A while ago, possibly when we were on our honeymoon but I'm not sure because timelines are not my strong suit, my husband asked me, if I were to publish another book, would I use the same name or would I publish it under my 'real' name?
Firstly, I know the question might sound odd, but I also know it came from curiosity, not any sort of bad or possessive place, because my husband isn't built like that.
Secondly, I love that he thinks I can and would publish another book. It's been a long time since the first and honestly, I'm not sure I possess the same thick skin which got eighteen year old me through both the editing and publishing process of Fairies, let alone the idea of online comments and reviews. (Yes, my little novel has reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and they're not all even by people I know. I try not to think about it too much because it kind of freaks me out at times.) Before you even get to that, you have to finish a novel, of course, and ever since the loss of NaNoWriMo, and the loss before it of a book I no longer remember the name of, I'm not sure I could do it anymore. Even before I was a mum with little time on my hands.
But let's say the sequel to Fairies eventually came together in a way that I was happy with, or a few other ideas which have been kicking around in my head for way too long. One of them comes together, and I get it finished, and I manage to edit it and someone else reads it, (no S, not you, you know what you did) and it meets the bar of Does Not Completely Suck (it's not as low of a bar as the name makes it sound), what name am I putting on the cover?
Well, if it was the sequel to Fairies it would kind of be weird to put a different name on it, right? But then again, I think it would be weird to put another name on anything I've written, because even though my name has changed, my marital status has changed, and a lot of things have changed since I became a writer or the last time I wrote or anything like that, I as a writer have not fundamentally changed, and whilst it's not that different than my name was prior to marriage, effectively my name was kind of a pen name, but only because it wasn't my legal name. Even if I published something using my new surname, it still wouldn't be published under my legal name, and honestly, I wouldn't publish anything under my legal name because I'm sure it would just make more people call me Charlotte, and that just makes me annoyed.
As an aside, partly because we didn't know what the process was at the time when looking at changing my name post marriage, my husband asked me whether it was worth changing my name from Charlotte to Charlie legally when I was changing my surname, and weirdly it was something I was against. Well, not exactly against... If it weren't that it would mean I needed to get a deed poll done instead of just using my marriage certificate to get my name changed, I'm not sure if I might have done it. But you do have to go through that extra step and honestly, it seems like too much effort. But also, my parents chose my name, for whatever reasons they had for choosing it, and whilst I hate people using it, because I specifically don't ask them to, I don't hate that it's my name. It's not like there's some massive trauma attached to it or that it's mortally offensive to me to have to use it when I have to use my legal name, but it's not what I prefer to be called. (Which is why I get mortally offended when I tell people my name is Charlie or say they can call me Charlie and they choose to call me Charlotte. To me, it's rude. If I ask you to call me Charlie and you choose to call me anything other than Charlie, it is rude.) I'm also n to sure that changing my name legally would prevent the people who still call me Charlotte from calling me Charlotte and I'm sure there are a few of them that would think I was just being petulant.
When it comes to pen names, people choose them for all sorted of reasons, whether to honour someone - like Sophie Kinsella using her middle name and then her mother's maiden name (at least I presume it was to honour her mother) - or to show shifts in writing, again like Sophie Kinsella (yeah, I kind of love her, and I was devastated when I found out she died), or to covertly showcase a set of beliefs (if you believe that's where a particular name came from) or for someone who is somewhat typecast into a role to explore a different type of writing or story without the reputation or expectations of their own identity. Thankfully we're past the point of women like the Bronte sisters and Mary Ann Evans who NEEDED to use a male pseudonym to be published, but I never chose Charlie because it is a classically male name. Honestly, it was just through sheer frustration of people not seeming to be able to pronounce the t's in Charlotte or Lotti. (And no, I have not spelt that wrong. I was always either Lotti or L.otti rather than Lottie.)
But if we believe Shakespeare, none of it really matters at all anyway, does it?
As I was finishing writing this I had the feeling that I had written something similar before, and having checked I realised it's strange how many times it comes up, but it also made me look at the blog from a reader's perspective for the first time in arguably too long and realise that my bio or whatever it's called is way out of date, because it's still very NaNo-centric and I definitely feel like that's something which needs to go...
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