So, I’m dropping my pen name.
My legal name is Caroline Ratajski. I’d apologize for my last name, but it’s not really my fault. Perhaps in the future a publisher will demand I switch to something actually pronounceable. I hope it’s something cool, like “Stark” or “Laser” or “Shields.”
I hope people don’t struggle too much with pronouncing it. My name is actually not too hard. Honest. I know it’s got that surprise consonant in the middle there, but trust me, we’ll get through this.
I’d told quite a few people that I’m doing this in the months leading up. There were some common questions, and I anticipate perhaps you’ll have those questions too. If you do, read on. If you don’t, well, thanks for your time and good luck with that Polish surname. (To be fair, it’s pretty tame as far as Polish surnames go.)
Why are you dropping your pen name?
I’m a writer and an engineer. For awhile I kept these worlds pretty separate. By day I was Caroline Ratajski, Professional Engineer and Master of Science. By night I was Morgan Dempsey, Fledgeling Author and Expert Flailmonkey. The two boxes were incredibly neat and well-divided. Nobody in one world knew of the other world.
That changed… pretty quickly.
I feel like I can’t go to a social event with half the room calling me one name, half the room calling me another, everybody stumbling over everything forever, asking me “How do I introduce you?” So I’m saying fuck it. Call me Carrie.
I only ever introduced myself as Morgan because I figure, well, these people will likely talk to me more online than in person, and I don’t want to cause confusion for anyone. Inadvertently, I caused confusion. I’m fixing that, simplifying.
Really? That’s it?
Well, no, that’s not entirely it, but the rest ties into why I had a pen name in the first place, so I’d have to explain that first.
Okay, I’ll bite. Why did you want a pen name in the first place?
Usually I give flippant reasons for the pen name. People can neither spell nor pronounce my last name, and I’d really like something that at least got one of those two. I like to keep my dayjob and my writing life separate. People are silly and I have an incredibly google-able name. Stuff like that.
It’s not that these things aren’t true. It’s just that there’s a little more to the story.
I’ll keep it brief and say that, when I first started actually trying to get published, I was coming out of a not-great time. I didn’t have much in the way of a support network, creatively or otherwise. In fact, there were people who should have been supportive being actively destructive, tearing me down, telling me I shouldn’t bother because I’d never get published anyway. So I had to create this little safe space in which I could operate, where I knew these people could not find out what I was up to via google, or via others googling and gossiping.
But you know what? I don’t need that safe space anymore. I have both the self-confidence and the support network to deal with negativity flung my way. After all, haters gonna hate, ain’t nothin’ truer in life. So now what was once a great help to me has become a great hindrance. And I am, above most anything else, a tool user. Once a tool has outlived its usefulness, I put it away.
How did you even come up with your pen name anyway?
Random Name Generator. I picked the first gender-neutral name.
Really. That’s it.
Originally published at geardrops.net. You can comment here or there.