Naming Minor Characters

Once again a long gap between posts. I feel my apologies are getting repetitive.
But a belated Merry Christmas is due as well :)

Writing has been going ahead steadily over the past couple of week and I now have one chapter completed and five more on the go - not all in chronological order. I seem to be adopting the technique of writing what comes to me at the time, rather than doing all the chapters in order; but this way seems to get stuff done for me (it's the method I also adopt with schoolwork - though it doesn't always work).


The topic I've picked for today is the naming of secondary and tertiary characters; the ones who aren't as essential to the plot. These for me are those that I need to fulfil a certain role eg. the one who steps in to fill a place on a sports team or the owner of a shop.
Most of my main characters so far have been named after family and friends, just a few have been completely made up, but this - for me - is slightly harder to do with less major characters; as I like to have names that fit the people, but for the background characters I haven't really had chance to develop enough to know what names would fit. This has led to me leaving blanks for names which I really do not like, as a chapter that would otherwise have been complete now looks like bits are missing.
So far I've been fairly lucky and only had a few of these problems with names; meaning I feel I can leave them for now as they aren't piling up, but I know that the further I progress with writing the more these things will crop up.

I have therefore decided to come up with something to tackle this:
As of today I will be keeping a list of all my family and friends' names that I have not yet used. This means that if I cannot easily come up with a name myself, I simply need to flick through the list: to find one that isn't taken and that fits the person I've created so far - I can always change it later if I change my mind.
I know this approach will be far from fool-proof, but I know it will solve at least part of the problem.

Let's just hope that all these people I've pinched names from don't end up objecting later on, eh?
Well if they do... tough!
Haha!
Hope you enjoyed this xxx