This Promptapalooza prompt was shared by Magi from Indiecator:
“How did you get the name that you regularly go by online, and what if anything does it mean?”
Years ago, before I started playing MMORPGs, bookahnerk (who had already played Ultima Online) started playing World of Warcraft. He kept telling me about the game and his adventures in there and I listened. I liked the world he told me about. And that the lore Warcraft lore had been there for such a long time already. Bookahnerk being bookahnerk, I also learned how this world came to be as it could have originally been based on Warhammer. And then he also told me about Warhammer. He also showed me screenshots and he showed me the game, World of Warcraft.
At the time, my online name was “Alamia” which I had gotten from a book that featured a “Lamia”. I just added the “A”. I know this isn’t very creative, but I’d never been creative when it came to giving me a nice online name. Friends shortened it to “Mia” and there is even one friend who still calls me that today. And her mum, because she thought it was my real name and I told her that I like it and she can keep calling me Mia, too! So that is the very short story of “Alamia”, a name I have never used since starting MMOs or my blog. If you do know the name “Alamia” and can connect it to Slytherin, Python, VH – then yes, that’s me!
Back to Paeroka and how she came to life! There are people who call their characters after their online handles. I, however, called myself after a character of mine. Back to my pre-WoW days. So I had been listening to bookahnerk’s stories and I had already been a big fan of fantasy novels. When I open a book and see a map of a fantasy world on the first page, then that’s a book I want to read! I had also participated in NaNoWriMo in 2004 and made it to 50,000 words! The story had made no sense, though, and I had basically just tried to get to the end and be done with it. But hearing about the Warcraft world gave me inspiration. So in November 2005, I had an idea and a loose plot that I would write about. But what I definitely had was characters with backstories and a world designed around the characters and different races living in that world! I had created countries with different cultures and different beliefs. So, I had decided to go with my own world, my own lore etc. The main characters were gnomes and in my mind, they looked like the ones from World of Warcraft. This is basically where the WoW-connection stops already. But it had been the driving force behind my first ideas.
About the story: I had used bookahnerk’s main character’s name – with his permission – for a character. And I had created some other characters. I came up with their names by randomly throwing letters together and stopping when it sounded good. There were “Grifo”, “Ysra”, “Tenedra” – and “Paeroka”. I had used all these names for my gnomes in WoW, of course. Paeroka hadn’t even been a main character in my story, but I ended up liking the name so much that when we started playing Horde on a server, I chose that name for my Undead Warlock. Paeroka was my first level 60 character in WoW and from then on, I used “Paeroka” as my online name. So yes, I named myself after a character I played in WoW which was named after a side character in a NaNoWriMo-novel of mine… which is still unfinished to the day. Maybe one day I will pick it up again and actually finish the story I would like to tell.
Nerdy Bookahs 