular adult film actress.
Needless to say, find/replace has been very handy today.
 

Alan Yee

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Dammit. I googled the name of one of my novel's MCs, and apparently he's a real person (not too surprising--it's an extremely common Russian male first name and a Russian last name). There's someone with the same name who is a business executive for some company. Do you think I need to change the name?
 

Brutal Mustang

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Dammit. I googled the name of one of my novel's MCs, and apparently he's a real person (not too surprising--it's an extremely common Russian male first name and a Russian last name). There's someone with the same name who is a business executive for some company. Do you think I need to change the name?

If it is indeed very common, I wouldn't.
 

Alan Yee

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If it is indeed very common, I wouldn't.

If it helps, the first name is Vladimir. The last name is Ranevsky. I'm not sure how common that combination is, though.
 

Brutal Mustang

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If it helps, the first name is Vladimir. The last name is Ranevsky. I'm not sure how common that combination is, though.

Quite, I imagine. When I lived in Central America, common names were more common there. Not quite the diversity found in the U.S. A lot of "Juan"s. And "Maria"s. Probably because the U.S. is a great big melting pot of cultures. Therefore, Russia might be less diverse, name-wise, no?
 

Nivarion

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I've had some great laughs googleing my characters. I've never had a real life person come up, but I've had a few horses.
 

Priene

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My MC's name googlewhacks with exactly one hit. I feel quite proud.
 

Tepelus

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The character's name is Simone Shine.
I'm still cracking up about this.

That is pretty funny. :)

I don't have to Google the names of my main characters because I know they'll pop up in a search, since they were once live people. My main character though has virtually nothing on him on the internet, or in any books, so I can make him however I want. My MC's epithet is my user name on this board. Now I've said too much. LOL!
 

swvaughn

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I had to check this out. I just Googled my mc's name and got... a bunch of hits for my book. Hooray! The only Gavyn Donatti out there is the one I made up. :D
 

Lyra Jean

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I just googled my MC who's last name is Emma Smith. She is a wife of Mormon leader Joseph Smith. The other link is to Emma Smith who was an English novelist.

Her sister Helen Smith who is a sort of parallel MC although she is not actually in the novel. Two people come up for her name and one is a psychologist in Knoxville and the other is a British nurse who died of suspicious circumstances in Jeddah Saudi Arabia in 1979.
 

Adam

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I google all my characters, after searching for one and finding that he was a well established character in a fantasy series. ;)
 

icerose

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I've never done this. Though I did accidently feminize a character from Scar Face...for a mafia story...and I've never seen Scar Face. How funny is that?
 

MumblingSage

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My character is...a region in France? Is that right?

Well, the bright side of having fantasy characters is that they generally don't share names with any real people...although they might share them with foreign locations.
 

Wayne K

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I google Wayne Kernochan and it turns out I'm a software billionaire from Boston.
 

ChristineR

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I worked with a porn star once. I always felt sorry for her having that name, but I guess she was more of a porn starlet--her article has been deleted from Google for lack of notability.

But I think it's awfully common, especially with the Lynns, Heathers, Ambers, and Gingers.
 

Makai_Lightning

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So I tried this with the major character in my current project, and nothing much came up. Then I tried it with a minor character, and apparently the kid's name means "drum" in japanese. Then I remembered his name he uses is short for a full (hyphenated) name, so I googled the second part. The first three things that came up were also drums.

Then I clicked on the wikipedia article. Apparently in japanese (why am I stealing words from this language?) it means soul. So his name is drum-drum or drum-soul? Hmmmm...... >.<
 

MumblingSage

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Lorraine? Brittany?

Probably not Languedoc-Roussillion, though.

Not a region, acutally, from waht I can tell after searching more carefully--http://www.fallingrain.com/world/FR/0/Averan.html Averan seems to be a town. Although "My character's a region in France" sounds a bit more dramatic.
 

kaitie

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LOL! That's hilarious! I always google my characters to make sure the name doesn't belong to someone famous (I'm always afraid that I've heard it somewhere before and that's why it sounds catchy to me lol). My character for my last book, who's name I'll give as Eddie for the moment (uh...it's in the SYW section, but one of the fun parts of the story is finding out his real name lol. so just in that off-chance I ever actually get published and like...someone wants to read it lol)...what was I saying? I got lost in my parenthesis. :) Oh yeah, anyway, I googled Eddie and found two people with his name, which was sorta fun because there's a part in my story where a character is googling him, so I threw the actual number I got in there. I changed some details on the resulting people obviously, but I did have fun with that. Man, I am a dork!

Makai, I totally am curious and want to know your character's name now. The first thing that comes to mind is Taiko Tamashi, which amuses me. ;)
 
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