Should I have used a pen name?
I ask myself that from time to time. It came up again yesterday when my local RWA chapter had their monthly meeting. The wonderful Louise Knott Ahern spoke about how to present a “Killer PR Plan.” (Great job, Louise!) In the course of the Q & A, she revealed that she will write under a pen name. Her reasoning is that she has written so much non-fiction under her own name, she didn’t want to blur the line between fact and fiction when she wrote romance. I consider that a very reasonable notion.
But then we started talking about why people take pen names. One of the members is a college professor, and she said she took a pen name because she didn’t think her students needed to know she wrote erotica. One is poised to really take off in the world of YA and wanted to maintain her privacy. Another used to a be lawyer who worked on putting people in jail, and she didn’t believe any of those people should have any way of finding her. All very valid reasons.
I didn’t chose to take a pen name, and in all honesty, I never gave it much consideration. I have to be honest that, first and foremost, my ego loved the notion that people would see my name on the cover of a book. Ego aside, I tend to “live out loud.” I’m a horribly extroverted person. (I can hear all my friends snorting agreeing laughs all over this fair nation.) My stories are not erotica, so I’m not embarrassed to have people know I penned them. I’m not taking the romance world by storm, so I don’t need to worry about groupies. And I might have wanted to be a lawyer, but I’m not reponsible for locking away any Hannibal Lecters.
Did I make the wrong choice? After all, people in my small, somewhat conservative community might take offense to the fact a teacher writes romance. So what? I can understand my professor friend’s reticence since she writes erotica. While I might be able to lecture about Freud’s psychosexual stages or Masters and Johnson’s sexual research with prostitutes (you heard me correctly), I blush profusely through the whole process. That’s why I can’t write erotica. I guess I’m just not that “liberated.”
I suppose, in my own mind, that if I took a pen name, I would feel like a hypocrite. I defend romance to those who say it isn’t literature. That fact that I have to do so is perplexing and a bit frustrating. But I’m proud of romance. My genre is one of the few markets growing in this horrible economy. My genre offers hope and the notion that good always triumphs over evil. And my genre shows the courage of the human spirit.
I don’t write sex scenes with a story wrapped around them.
***I’m sorry, but that’s my overall opinion of a lot of erotica. The erotica writers can go ahead and throw rotten vegetables at me, but I consider romance and erotica to be separate genres.***
I write award-winning, complicated, and well planned stories that have love scenes which are the culmination of a committed and caring relationship.
Why wouldn’t I be proud to put my name on them?
Hear, hear, Sandy! You should be proud to put YOUR name on YOUR books. They are awesome!
FWIW, I completely agree with your opinion of erotica. Even on the ‘esteemed’ RWA site (which I can no longer access because I let my membership lapse…but that’s a whole ‘nother rant)’romance’ is defined as a plot centering around TWO main characters. Group sex, IMO does not fall under the heading of romance–and yet because it sells well online, RWA would recognize it for PAN status…whee. Slams on brakes. See? Whole ‘nother topic. I’ll stop now. Promise.
On topic. I AM Lainey, but I opted for a different last name from my husband and children for several reasons. When I sold my 1st story, my kids were at a sensitive age (mid-teens) and I didn’t want them to HAVE to be associated with me if they weren’t comfortable with that. We run a local business and I didn’t particularly want ‘business me’ tied in with ‘writer me’ just cuz it felt ‘weird.’ (I deal mostly with construction dudes…the few who did know I wrote always wanted to know ‘how sexy’ etc. so I opted to have that bit of distance.)
It has never been that I’m ‘ashamed’ to put my name on my books. More just that I wanted the people in my life to have that buffer…if they wanted it. Turns out, for the most part they don’t. My kids brag and the DH lists all my books on his tool-head forum. So, there ya go.
Sounds like perfectly valid reasons to take a pen name. Makes me very grateful I don’t work with construction dudes.
I was really concerned about my students, but they’ve been nothing but wonderful, just like your family!
I could do pages and pages on the topic of romance versus erotica versus romantica versus menage a fifty people. But if I get going, I’ll have a really hard time stopping. I have no problem with people reading and writing very erotic stories. I only have a problem with them when they call those stories romance.