What’s a name in? (or, For the love of anagrams)

What’s a name in? (or, For the love of anagrams)

I have a confession: I used to dread naming characters. I'd write things with characters named "Blue" or "Asparagus," scrambling at the last minute to come up with something better. This all changed in 2011. I was writing a story that had a minor character who was a previous incarnation of a villain I despised. (Let's call him Ramik.) I was stuck for a name until I started playing around with the letters of the phrase "Ramik hates" and came up with "Mihakrates," which I decided worked as a vaguely ancient Greek character story set in a vaguely ancient Egyptian…