Well, I’ve named everybody in Ezra’s family, and Oliver’s, and then one more of the group of people that Ezra is supposed to be mentoring (which is, of course, the main reason the story itself kicks off). Problem is, I can’t name the rest of the group.
Obviously, there’s Oliver himself, who can mostly be summed up as a disaster, or my current favourite character description of ‘idiot genius’ (also applies to Ezra). Then there’s Fiadh Connelly, part-witch but incapable of casting a spell to save anyone’s life. And then there’s the other two who actually end up being accepted, though one other person attempts to do the same and fails miserably by being that person who makes awful impressions because they don’t really seem to think about what they’re doing or saying or whatever. But since they hardly matter in the long run, this is about the first two.
#1 is a telepath who rarely speaks for reasons, namely that their actual voice sounds a lot more like someone speaking through a throat full of gravel or sandpaper or something than an ordinary teen’s probably should. Even though their thoughts do not reflect this, they tend to be very self-conscious about anything that can be considered verbal communication and stick to basically whatever else they may have at their disposal unless it’s urgent enough to require using their telepathy to get people’s attention, nothing else will work, or they’re trying to keep a conversation as secret as possible. You know, writing out your half of a conversation you don’t want to risk people knowing about is probably not a great idea.
#1 is, like literally every other one of the people in this group, 16. Like everyone else in this group, their birthday is not yet decided entirely, but imagining the story itself is officially set in the coming UK academic year (1st September 2023 to 31st August 2024) then everyone’s 17th birthday comes between those two dates. It’s somewhere in there. I just don’t really know where yet. They are slightly short for a person their age – though since I’m not exactly certain about their biological sex yet there’s like a 4-inch difference between what this means, but somehow I doubt not knowing their precise height is going to affect people’s ability to suggest names – with messily cut hair that Oliver thinks is the result of having a younger sibling play hairdresser, usually dyed in bright colours, and grey eyes.
If you couldn’t guess by the pronoun choice, #1 needs a gender neutral name… and that’s as much as I’ve worked out. Joy. Preferably one that leans more masculine if it isn’t the sort of name that would make it basically entirely ambiguous, and also preferably not starting with a vowel.
#2 is less firm about literally everything but her gender and her age. I just sort of know she exists, and also that she’s a lesbian but her sexuality also has nothing to do with her name so… you know. Not helpful. I’m not quite sure what she can do or what she looks like, so maybe I’ll be mostly stuck working this one out on my own. Still, same ‘no vowel’ rule mostly applies here, especially O or E, but I’d be more okay with a vowel name for her since Fiadh doesn’t start with a vowel. Which also eliminates F. There’s a list of names below that I’m already using, so anything that would be too similar to any of those is also a no (same applies to #1, obviously – I already changed Zachary’s name because he’s the most prominent of Ezra’s cousins and I couldn’t have Fiadh and Felix both being important characters.
Names I'm already using (mostly Ezra's family, but some are from Oliver's)
Henry
Dorothy
Valerie
Julian
Amy
Thomas
Hayley
Luke (admittedly he is dead)
Kirsty
Charlie
Jennifer
Ben
Samantha
Alice
Ophelia
Zachary
Jasper
Violet
Luna
Leo
Silas
Clara
Noah (also dead, but more important than Luke since he’s actually a ghost and also Oliver’s twin)
Imogen
I hope this is helpful information this time around, since it was definitely not good enough when I provided naff all for the post about naming Ezra’s family.