V is for Villasante

Forgive the lateness of this post, but I only just got laptop back from Apple. Oh, how I've missed you...

During last year's Pennwriter's Conference I listened to my future agent (never gets old, saying 'agent') Barbara Poelle, talk about how to become as knowledgeable as possible about the industry and your craft. Read a ton, in and out of your genre. Look at shelves in the bookstore to see how books are marketed, where they are located. Figure out where you would be. Go, alphabetically and find the actual physical space where your book would be. Then buy a copy of the books on either side of you.

I did this and after some wandering around and a promise to reward myself with a cup of tea and a scone, I found where I'd be, in teen fiction (Barnes and Nobel calls it that, not me), subset fantasy, on the bottom shelf, next to Scott Westerfield. Not a bad shelf mate to have, I know, but it got me thinking about my name. I've always had a love hate relationship to my name. It's fairly unusual and it's not unpronounceable with extra letters and silent g's or anything. It just seems so unlikely to me, that it would be on a book. I think about my blogging buds and their last names. These are the names that seem to belong on book covers: Campbell, Hardin, King, Cavanaugh, Robin. Bransford (oh wait, that's already on two covers - have you got your copy of Jacob Wonderbar for President of the Universe yet?) But mine? 

I'm pretty sure it's the child of immigrants in me that's making me feel like that, making me feel like my name is too foreign to be on a book. I had considered using my husband's last name or a pseudonym but in the end the artifice rubbed me the wrong way. 

Now I'm trying to 'celebrate' my own name. It is what it is, after all. Mine. And unlike the mis-pronunciations of telemarketers past, it's not Belefonte, or Valente or Visante. V is for Villasante.

Do you use your own name or a pseudonym? And if you don't use your own name, why?

V is also for V is for Vendetta, which I've never seen but after reading the Fault in Our Stars, I really want to:

RTW - Who Shall I Say is Calling?

Each week, YA Highway hosts Road Trip Wednesdays. 




Today's prompt:
If you couldn't use your own name, what would your pen name or pseudonym be?


Bank tellers, school admins and older ladies behind registers love my name. I know this because they often comment, "Oh, what a lovely name." I smile and say thank you secretly thinking, are you kidding?

It's not that I don't like my name, I do. My first name can be girly or masculine and I love that suppleness. My last name is foreign, but it has enough vowels in it so that most americans can pronounce it. I like my name so much that I kept it when I got married, not able to picture myself with my husband's wholly other (to me) last name.

But as a writer I have two problems with my name. The first is that I cannot imagine anyone buying a book with my name on it. When husband had my book printed on blurb.com as an xmas present, the only thing on the lovely cover he designed that looked wrong was my name. The second problem I have with my name is that it's my identity. I have a career that doesn't involve writing at all. And I don't expect to become a household name any time soon, which means that writing and working will happen at the same time. Would it be strange to have the two worlds collide?

Even building a presence online for me started with a pseudonym, magpie. And while I wouldn't publish with that name, I am comfortable being known in this little community with that moniker.

OK but that wasn't the prompt. So what would I choose as a pen name? Alex O'Donnell. And will I eventually do that? I don't know. Maybe.

Do you plan on using a pen name? If so, what is it?