Names

To me, one of the hardest things about writing is coming up with names. I rarely think of names first, and I'm not the kind of person who will just pull out the phonebook and name characters random names in the book. I have to think about them. A lot of my characters names tend to be extremely obscure references. For example:

• the name of Jaden's closeted co-worker, Mel, is a reference to Mel Blanc, voice actor of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et al.
• Arthur Maltese, Todd's boyfriend, is a reference to one of the Looney Tunes script writers and to the voice actor of Elmer Fudd. 
• Alice Yamagishi, another one of Jaden's coworkers,  is a reference to Ryoko Yamagishi, who wrote one of the earliest yuri.
• Terra Aelfdene is a reference to a Final Fantasy character
• Joan Maloney is a reference to Joan Jett and Samantha Maloney

So on and so forth. For a science fiction story I have been writing, it's even harder to come up with names. I didn't want the characters to have names that actually exist, because it wouldn't make sense in context. But I didn't want to just string a bunch of useless syllables together and call it a name. I ended up taking words from various languages and turning them into names.