What's behind a name? I have strange habits in choosing names for my characters... As a general rule I try to avoid the names of people I know... If I'm writing a contemporary story, I want quite common names; if I'm writing a fairy tale I go for strange names, usually taken from the calendar, where you can find names of ancient saints now out of use; if it is a totally fantasy story I often generate names choosing letters at random, and rearranging them a bit... When I'm writing something long, which requires a lot of characters, another habit of me is to choose the names in alphabetical order, so it happens that the first character I name begins with 'A' and so on (it's not always the first character the reader meets, but it's the first I've built in my mind)... This makes it easy for me to recognise them when I need to build a scheme of their moving and relationships... Sometimes queer things happen to my nouns... For example once I named a business man Mr White, and the man blackmailing him I called Mr Snow... In the story I never wrote the names jointed, not even in the same page... so I didn't realized the Snow-White thing until a friend of mine, giving me his comment, declared what a clever symbolism and humor were the Snow/White names for such corrupted people... As for the screen names, I know that most of them have a reason, but I don't try to guess things from them, maybe because I've choosen an English male screen name, while I'm an Italian female... With such a misleading screen name, well, I simply cannot trust the other ones...