Most fiction has a degree of self-insertion, if I'm honest, even fan-fic. It's almost impossible to avoid it.
Agreed. Even with characters that have been given to you by the series/film/whatever, you remake them at least partly by the actof writing.
Yeah. As you said in previous post, you can't help but impose some of your own words, phrasing, rhythm, sense of metaphor and so on. It's pretty much unavoidable. The only way to keep an already-existing character absolutely true is by making her a stereotype of herself, and then she comes over as flat and 2-D. A bit of creepage is always unavoidable.
<grin> and that brings us to another point, names. How do people go about picking/creating names
Difficult. Naming is a true art, and not one I'm much good at. I tend to go with full or partial anagrams a lot of the time; helps make sure that the name seems reasonably consistent with the language, 'cos the letter balances stay the same. It can also be a good way of partially mutating real-world names if you stick to generating an anagram from a fairly short first name / surname pair. Of course, sticking to plainish real-world names is always a reliable option!
Tim. -- Imagine there were two of you. Which one would win?
tim@midnight.demon.co.uk