Fictional Name Synchro

Synchronicities often involve names, even clusters of names. You might, for instance, encounter several people over the course of a few days who share the same name. It’s often an unusual name – not John or Jill, not Barb or Bill, but something out of left field –Bella or Selsie or some other weird combination of consonants and syllables.

Sometimes these name synchros involve last names. One of the first novels I wrote in the late 1970s – never published – involved a main character whose last name was McGregor. At the time, my husband, Rob MacGregor, was still years in my future, but that name, the Irish rather than the Scottish version, resonated for this character, resonated for me.

In 1991, I wrote a novel called Death Flats. By then, Rob MacGregor and I had been married for eight years and had a two-year-old daughter. The book has been out of print for a long time and I’ve been going through the formatted ebook version for Crossroad Press and ran across the name Wayne Sheppard.

A kind of shock zipped through me. In 1998, Kensington Books published The Hanged Man, in which a detective named Wayne Sheppard plays a prominent part in a series that spanned four more books. Crossroad has since brought out that book and the others in the Tango Key/ Mira Morales series as  ebooks. A skeptic might say that the name, Wayne Sheppard, was firmly ensconced in my subconscious and I simply drew upon that knowledge and used it in my Mira books. But here’s the thing. I’ve written more than 40 novels and once a book is done and off to my editor, I forget it. I can’t keep all these characters and their names in my head at one time.

So as I was reading through the ebook version of Death Flats and saw Sheppard’s name in a book written seven years before I even wrote the first Mira book, I was tempted to change his name, to make him someone else. In Death Flats, he’s a compromised person, a really nasty dude. In the Tango Key books, he’s a hero, the lover and male counterpart of psychic Mira Morales.

So, now I’m wondering if there’s a Wayne Sheppard somewhere in the universe who resonates to these two very different characters. Am I going to be somewhere tomorrow or the next day and run into some dude named Wayne Sheppard? And if that happened, which Sheppard would it be?