What's In A Name?

As an aspiring novelist, I spend a lot of time working on critical aspiring-novelist skills. And by that, I mean I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want my name to look on the dust cover of the imagined book.

It goes without saying that I don't want my real name on the dust cover. For one thing, my name consists of two words of similar length and is desperately devoid of hard consonants. It sounds like the kind of name you'd associate with French literature, not the hard-hitting but suavely smooth name you'd associate with modern American crap... I mean, fiction. And for another thing, if I wrote any sex scenes, I'm not sure I'd want my family and neighbors to trace them back to me. I dread the phone calls like "I liked the novel a lot, but don't you think the line spank me you crazy Visigoth was just a little over the top?"

In picking names, it seems to me that there is much room for error. It would be a mistake, for example, to adopt the name William Jefferson Clinton, because I could reasonably expect broad-shouldered mooks from the Clinton Presidential Library to show up to sort me out with meat tenderizers and tommy-gats. It would be a mistake for me to adop the name Burl Ives, because some people would expect me to sing, some people would expect me to be dead, and some people would get me confused with skin rashes ("I'm sorry, but I can't come to the cotillion; I've come out with a nasty case of Burl Ives!"). If I adopted the name Rupert Grint, people would arrive at startlingly inaccurate estimates of my age, and I would go through my literary life sounding like a wrestling move ("Soulfly is putting a Grint on Savage; mother of God have you ever seen anything so beautiful!")

So what's a writer to do? Obviously I need to pick a name that suggests action and decisiveness, but not at the expense of human warmth. Something with a pleasing combination of hard and soft consonants so there's something for everyone.

How about - Rocky Shaft?

Yeah!