The Names Are In The Music

A lot of my inspiration come from music, as I am always listening to music when I write. Sometimes I listen to heavy metal, sometimes it's 80's pop, and sometimes it's irish and celtic music. I listen to a lot of different music, and I'm usually able to draw some sort of inspiration from most of it. However, I do find that I also like to draw character names from songs that I like. If I find a characters name in a song, I can often get other inspiration for that character from the same song or the same band. Here's an example of characters I've named after songs, or fund inspiration for in songs:

Mephisto - The main character of my unfinished novel was not named after a song, but after hearing the song 'Mephisto' by Moonspell, I incorporated parts of the song in the character, such as the line 'I am an angel who dresses in red', leading to the idea of him wearing mostly red and black clothes. (The fact that he was a fallen angel however, I established earlier).

Cassandra - The titular character of my short story 'Cassandra' is named after the song by the same name by Theatre of Tragedy. In the song they sing 'She hath no life but the one he for her wrought', which led to the idea that the character had no life, but the one 'he' for her wrote, the whole basis of the story.

Messalina and Nightwing - These two characters from Kain, Nighthunter are both the titles of songs by Inkubus Sukkubus, and alongside the song 'Sanctuary' by the same band, they helped establish several ideas I incorporated into the story.

Characters from Mephisto - In mephisto I had a character named Cassandra, named after the same song that named the short story. I also had a character named Lillith, partially inspired by the song 'heart of lillith' by Inkubus Sukkubus. Another of their songs inspired the character Atrocity from Mephisto, and made me create a backstory based on the song. The character Beltaine was also inspired by one of their songs. A character called Luna/Lisa was named after the song 'Luna' by Moonspell and 'Lisa' by Lita Ford... And yes, in the story it makes sense that she has two names. The idea for this novel was that I'd pay homage to some of my favorite bands and authors by naming characters, locations and such after them or their work, without copying of course, so I mainly stuck to first names. Some characters however, like Azrael, Lucifer and Lucifierra were harder to link to any particular piece of work, but all of them were in turn inspired by pieces of music I was listening to while writing. I could probably make a soundtrack for each character and chapter at the time of writing =)

So yeah, to sum up, I use a lot of music to inspire my writing, and in particular my characters. I've found that Inkubus Sukkubus is a great band to look at when I want a character-name that suits the sort of mythology I'm going for in works like Mephisto and Kain, Nighthunter. And yes, the picture on top is of Inkubus Sukkubus. I thank them for all the inspiration they have given me so far when listening to their albums, and all the inspiration they will continue to give me in the future =D