Kristin Wolden Nitz

In an earlier post, I wrote about some of my naming problems for a protagonist.  When I ran my list of new names for that person past my various critique groups, I got a wide variety of answers.  Elisa was a favorite with many, but my son shot that one down in something less than a heartbeat. Since he and I have similar reading tastes, I had to take him seriously.  I also did a ‘find and replace’ on the names to put them into the manuscript and see how they felt.  I used my reading aloud trick, too.  None really worked for me.  So I went back searching for German girls’ names on the web and found Calyn, which shares a lot with Katrin.  In fact, the shape of the mouth when pronouncing the consonants R and L are quite similar. 

Do I have a winner?  Maybe.