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"

[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]

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!

[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]

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

Very pretentious.

[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]

*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.

[annathepiper]

Oh, I dunno. Note that every SF author you're citing there is male--whereas a lot of the SF authors I read who are females do not in fact have that middle initial! Julie Czerneda, Sharon Shinn, and Kathleen Goonan all come to mind. (I REALLY love Julie Czerneda's SF novels. :D )

As for ideas that have been done before--honestly, I think this is likely a danger no matter what genre you're writing in. You'll find that every idea has, somehow, been implemented in a different way by some other author. Where I start to find ways to get around this is thinking about my characters and how they respond to the situations I'm going to throw at them. It's not unlike life, really; take any random twenty people and throw the same situation at them, and every single one of them will respond to it in a way that is unique to them. That's where you start making a story your own.

Look at the Harry Potter books, for example. Just about every element in there has been used before in some way or another--but J.K. Rowling combined them in new ways, and made her own vivid characters, that made the whole of her work far greater than the sum of its parts. :)

Ultimately, though, if you want that initial in there, you should durned well use it! :)

[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]

This is true. Lady _fantasy_ writers tend to use middle names and initials :p

(Sidenote - until about a year ago, I didn't know Andre Norton was a woman. Andre is a man's name, you see, and would be spelled Andree if she was in a french society.)

J.K. Rowling goes really overboard with the initials! ;)

[annathepiper]

Ms. Rowling ain't got nothin' on J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin, I think. ;) I think there may be some kind of rule about 'the longer a work you're producing, the more initials you should have in your name!'

(Of course, by this logic, Robert Jordan should have about twenty initials by now...)

And the aforementioned lovely and talented mizkit is going to be using a variety of names, as she has posted about over on her own journal: C.E. Murphy for fantasy/urban fantasy, Catie Murphy for young adult work, Cate Dermody for suspense/action/adventure/romance.

Other authors I know who use alternate pen names... hrmm. Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters, which is a pretty straightforward pairing. Stephanie Barron/Francine Mathews.

[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*

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

ROFL @ Robert Jordan. (I like his books. I'm not sure they're Works of Great Literature, but I like them. Probably because they're long - I read fast, so it's nice to find something that takes me more than two days to get through).

One thing I was considering is staying Em F------, but making it E. M. F------, after my grandmothers Edith and Moira.

That way, when I sign things 'Em', people would just assume I was signing my initials!

[annathepiper]

I never have gotten around to reading Jordan--partly because, while I like a good meaty epic fantasy as much as the next reader, I really don't need to have every single detail of every single day of a character's lives laid out for me. This is a skill I'm having to learn to fine-tune, myself--after my history of MUSHing, I'm very much in the habit of long and elaborately detailed textual descriptions. This is, I think, a big part of why I got that 'overly wordy' feedback before. :)

George R.R. Martin is one of the few authors I've read in recent years that writes with huge epic scope, and yet feels like he's writing a short novel--just because his style is so tight and so very much forthright that you don't notice you've just read 600 pages. I admire that!

*grin* I like the "E.M. F------" thing!

[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]

The trick with Jordan is to skip a page every time he starts describing something. *nodnod*

Much like Dickens with flashbacks.

I envy you your wordiness. I can't get past 7000 words before my stories end.

[framlingem.livejournal.com]

Belgium to Scotland :p

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

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Stephen King. Although he hasn't produced many series at length (the Dark Tower series is the only one coming to mind), he is sitting on a mine of works and doesn't use one single initial.

[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.

[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". :)

[annathepiper]

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

[annathepiper]

*snicker* Very, very true! But he tends to go for zillions of novels, rather than zillions of words in a single novel, doesn't he? ;)

[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.