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Strategies for Choosing Pen Names
Feb. 1st, 2011 02:19 amI feel that not raping your food is a good idea. It could get too messy, too quickly. You should delicately make love to your food with your tongue. I mean, I guess you COULD sprout tentacles and turn into a Cthulu-like monster for every meal and totally savage your sandwich, but... that feels like so much effort, oh man.
My friend and I were talking about how we should start a winery together. But, our incompetence would be so phenomenal that our wine would kill anyone who drank it. So, we'd send bottles of our wine as gifts to people we did not like very much.
"Dear Bret Easton Ellis, Enjoy this bottle of wine! Sincerely, Blue Bottles Winery"
With luck, we could get this guy we both dislike who adores Bret's novels to send off the wine, so he could get framed for the murder and that would make get rid of two birds with one stone. This is all theoretical, of course, but I guess that makes us theoretically bad people.
There's a lot of articles on the internet that talk about choosing pen names, and they all say the same shit, over and over, and it's never anything that interesting anyways. They tell you the various reasons for choosing a pen name, give some basic boring strategies towards picking one, and mostly just exist to reassure you in your decision to use one.
However, that's not what I'm interested in! What I'm interested in is the idea of creating a pen name that is actually in some way a cool badass code or phrase or something! Like, Lewis Carroll, or Vivian Darkbloom, or even Mark Twain. I will now proceed to explain what is cool about each name.
Lewis Carroll is a play on the author's real name, Charles Dodgson. To quote wikipedia: "Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes." So one cool strategy for deriving a cool pen name is to play language games with your real name.
Vivian Darkbloom, while not a real author, is a fictional author mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and she herself is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. So another fun way to get a cool pen name is to make an anagram of your real name. However, Nabokov's name happens to be particularly well-suited to anagrams. Some names are not. But you can still play with anagrams! You can make an anagram of a phrase involving your name, such as 'Hanna made this' turning into 'Amanda Hithens', or you can even do a phrase that does not involve your name but just feels to you like a self-describe phrase, such as 'badass mothafucka' turning into 'Casadama B. Khustof'. So much fun!
And you could always go the route of Mark Twain, who took the phrase 'mark twain' from Mississippi riverboats, where the shout of 'mark twain!' indicated that the water was at least twelve feet deep and thus safe to pass. You could even use the previous methods of forming pen names and combine it with this method: for example, 'white night' could turn into 'Bella Notche' if you passed the phrase through Russian and transcribed the sounds back into English. 'Cheval Fonce' is French for 'dark horse'. 'Tut Bannan' is Hebrew for 'strawberry-banana'. And so on.
The point being that the fun in coming up with pen names isn't just finding a name that 'sounds good' because really far too many stupid-sounding names crop up that way, like 'Isabella Fier' or 'Adrien Myst' or whatever, and meanwhile people who are actually named Isabella or Adrien feel a deep sense of shame. Sometimes you can be lucky and stumble onto a pen name that just sounds fabulous without meaning anything in particular (like Lemony Snicket) but if you are like me and chronically indecisive (and also like playing with words when bored), it can be a lot more fun to create a pen name that has a secret to it! Like giving someone a wedding ring without them knowing that it's actually a decoder ring, and then a few years later when you get kidnapped by foreign spies, they discover that their wedding ring can decode secret codes and they go on a badass butt-kicking mission to rescue you from the spies so that you can be reunited in a fit of passion lovemaking. Woo!
There was a sale at the local grocery store: buy ten tiny buckets of ice-cream, and get them for one dollar each! Luckily I realized the sale applied even if you just bought one - sometimes it works like that, but sometimes they actually only apply the sale if you buy the specific number. But either way, even though buying smaller buckets is more expensive than buying a proper quart, this way you get VARIETY and plus it's so much fun to eat out of the tiny little buckets! I bought five. They are neatly stacked in the freezer, like a delicious little tower of upcoming joy.
I'd like to write a romance novel where halfway through the middle, during a steamy sex scene between the 'fiery yet petite and delicate young damsel' and the 'smoldering uncouth shirtless rouge', the damsel runs her hand over his smooth, smooth chest and pauses, furrows her brow, and says 'Is that.. stubble?' and then it'll turn out that, yes, he shaves his chest. Why are they all hairless? I don't get it. Some guys do have hairless chests, but hairless arms? Hairless legs? That's not nearly as common. My dad is one of those rare individuals who have barely any hair on their bodies (except his head and his facial hair, of course, where he has plenty), and he was always embarrassed by it when younger, because he thought it made him less manly or something dumb. But it might because some guys probably assumed he shaved his legs, or maybe even teased him about it. He was quite the playa before he settled down and got married, though, so it's not like his manhood was in question or anything... Anyway, I digress. The point being, hairlessness is not a natural state of being for most men, so why are almost all romance-novel men so hairless? Maybe their hair is on a vacation in Hawaii? I can just see it. The guy wakes up one morning, suddenly hairless, to find a note from his leg-and-chest hair:
"Dear Hunk, We are tired of being attached to your hunky glory all the time so we have decided to take a break, get some sun, and enjoy a bit of snorkeling. We'll send postcards! Sincerely, All Your Body Hairs From Below The Neck"
And while his hair is vacationing in Hawaii, he meets this fiery young wench (why are they always described as 'fiery'? Are romance novel women prone to lighting themselves on fire or something?) who, depending on how you see it, seduces him with her feminine charms / falls for his pick-up routine because she's extremely horny and sexually unfulfilled, and the novel ends with what we assume will eventually be marriage... and then, a few days after the novel's end, she wakes up to this very unfamiliar feeling beneath her body and realizes it's because all the man's hairs returned from Hawaii, but all the coconut juice and bananas have disoriented them and instead of landing back on the man's body, they missed and landed on her body instead. WELL, SHIT, THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR RUNNING OFF WITH A MYSTERIOUSLY HAIRLESS HUNK, guess you should have been a bit more curious over why his skin was so baby-smooth, huh!
The timing in how you steam your asparagus is so crucial. If you steam it too little, it's just not cooked. But if you steam it even a minute too much, then it's not crisp and kinda soggy and not nearly as much fun to eat! Generally I find that between three to five minutes does it for me. At three minutes, I'll start nibbling and sampling one of them to see if it's done yet, and the moment it's just cooked enough, I yank them off the fire and put them on a plate and yum yum delicious asparagus!
I once had steamed fiddleheads when my college's dining hall did 'Healthy Food Day!' for health awareness week or something silly like that, and I thought there were fantastic. I put a little butter and salt on them and ate soooo much oh man, delicious fiddleheads. When I am living on my own like a proper adult and cooking for myself, I'll have to figure out where you get fiddleheads and make them for myself because man are they fun to eat. I like foods that are fun to eat! Maybe that's why I don't like apples. I don't find them that fun to eat. And I HATE most oranges because they are such a pain in the butt to peel, oh my god, just stick with tangerines instead, those things peel like a charm if you buy the right kind. Blood oranges peel pretty well though, I've found.
Why are blood oranges so popular all of the sudden? There's blood orange sorbet now where before I didn't see any, and pinkberry has a new blood orange flavor and also blood orange bits to put on top of your yogurt if you so desire. I mean... blood oranges are just oranges that are red. It's kinda cool and I guess maybe there's a slight taste different, but I don't see what's so awesome about them, other than them being easier to peel, which is a big deal only to me... Maybe it's because there's a novelty to blood orange. Just orange is no longer cool anymore, so they make it BLOOD orange and change the color around and people get all excited!
Or maybe blood oranges actually taste significantly different and I just am remembering them wrong. Who knows. Anything is possible.
You know those vibrating chairs in malls where you put in a quarter and it vibrates for two minutes? I fucking love those things.
My friend and I were talking about how we should start a winery together. But, our incompetence would be so phenomenal that our wine would kill anyone who drank it. So, we'd send bottles of our wine as gifts to people we did not like very much.
"Dear Bret Easton Ellis, Enjoy this bottle of wine! Sincerely, Blue Bottles Winery"
With luck, we could get this guy we both dislike who adores Bret's novels to send off the wine, so he could get framed for the murder and that would make get rid of two birds with one stone. This is all theoretical, of course, but I guess that makes us theoretically bad people.
There's a lot of articles on the internet that talk about choosing pen names, and they all say the same shit, over and over, and it's never anything that interesting anyways. They tell you the various reasons for choosing a pen name, give some basic boring strategies towards picking one, and mostly just exist to reassure you in your decision to use one.
However, that's not what I'm interested in! What I'm interested in is the idea of creating a pen name that is actually in some way a cool badass code or phrase or something! Like, Lewis Carroll, or Vivian Darkbloom, or even Mark Twain. I will now proceed to explain what is cool about each name.
Lewis Carroll is a play on the author's real name, Charles Dodgson. To quote wikipedia: "Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes." So one cool strategy for deriving a cool pen name is to play language games with your real name.
Vivian Darkbloom, while not a real author, is a fictional author mentioned in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and she herself is an anagram of Vladimir Nabokov. So another fun way to get a cool pen name is to make an anagram of your real name. However, Nabokov's name happens to be particularly well-suited to anagrams. Some names are not. But you can still play with anagrams! You can make an anagram of a phrase involving your name, such as 'Hanna made this' turning into 'Amanda Hithens', or you can even do a phrase that does not involve your name but just feels to you like a self-describe phrase, such as 'badass mothafucka' turning into 'Casadama B. Khustof'. So much fun!
And you could always go the route of Mark Twain, who took the phrase 'mark twain' from Mississippi riverboats, where the shout of 'mark twain!' indicated that the water was at least twelve feet deep and thus safe to pass. You could even use the previous methods of forming pen names and combine it with this method: for example, 'white night' could turn into 'Bella Notche' if you passed the phrase through Russian and transcribed the sounds back into English. 'Cheval Fonce' is French for 'dark horse'. 'Tut Bannan' is Hebrew for 'strawberry-banana'. And so on.
The point being that the fun in coming up with pen names isn't just finding a name that 'sounds good' because really far too many stupid-sounding names crop up that way, like 'Isabella Fier' or 'Adrien Myst' or whatever, and meanwhile people who are actually named Isabella or Adrien feel a deep sense of shame. Sometimes you can be lucky and stumble onto a pen name that just sounds fabulous without meaning anything in particular (like Lemony Snicket) but if you are like me and chronically indecisive (and also like playing with words when bored), it can be a lot more fun to create a pen name that has a secret to it! Like giving someone a wedding ring without them knowing that it's actually a decoder ring, and then a few years later when you get kidnapped by foreign spies, they discover that their wedding ring can decode secret codes and they go on a badass butt-kicking mission to rescue you from the spies so that you can be reunited in a fit of passion lovemaking. Woo!
There was a sale at the local grocery store: buy ten tiny buckets of ice-cream, and get them for one dollar each! Luckily I realized the sale applied even if you just bought one - sometimes it works like that, but sometimes they actually only apply the sale if you buy the specific number. But either way, even though buying smaller buckets is more expensive than buying a proper quart, this way you get VARIETY and plus it's so much fun to eat out of the tiny little buckets! I bought five. They are neatly stacked in the freezer, like a delicious little tower of upcoming joy.
I'd like to write a romance novel where halfway through the middle, during a steamy sex scene between the 'fiery yet petite and delicate young damsel' and the 'smoldering uncouth shirtless rouge', the damsel runs her hand over his smooth, smooth chest and pauses, furrows her brow, and says 'Is that.. stubble?' and then it'll turn out that, yes, he shaves his chest. Why are they all hairless? I don't get it. Some guys do have hairless chests, but hairless arms? Hairless legs? That's not nearly as common. My dad is one of those rare individuals who have barely any hair on their bodies (except his head and his facial hair, of course, where he has plenty), and he was always embarrassed by it when younger, because he thought it made him less manly or something dumb. But it might because some guys probably assumed he shaved his legs, or maybe even teased him about it. He was quite the playa before he settled down and got married, though, so it's not like his manhood was in question or anything... Anyway, I digress. The point being, hairlessness is not a natural state of being for most men, so why are almost all romance-novel men so hairless? Maybe their hair is on a vacation in Hawaii? I can just see it. The guy wakes up one morning, suddenly hairless, to find a note from his leg-and-chest hair:
"Dear Hunk, We are tired of being attached to your hunky glory all the time so we have decided to take a break, get some sun, and enjoy a bit of snorkeling. We'll send postcards! Sincerely, All Your Body Hairs From Below The Neck"
And while his hair is vacationing in Hawaii, he meets this fiery young wench (why are they always described as 'fiery'? Are romance novel women prone to lighting themselves on fire or something?) who, depending on how you see it, seduces him with her feminine charms / falls for his pick-up routine because she's extremely horny and sexually unfulfilled, and the novel ends with what we assume will eventually be marriage... and then, a few days after the novel's end, she wakes up to this very unfamiliar feeling beneath her body and realizes it's because all the man's hairs returned from Hawaii, but all the coconut juice and bananas have disoriented them and instead of landing back on the man's body, they missed and landed on her body instead. WELL, SHIT, THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR RUNNING OFF WITH A MYSTERIOUSLY HAIRLESS HUNK, guess you should have been a bit more curious over why his skin was so baby-smooth, huh!
The timing in how you steam your asparagus is so crucial. If you steam it too little, it's just not cooked. But if you steam it even a minute too much, then it's not crisp and kinda soggy and not nearly as much fun to eat! Generally I find that between three to five minutes does it for me. At three minutes, I'll start nibbling and sampling one of them to see if it's done yet, and the moment it's just cooked enough, I yank them off the fire and put them on a plate and yum yum delicious asparagus!
I once had steamed fiddleheads when my college's dining hall did 'Healthy Food Day!' for health awareness week or something silly like that, and I thought there were fantastic. I put a little butter and salt on them and ate soooo much oh man, delicious fiddleheads. When I am living on my own like a proper adult and cooking for myself, I'll have to figure out where you get fiddleheads and make them for myself because man are they fun to eat. I like foods that are fun to eat! Maybe that's why I don't like apples. I don't find them that fun to eat. And I HATE most oranges because they are such a pain in the butt to peel, oh my god, just stick with tangerines instead, those things peel like a charm if you buy the right kind. Blood oranges peel pretty well though, I've found.
Why are blood oranges so popular all of the sudden? There's blood orange sorbet now where before I didn't see any, and pinkberry has a new blood orange flavor and also blood orange bits to put on top of your yogurt if you so desire. I mean... blood oranges are just oranges that are red. It's kinda cool and I guess maybe there's a slight taste different, but I don't see what's so awesome about them, other than them being easier to peel, which is a big deal only to me... Maybe it's because there's a novelty to blood orange. Just orange is no longer cool anymore, so they make it BLOOD orange and change the color around and people get all excited!
Or maybe blood oranges actually taste significantly different and I just am remembering them wrong. Who knows. Anything is possible.
You know those vibrating chairs in malls where you put in a quarter and it vibrates for two minutes? I fucking love those things.
