What's Your Porn Name?

It's an old joke. The formula for your porn name is on the Internet, somewhere. The formula for your writer alias/pseudonym/alter-ego however isn't. Not that I'll be the next Harlan Ellison or something... (the man has more than a dozen pseudonyms, in addition to his infamous Cordwainer Bird) Still, it's interesting to see how people (or rather the publishers) come up with names for their writers.

Slightly off-tangent, someone should also make a formula for creating Filipino-Chinese names. There's thousands of Kenneth See's ("cannot see", get it?), Henry Sy's, Charles Tan's (I've personally met one of my namesake doppelgangers), etc. So far the only unique sounding names I've heard in a long time is that of my friend Elbert Or or my classmate Sherwin O (the latter mainly due to his unique last name), but that's the exception rather than the norm.

Of course some Filipinos aren't better off. I mean we are the country that had a Catholic cardinal whose last name was Sin (God bless his soul). And somehow I suspect that the "Mari-mar" (the title and protagonist of a Mexican soap opera) generation isn't an urban legend and there are thousands of Filipinos out there named after the soap opera heroine (and that's not counting the Meteor Garden generation among other things) although I have yet to actually meet someone named Marimar.