Two weeks ago we had a frog thumping on our bedroom window all night. I thought it was just a nature thing, but it turns out that the frog was a portent of doom. Poe gets ravens, which sounds mysterious and deep and intelligent. I get frogs, which are not.
In any case, I finished the latest draft of my WIP last Friday. Hooray! It's short and a pretty lousy draft, but it's somewhere to start revising from. But there's a problem. Apparently my main character's name means frog in Spanish. I told you the frog outside my window was a harbinger of misery and woe.
Rana=frog (in Arabic, it means to look or an eye-catching object)
This does not make me happy and, even though that's been her name in my head for a long, long time, I can't look at it without thinking "frog" now. And, yeah, this is a retold fairytale, but it's not the Princess and the Frog, and the story of the princess actually being the frog has been done before, I think.
I can change the spelling, but I'm not sure I love the look of "Rhana" or "Ranna" or "Ranah." I can also change her name. A friend came up with a list of similar Arabic names for me and these are my favorites from this list:
Rahila=path guider
Raina=peaceful queen
Rani/Rania=queen
Ranya=conquerer
What do you think? Is this even something I should worry about? Do you like the respellings of her name or do you prefer one of the other names? I want something that's familiar-ish, but still slightly foreign sounding. What are your thoughts?
I don't think it is a big deal, but if you really want to change the name, I would vote for Raina.
ReplyDeleteI'll mark that down. And you know me, I tend to make too big of deals of too small of things. :)
ReplyDeleteI like Raina too--but I think it would be enough to simply have Rana thinking somewhere that her name means X in Arabic.
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