All those earlier posts have been about tricks and tools. They're important up to a point. But they're nothing without people. Without a good agent and publishers you're writing for no one but yourself.

So a million thanks to Carole Blake, my wonderful agent at Blake Friedmann, and her colleagues for a fantastic year. And the same to all my publishers around the world too. It's a pleasure to be working with you all.

Happy Xmas everyone! This office is now closed for a little while. In the meantime let me leave you with a little computer creativity courtesy of the name generator for the new Scrivener 2.

<!--more-->I don't use name generators but if you put a toy like this in a writing app I <em>will</em> give it a try. It generates a decent range of names left to itself. But naturally I had to tweak the options so that it gave me Italian female first names tied to a restricted form of dictionary-based surnames (oh come on, you know you'd do the same).

Here's what you get with a 'simple' name search.

<img class="size-large wp-image-6571 alignnone" title="Screen shot 2010-12-23 at 11.01.48" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/12/screen-shot-2010-12-23-at-11-01-481.png?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="600" />

Here's what you get if you ask for double-barreled names.

<img class="size-large wp-image-6573 alignnone" title="Screen shot 2010-12-23 at 11.07.13" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/12/screen-shot-2010-12-23-at-11-07-131.png?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="617" />

And here's what you get if you ask for 'obscure' names, as if these ones aren't obscure enough.

<img class="size-large wp-image-6574 alignnone" title="Screen shot 2010-12-23 at 11.07.55" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/12/screen-shot-2010-12-23-at-11-07-551.png?w=640" alt="" width="640" height="628" />

As I said on Twitter my favourite was definitely Dafne Snood-Flatus. About five minutes later I then got the following reply tweet.

<img class="size-full wp-image-6576 alignnone" title="Screen shot 2010-12-23 at 11.36.02" src="http://vir.liquidweb.com/~davidhe4/davidhewson.com//wp-content/uploads/2010/12/screen-shot-2010-12-23-at-11-36-021.png" alt="" width="490" height="69" />

What <em>did </em>we do before the internet?