So today I was working on my novel, Worlds Away from Home, and I decided to change the name of a minor character from “Soroya” to something that sounds cooler.
I’d given the rest of her family Arabic-sounding names, because they’re basically far-future Arabs living on another planet (their tribal name is Najmi (نجمي), which means “of the stars”), so I wanted to give her an Arabic-sounding name.
Well, when I looked up female Arabic names at Behind The Name, guess what I found? “Soraya” is an actual Arab name–in fact, it’s a variant of “Thurayya” (ثريا), which means “the Pleiades.”
Ha! Isn’t that perfect? “Pleiades of the stars.”
To make her name cool, though, I changed the spelling to “Surayya.”