Introducing Lia Booke

That’s right, dear Reader. The mysterious author now officially has a Name! A pen-name to be precise. I’m quite proud of it. Short, simple, easy to remember, but it has meaning behind it. And best of all, there’s a joke built in (granted, it’s by accident, and in French, but not the point)! I was forced to make a decision by the necessity of providing a name for a story I recently submitted. My first ever submission for publication, and that was certainly scary, but a topic for another day.

Coming up with the name took rather a long time for me. I decided early on that I did not wish to write under my own name. Not because my given name is not memorable (it is) but because I don’t want it to be too easy for people in my every-day life to track down what I’m writing for fun. This is not to say that I won’t tell close friends and family about my writing. In fact, I regularly link to this blog from my personal Facebook page. I am merely uninterested in allowing my bosses, teachers, casual coworkers and random classmates know what exactly it is I write. The unfortunate prejudices which seem to exist against certain types of fiction is simply tiresome.Make no mistake, I am not ashamed of what I write. I am simply unwilling to allow casual acquaintances to judge me by preconceived notions of the sort of person who writes fantasy, or erotica, or steampunk. So, I will always publish under my pen-name, regardless of genre, but those who I know and trust will certainly know the name is associated with me.

The name Lia Booke grew out of the Narrator’s name from my novel. At first I thought I would go with “Aurelia”, the character’s name. But after wrestling with it for a while I decided to shorten it to just part of her name. I tried to keep the ‘A’ beginning out of some mis-placed notion of playing about with the phrase ‘A.K.A’ but eventually decided that was too long and complicated. I also came to the conclusion that ‘Aure’ sounded stupid, and how else would I shorten the name? After some thought I settled on Lia. It has a nice ring, is short and easy to spell. The Booke part is of course simply a shortening of ‘Bookewyrme’ which is my primary on-line nickname, not to mention the species of Dragon I write about. That part was easy to decide on.

Now I’ve just got to practice signing the name, just in case I accidentally hit the NYT best-seller list someday!

Thought for the Week: “Always end the name of your child with a vowel, so that when you yell the name will carry.” Bill Cosby

Currently Reading: Rise of a Merchant Prince by Raymond E. Feist

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