Importance of Names: Stuffed Animal Edition

I was just blogging about a potentially embarrassing word faux pas of mine, and now I have my five year old to thank for embarrassing me through her word choice. Although it really wasn't her fault!

Authors have blogged on this site before about naming books and the big decisions of picking just the right character name. Well, my daughter takes naming her three zillion stuffed animals VERY seriously. She went through a surrealist phase of stringing together words and sounds that had nothing to do with the animal in question (a floppy purple unicorn is named BucklePeanut). Then there was giving them all little girl names like Cindy, Carly, Kelly--listening to her talk to them at night, it sounded like she had her own cheerleading squad in her room. Currently, she's in a very LITERAL phase. A cat named Kitty, a duck in a giant flowered hat named Hat, a frog with a polka dot tie named Polka-y, even though Dotty would be way easier to say.

And her new stuffed triceratops dinosaur. She introduced her to a woman in the checkout line as, "my friend Horny." You should have SEEN the "what kind of mother are you?" look I got.

My September release from Harlequin American Romance is A DAD FOR HER TWINS and features a single mother with a son and daughter. My editor particularly loved this book and noted that I "write children really well." Maybe because I have so much material to work with!