Kamil, Kesrin, and Kitarin.
I hadn't realized what an issue it was to have three principal characters of Hollenguard have names of similar length beginning with the letter K until I was rereading my initial draft. There are a few passages with Kesrin and Kamil speaking that were leading to speaker identification mix-ups. Oops.
The idea of these three names has been with me for several years, the origins of which all differ. It truly is just a coincidence that they all happen to start with the same letter. Each is a nod to a different fantasy story that impacted me greatly in my youth. I like to tell myself that it has nothing to do with some sort of deep-seated fascination with names that start with K, but then I ended up with a draft of book 3 with yet another: a character named Kels that had his name changed with a Find/Replace before I started in on my first revision.
What I didn't expect is how much of an impact having those characters' names so closely resembling each other would have on my storytelling. I bowed Kitarin out of the bulk of Half of Forever specifically because of it, and thus her part was replaced by Rinna and given a slightly different role. This gave Kesrin some fun character development opportunities and was ultimately a good thing, but I missed Kitarin a great deal. I think some of her heart bled out into her brother in her absence, softening his edges a bit when he otherwise would have been finding trees to kick.
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