The anatomy of a band name

I’ve mentioned before that naming things in my WIP are the bane of my writing life. I struggle with coming up with character names, place names, business names, you name it. It doesn’t even help that I keep a list on my phone of names that I find interesting (I come across them in my job sometimes).

That said I have been fairly lucky with my band names.

When I finally decided to write about members of a rock band, I obviously started out by looking for a name for my band. My day job office is in a library even though I’m technically not library staff or faculty. During my morning break in the cooler months, I sometimes walk a pattern through the book stacks on the third floor. One day, as I was walking through my break, I stopped in a random aisle of books and decided to used the first words I saw when I looked left and then right and combine them to make the name. I looked to the left and saw Rebels. Then I looked right and took the next word I saw-which was Blind. And that’s how I named my first band. I switched them because Rebels Blind sounded dorky to me.

Now that the Blind Rebels stories are being put to bed in my brain as they move through their last stages of editing, I’m daydreaming about the stories of my newest rock band. And as you probably guessed, that means I need a band name. I was chatting with one of my alpha readers/critique partners and capitalized on one of her suggestions about using the names of band members to make up the name of the band.

And thus my new band is called Galexy Rose (and yes Galexy is spelt wrong on purpose. You’ll find out why in book 1). I not only have the band name but the names of all five members (but this series will only be three books- you’ll understand why book 1) and it honestly didn’t take me that long to come up with them. So hopefully I am getting better at the naming thing. It sure would make my writing life a lot better.