My writing peeve of the day

[annathepiper]

If I ever get to a position where, like the lovely and talented mizkit, I get to be worrying about such things as professional names to use on my novels, it will annoy me that I will not be able to have angelakorra'ti.com, on the grounds that you can't have an apostrophe in a domain name.

And after all the grumpy-making effort solarbird and I have had to go through over the years to get people to spell Korra'ti CORRECTLY, it would suck to have to misspell it on my own professional site. ;) It's ALMOST enough to make me decide to be Angela Highland for purposes of writing!

But okay FINE, I'll sell a book first. :)

Comments

[jesshartley.livejournal.com]

I like "Hyland"

[annathepiper]

Highland is actually my maiden name, so it'd be my first choice for a possible pen name. :) But according to my little brother, we've got ancestors who spelled it "Hyland" as well as other variants. He's traced our family tree back seven generations along our father's line, so he's seen some interesting changes in how the name's been written over the last century or so!

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

Spelling hasn't always been standardized, as I'm sure you're probably well aware! My last name has had some interesting variations- still does actually, as some folks have tried to make it sound less hick/funky and so altered a letter here or dropped one there. Silly. :P

[annathepiper]

*nodnod* I am given to understand that literary or lack thereof during the 1900's was also a considerable factor, and how a name got spelled may well have depended upon the literacy of the person doing the spelling at the time.

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

I don't have that problem. (Granted, nobody can spell my real surname right, but that's only because it has one 'm' where the more common variant has two).

When I was filling out my full name for a background check this summer, the policewoman on duty read it, looked up at me and said it out loud, then smiled and said 'that sounds like a writer's name!'

This is not an uncommon reaction.

I think it's the 'Emily Claire' part. Just sort of sounds like someone who has her head in the clouds and writes flowery prose. ;)

Plus, my parents named me (sort of, in a roundabout way) after Bronte and Dickinson. Bronte I don't like much, but Dickinson kicks ass.

[annathepiper]

Hee! I've been thinking about possible sources of pen names out of my ancestry, myself. Carey and Amerine are my grandmothers' maiden names; Amerine, however, wouldn't flow with 'Angela' very well. And 'Carey' is already in use by another fantasy author, Jacqueline Carey, so!

Sherer, my mother's maiden name, might not be bad, but I'm not sure if I like the flow of 'Angela Sherer' better than 'Angela Highland'.

And I'm not terribly fond of any of the Brontes, either, though my exposure thus far has only been Wuthering Heights that I can recall off the top of my head. :) I think I read something by one of the other Bronte sisters in college when I took 18th Century British Literature, but damned if I can remember what it was!

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Heh. Ancestral names that I can think of off the top of my head are Barr, Anderson, and Stuart. I also can lay claim to Murray. (Murray of Atholl, mind :p).

Can't think of Gran's maiden name for the LIFE of me. There's also a lot of cousins up in Ayrshire, but they get referred to affectionately and collectively as 'the Prestwick lot', or by first names: "Kathleen and Euan", for example.

*reads list of names*

For an English person with English parents, there's a lot of Scottishness in there, isn't there?

[annathepiper]

Heh! Yeah, that's an impressive amount of Scottishness. :)

I need to hassle my brother some more and see if he's got data on other branches of our family. I'm really interested in knowing which bits are Scottish and Irish vs. which bits are German and English. I know the 'Amerine' part is German; 'Sherer' also looks German to me, while 'Carey' sounds pretty darned Irish. I assume but do not know at all for certain that 'Highland' is probably of Scottish derivation.

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Forgot to add - when I am published, I fully intend to use the Ostentatious Middle Intital (tm). Emily C. F------.

Very pretentious.

[annathepiper]

*giggles!* What is your genre of choice? Some genres, you need that initial! ;)

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Well... I would like to write SF, which encourages the initial o' doom. (Arthur C. Clarke; Robert J. Sawyer; Philip K. Dick; Kevin J. Anderson - granted Anderson is closer to futuristic fantasy than science fiction, but he spins a good yarn!)

But, every time I come up with an idea, I get halfway through thinking it through and realise "This is nearly verbatim _______ by ______". I have read too much SF to write it, I fear.

One lives in hope, though.

If I write something bookish, it will probably be more like Bryce Courtenay, or parody/humour. (I'm good at the ironic funny. Not laugh-out-loud, but more quiet snickering).

That being said, the stuff I'm most likely to get published is poetry. It's definitely where my strength is. The middle initial is not so necessary there.

I just think it looks pretty.

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

I can serious sympathize with fighting with others to actually spell my name correctly. Not many get the concept that there might be different ways to spell Rebekah, which is what I use for school and work purposes. Speaking of which, today when the lady doing the orientation for my new job was handing out badges for us to use to clock in/out with, she gave mine to me last and while doing so, looked at me as asked if they had actually spelled it correctly. I smiled and was glad that they had, but then, they had access to my application as a backup for making sure my name was spelled correctly.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I can buy 'Rebekah' confusing people! I'm glad that lady took the time to ask you about it, though!

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

I've gotten plenty of a strange loook when I've gone to spell my name, often having to repeat myself. It's almost gotten to the point where I want to either scream or go around wearing a big name badge just so that people get the point and don't assume the every person spells their name the same way. I've also gotten plenty of compliments on how my name is spelled.

[annathepiper]

Yay on the compliments, at least! :) But not so much on the having to scream at folks sometimes.

[gerimaple.livejournal.com]

but after 14 years will your brain actually remember to register that identity during phone calls or opening snailmail? :)

[annathepiper]

Oh, I think I'll be able to make the effort. ;) I still have "Angela" and "Angie" and "Anna" kind of compartmentalized in my brain, for "work" vs. "family" vs. "friends", so it won't be too much of a stretch to do one surname vs. another for "writing" vs. "everything else". :)

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

I'm the same way, because with family and close friends that have known me for several years, I still go by Becky, but for most people with school starting in middle school on and with work, I go by Rebekah. It's strange to have the two intermingle because I have to do double takes and some people who don't know that I go by Becky are confused. The first time Sarah called last year, my roommate answered and was slightly confused to say the least.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, folks here who know me who happen to answer the phone when family calls and asks for Angie are sometimes still thrown for a loop. :)

[seimaisin.livejournal.com]

Heh. I've been fantasizing thinking about what I want to do, name-wise, when I get to the point of sending one of my manuscripts out to agents. I've always sworn that, if I use a pen name, the last name will be O'Brien - my mom was an amateur writer, and since she never got to read any of my work, I figured I'd put her name on it instead. :)

But, using a pen name will probably be easier, spelling-wise, for me - while both of my names sound nice and easy, they're both spelled just differently enough that no one ever spells both of them right at the same time. ;)

[annathepiper]

Oh, I like that notion about your mother. Something vaguely similar has gone through my brain, thinking about the possibility of using 'Sherer' as a pen name as well. (That's my mother's maiden name.)

[janne.livejournal.com]

My real name is spelled with ø which doesn't work well with most webbrowsers either. (They actually managed to make it work for norwegian domains somehow, but eh, who cares :) So I made my domain-name spelled with 'o' rather than the grammatically more correct approximation 'oe'. Just one of the prices to pay for not having a global languages.

I suppose angelakorra-apostrophe-ti.com is a bit long =)

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I think I remember that about your surname! My other Norwegian friend, Yngvar, has the same problem with his last name, 'Følling'.

And yeah, that domain name's just a tad unwieldy. ;)

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

Well, I believe one can never have too many pen names. And, get the website registered now, before someone else does.

I own several: Anna Moss, Fiona Macleod, Fiona Macbride, Zan Abbey...to name a few. It is my secret compulsion to own domain names.

As a side note, the initials J and K are in the top selling authors names. This is not coincidence, in some cases pen names are planned to maximize ease in remembering the author's name and you can definitely plan to have a name which is happiness-making for the reader - we tend to like names with the flat vowels, like 'Matt' and 'Ann' or 'Angela'. Of course, you can consider your future sales and how they will be improved by that chance reader picking you up because you are shelved next to, say, Jacqueline Carey, if you take the name Carey. Which I would not hesitate to do, btw.

How easy is it for a reader to find your books, or google you, or look you up on Amazon? If you are Tannarive Due, what are the odds of someone finding you if they've only heard your name and never seen it in print (sherer is lovely, but how would someone try to spell it?).

more unsolicited advice is available at any time, of course...

[annathepiper]

Hey, unsolicited advice is NOT a problem. If I didn't want advice, I wouldn't be posting these things to Livejournal! :) Especially about issues related to the pro side of writing. I WILL have to worry about these things eventually.

Very good point about sneakily grabbing more sales by living on the shelf next to an established author. And also about ease of a potential reader being able to recognize and spell your name. That's one of the biggest issues I see with "Korra'ti"--it's certainly immediately recognizable, but spelling it would be a major problem for many, just based on my and Dara's experience with it.

"Carey" and "Highland" might be a tossup as to which would be easier to remember to spell right. "Carey" is more common, I daresay, and easier to spell. But it might also be confused with "Kerry". "Highland" has more alternate spellings with which it might be confused: "Hiland", "Hyland", and a few others. But it's also more unique.

Very good point about "Sherer", too. It's pronounced "sheer", but I bet that'll confuse the heck out of people.

"Angela Carey" sounds pretty good. Though I'm also considering "Renee" with some combination, as that was my original middle name. "Renee Carey". HRmRmm.

Perhaps I will have to make an LJ poll for this. ^_^