Obviously we didn't get to choose the names that we were born with, given to us by our parents. Presumably, though, we all choose a new name to match our identities. I wonder -- what did everyone else put into that choice?
Did you choose at random, like.. by putting a lot of potential names on slips of paper and drawing one out of a hat? Or did you just choose to go by the masculine form of your birth name? (like someone named Andrea might change their name to Andrew, or someone named Christine might change to Christopher, etc) Was there a particular person you admired, and you choose to name yourself after an influential figure in your life? Or perhaps your parents gave you a gender-neutral name at birth and you didn't feel the need to change - like Adrian, or Leslie.
Or some other way?
I have always been an avid reader and writer and learner of languages -- one language that I have devoted considerable energy to is Chinese. My best friend is Chinese, and I was very close with his family for a long time til they moved away. (Yes, those two facts are relevant)
One character I've written about more than any other is named Indigo. He is a lot like me in a great many ways, and for a long time I've thought that I created him as a way of being who I am - a male. (In fact I've spent a lot of time writing stories with male main characters and roleplaying males (online, and in tabletop D&D), all of whom bear a striking resemblance to myself, but that's another story..)
So here's the rather uninspiring punchline - "Indigo" in Chinese is pronounced "lan dian". I thought of making that my name, but since many Chinese people end up going by either a translation of their Chinese name, or a Western name that sounds like their Chinese name, I decided on Landon instead. (This way I could avoid having the same name as the main character in all my books once they're published, too!)
So there's my story about my name. Really, I thought it was terribly clever.
