Okay, fine, I admit it—yes, teenage me did name one of his many shameless self-insert characters Julian Ayriss.

To continue using poor ol' Jules (and indeed myself) as an example, a name my freshly thirty-year-old self might choose instead for such a character is Finn Murphy. Arguably, this is not an enormous shift in aesthetic preference ... but to me, Finn just feels like a more well rounded, less angsty guy, and that works for me.

Let's pretend for a moment that the only thing I hated about that manuscript was Julian's name, and I simply wanted to transplant Finn's over the top of it. Sure, there's Microsoft Word's Find and Replace ... but there are limitations to its utility.

In an alternate universe where I continued through to the end of that manuscript, I might have already changed Julian's name to Dante (or something similarly pretentious) by the time Finn came into the picture. If I'd forgotten to swap out earlier iterations of Julian for Dante, then only ran Find and Replace on Julian ... instances of Dante would still remain.

Maybe part of the way through, I started calling him Julien instead of Julian. Again, whichever one I neglected to account for in the Replace action would slip through the net. Lastly, at risk of belabouring the point, running Find and Replace on a document with a high character & word count can sometimes just outright fail, and even lie to you about it (e.g., report '89 replaced instances' without actually making any changes).

So, how does one account for such tomfoolery?

Well, you could engage a brilliant, seasoned editor to do it for you ... or you could do as editors do and keep track of these things in a style sheet.