How many of you have used a pen name? I used one for my last book. I'm not really sure why. I guess it was a privacy thing. But now, I'm kind of regretting it. It's so silly. My pen name is so close to my real name anyway.
Thoughts?
More and more, I'm a fan of the pen name. It gives you the flexibility to have a writing persona that's separate from your personal life and/or work life. And I think the thing is that you can always start with a pen name and collapse your pen name and personal name down the road, but if you start out with your real name, you're stuck. A pen name gives you the best and biggest number of options.
It was Nadine Gordimer who said: “A serious person should try to write posthumously.”
This is sound advice and it’s made easier to follow when using a pen name, since, after all, a pen name removes vanity from the equation and thereby self-restraint.
I write a lot of different genres - the sort of genres that don't usually appeal to the same groups (erotica and childrens lit for example) so I use a couple for those.
But also, I write a lot of memoir/personal essays and I'd much rather keep that from blowing up in my personal life.
I feel like I have to, there are like three or four authors who write with the same name in the same genres I write in.
Ah ok I didn't answer, it seems the thread is short enough to determine this.
I have and haven't, depending on the work in question. I was gong to use my real name for my adult fiction, and L.W. Flouisa for my middle grade and YA "Francophone/Dutchophone Steampunk", but when I wrote Anna-Marie WIth Her Shotgun, it seemed most of my readers started reading that.
People like complicated and depressed Wild West heads women I guess.
So I gave up.
I pretty much use Sarah Weaver, as that's my MTF name anyway to write my "Non-Fiction Essays that build toward a novella, about humanity and kindness."
(I found certain speculative fiction dreadully boring, ironically. When the feelings used to be the inverse.)
Halarious bit, is its pretty much no holds barred French Western Literotica (Lyrical Erotica), so I'm not entirely sure how I feel younger readers reading that.
Now to start learning French, and moving to Alsace.
