I'm no help.
Even in high school, I always hated my name, and would often add a pen-name to my creative writing assignments -- I've pretty much always given myself the first and middle initials "RJ". "Ruadhan" came for two reasons -- it means "red hair" (and yes, I have it) and it's a family name on my father's side, and while I never formally told him of the TS thing, I managed to make peace with my father before he died (and he died from a random brain hemmorage, so it actually meant something), and I think he always suspected I at least wasn't "really a girl" (he compared our relationship to the Cranes on
Frasier); for the J I went with "Jarleth" for two reasons -- 1) it sounds a lot like "Jareth", and that's a name I associate with having a large penis (because I am a nerd who watches
Labyrinth a lot), and 2) doing a look-up of Irish Boys' names on
behindthename.com, this was the only one that started with J.
So, I suppose my advice is to pick an initial that works well with your first one, and narrow it down to a few qualities you like, then have fun with it.
behnindthename.com is a great source for names, and you can search them by ethnicity, mythology, literary references, or just by inserting words into the search box. It gets periodically updated with new names, variant spellings, etc, but not on any regular schedule, but that's the only "con" about the site that I can think of.
