Resources #1

Baby-name websites are often interesting for fanfic purposes. The idea of an AU story about Sandi Griffin was recently floating about in my head, for instance, so for the heck of it I looked her up on ThinkBabyName.com and discovered Sandi was a variation on Alexandra. Another fanfic writer had already made use of this data in a great story some years ago ("Everything's Cool and Froody," by Jill Palmer), and she had a great twist on it, in that the AU Sandi had a different version of this name, Alex. (I think this AU came about because Sandi was not held back in school, and as she's the same age as Daria, she was in Daria's grade, not Quinn's.) If you have more than one version of a character, each from a different AU, give one of them a variant name (in Sandi's case, Lexi, Alexis, Sandra, Zondra, etc.).