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

[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]

Highland could be German as well; there's a cultural distinction between 'high' and 'low' German, which has to do with nothing other than altitude!

My own surname is ostentiably of Scot derivation, but I can't help but believe there has to be some connection to Belgium in there. It's just too much of a coincidence otherwise.

*wonders what the possible historical connection between Northern Scotland and Belgium could be, knowing that it would have to go back far enough for the clans to be in power still*

[annathepiper]

*nods about German* My theory was that some Scottish person came over to Ellis Island X number of years ago, and somebody took one look at their Scots Gaelic name and said to them, "Highlander, huh? Okay, you're Highland now!"

Northern Scotland over to Belgium? That IS a bit of a jump!

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Belgium to Scotland :p

The Ellis Island thing works, certainly. I hadn't thought of that possibility!

[annathepiper]

Ah, my bad on flipping those around! Still a bit of a jump. :) But my Scots history is minimal and my Belgian history even less; the closest I've dealt with the latter is having a Belgian pen pal when I was in high school. :)

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

You're doing better than I am on Belgium! (Chocolates and the Walloonatic; speaks French and Flemish; people are the Walloons and the Flemings; Capital is Brussels).

My Scottish history and grasp of culture is slightly better.

I could research it (have access to a university library, after all), but I've got enough on my plate with Zen gardens.

[annathepiper]

My pen pal lived in the French-flavored parts of Belgium; his name was Jean-Luc Milis (or, as he wrote it, Milis Jean-Luc), and he lived in Liege. So that's what I tend to remember. :)

I know just enough about Scotland to have an idea of who Bonnie Prince Charlie was, and about Culloden, and that's mostly only because I read Diana Gabaldon's book Outlander. Hee.

And I know what you mean about full plates!

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Three cheers for Diana Gabaldon! *grin* Her books are fun. (Bit of a formula, though: historical misunderstanding, angst, angst, searching, searching, angst, quaint domesticness, angst, torture/horrible and stomach-turning injury of some kind, angst, sex scene, angst, another sex scene, happy fuzzy feeling.)

Bonnie Prince Charlie's by way of being a distant relative on my mother's side, if one goes by clans :) The Stuart I mentioned is Royal Stuart. Apparently.

*is Scottish princess or something*

:p

*is actually utterly mundane and plebian in terms of bloodlines, as far as she can tell, though she has a cousin who is Eminent*

[annathepiper]

I kinda noticed that with Gabaldon's books, and I've only read the one so far. ;) By the time I got to the end of Outlander, a not inconsiderable portion of my brain was going "ENOUGH WITH THE ANGST ALREADY!"

And whoot, extremely distant connection to Scottish royalty! ^_^