Crandon and Mora Ironwood

There's a town in Northern Wisconsin called Crandon (like one of my characters) -- in Forest County. Nearby? (Well, relatively near.) Ironwood, Michigan, and Mora, Minnesota. Rather shocking. Imagine, once we've moved there, if I try to tell anyone about my stories, they'll want to know if I named the characters after the towns. I didn't! I'd never even been to Wisconsin when I gave them those names. Admittedly, though, Mora is the name of a camping area in Olympic National Park. That is on purpose. Her (and Crandon's) other name, Ironwood, is really from the incredibly gnarly trees that grow in Eastern Oregon. Crandon I just liked the sound of.

It's true, though, that I find inspiration for the names I choose from place names a lot of the time. Even more so, plants, especially the scientific names because they sound so interesting. Trientael (the name of my story's world) is like that. The plant it's from looks like this.

More conventionally, I've found ideas in myths, and here and there picked names to give homage to someone else's story. Ellidir, the town where Mora's grandmother was born, I named on purpose after Ellidyr from the Chronicles of Prydain, for reasons that I'm not going to tell you. ;) Actually, notice that I'm not really telling the specific reasons I chose any of those names. ;D