I’m several pages into my new manuscript–*wiggle*. I have a basic outline of the first two chapters, and several of the later, bigger scenes sketched out, and I just now realized my heroine doesn’t have a name.

That’s not good.

I hate naming characters. While my guys let me know right away who they are, I usually don’t settle on the heroine’s name until at least 3/4 of the way through. So I slap ‘Sarah’ in there until they tell me their names. (Why Sarah? Who knows.)

The hero of Roadtrip was probably the first guy who had trouble settling on a name. Originally it was Ian, and it stayed Ian until I was almost done. Then he said, “Hey, moron, try Ethan.”

So I did the Find & Replace thing. Of course I did it at midnight, so I forgot to check the ‘match case’ and ‘whole words only’ buttons. Words like librarEthan abounded.

I also have a very small pool of names. I use them over and over and over again. I was working on my Brava novella when I realized that three of the names were already used in my SIM, including the hero’s. One of them weaseled its way into Roadtrip, but I caught it. And a few of the names in that SIM were used in a Silhouette Romance that was rejected a couple of years back. (*whew* I dodged that bullet–I realized even before the rejection came that if they bought it I’d be writing books with NO SEX!)

Time to hit the baby-naming sites.