Elizabeth Black writes in a wide variety of
genres including erotica, erotic romance, and dark fiction. She lives on the
Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and four cats.

Pseudonyms, pen
names, noms de plume. Regardless of what you wish to call them, writers have
chosen fake names for as long as they’ve been transferring their thoughts to the
written word. I interviewed some of my writer friends to learn why they chose
the pen names they chose. Everyone gave sensible and even fascinating answers.

I’ll start with
myself. Elizabeth Black is not my real name. It is one of my pen names. I chose
Elizabeth Black for my erotic fiction to differentiate it from the political
and feminist non-fiction I had written under my real name. Elizabeth is
my favorite woman’s name. I chose “Black” because the “Bs”
would be at eye level or above in a bookstore. Black is also a classy name and
it’s one of my favorite colors. My horror, fantasy, and speculative fiction pen
name is E. A. Black, and I created it to separate those works from my erotic
works. I liked the idea of using initials and a surname because I thought it
was cool. “E” for Elizabeth, obviously. Black is already my fake
surname. “A” is my fake middle name – Alexia. I first saw that name
on the game “Resident Evil: Code Veronica”. I’m a fan. I later learned
that “alexia” is the name of an acquired reading disability. That
didn’t cause me to waver in my choice at all, but it did make me giggle.

Authors choose pen
names for a wide variety of mundane and interesting reasons. Here are a few
examples of famous pen names:

J. K. Rowling –
Joanne Rowling’s publishers feared that pre-adolescent boys (her target market
for her Harry Potter books) would not want to read stories about a boy wizard
written by a woman. So, they asked her to use her initials. She has no middle
name so she used the initial of her grandmother Kathleen. The interesting thing
about this is that these days, it’s largely assumed that anyone whose pen name
includes initials is a woman.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
was born Nathaniel Hathorne. He was a direct descendent of one of the hanging
judges of the Salem witch trials. Hawthorne may have added the “W” to
his last name as a means of distancing himself from his personal history.

George Orwell – Eric
Arthur Blair chose a pen name so his family wouldn’t be embarrassed by his time
living in poverty. He chose the name George after the patron saint of England.
He chose the name Orwell from the River Orwell, a popular sailing spot he loved
to visit.

Stan Lee – Stanley
Martin Lieber wanted to save his real name for the more serious literary work
he hoped to someday write. He got his start writing comic books, so he chose
the name Stan Lee. He legally changed his name to Stan Lee after making it big
in the kid’s market as a comic book writer.

Lewis Carroll –
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wanted a simpler, less snooty name and he wanted to
keep his privacy. He changed Charles Ludwidge into Carolus Lusovicus, changed
that to Carroll Lewis, and then switched the words, resulting in Lewis Carroll.

William Makepeace
Thackeray – He wrote under pen names that were just plain silly, since he was a
satirist. His pen names included C. J. Yellowplush, Esq., George Savage
Fitz-Boodle, and Théophile Wagstaff.

Harry Turtledove –
(from Dear
Readers: A Letter From Harry Turtledove) “When
I sold my first fantasy novel, the publisher renamed me Eric Iverson. 
They said no one would believe Harry Turtledove, which is my real name.  I
decided to live with it, though I gave myself a middle initial, G., which stood
for Goddam.  The pen name had certain uses:  I could use it for my
fiction and my own name for academic nonfiction, which I still published
then.  But when Lester bought The Videssos Cycle, he named me Turtledove
again–people would remember it, he declared.  I objected that I was just
starting to get known as Iverson.  He said he wouldn’t buy the books if I
wanted to stay Scandinavian.  I stopped objecting.  But I may be the
only writer in captivity who’s had both his pen-name and his own name imposed
on him by force!  I hope you will remember my name–that’s Harry
Turtledove–and look for the reprint of The Videssos Cycle (and maybe even some
other things I’ve done).”

My
friends who write erotic fiction had many sensible reasons for choosing their
pen names. Here are the most common reasons:

Some
writers simply wanted to create a new identity for their writing, and the way
they chose their pen names was rather creative. Julez S. Morbius told me:
“The first two initials are
my real name initials and Morbius because of my love for vampires and Marvel
Comics.” Angelica Dawson’s pen name is derived from Angelica dawsonii, a
yellow flower in the carrot family native to her province. She’s a botanist and
environmental consultant in her day job.

Dawson also gives
another reason for her pen name: she writes Young Adult fiction under her real
name, Kimberly Gould. Many erotic writers like to differentiate their erotic
works from their other works by use of multiple pen names.

Writers
like Jacques Gerard chose pen names to protect their privacy, especially when
it comes to disapproval from family and religious people. Gemma Parkes also
wanted to protect herself from familial disapproval and she wanted to protect
her children from negative comments from her family in case any of them read
her books, hence her pen name. Vanessa de Sade feared her family would discover her erotic writing so she chose her pen name to protect her privacy. Obviously, de Sade is based on the Marquis de Sade. She wrote: “So I thought, well I don’t want to be Fluffy von Kitten, or Sweetcakes McGhee or anything like that. And then I thought about the Marquis de Sade, and all his weird shit, and I thought, yeah, that’s more like me.” She’s not sure where Vanessa came from. Might be an old girlfriend from years ago.

Kara
Huntington works with children in a very small town. She figured she’d save the
locals the trouble of running her out of town with pitchforks. Her concern over
small-minded townspeople lead her to create her pen name. Alysha Ellis voiced a
similar concern. She is also a teacher. Any connection between her real name
and erotica or even erotic romance would result in instant dismissal. Even if
it didn’t, the knowledge would be very disruptive to her ability to teach very
curious 15 – 18 year olds who would probably make a big deal of it.

Sometimes
having more than one pen name makes decisions difficult, even if you started
out creating them for good reasons. Sacchi Green said: I started out writing
science fiction and fantasy short stories under my real name, Connie Wilkins.
Eventually I published work in a couple of anthologies for kids, and enjoyed it
so much (plus it paid pretty well) that I thought that was the direction I’d
mostly go. When I wrote a lesbian erotica story and had it accepted at Best
Lesbian Erotica, I thought I should use a pen name in case I wrote so much for
kids that they might look me up online. Things didn’t work out that way,
though, and my pen name got a whole lot more mileage than my real one. I’ve
still used the real one sometimes for speculative fiction, and in cases where I
have more than one story in an anthology, but it gets to be hard to decide when
it comes to erotic speculative fiction. Right now I’m in the process of having
a mini-ebook published by Circlet Press, consisting of three stories I wrote
for their books previously and one more that’s about one of the same group of
characters. The problem is that two of the stories are under my real name, and
two under my pen name, so we’re having a hard time deciding which name to use
on the cover.

Some
writers chose pen names to keep them safe. Phoenix Johnson had an online
stalker and she didn’t want that person following her and hurting her writing
career in any way. Phoenix to her means rebirth, and it represents her darker,
wilder side. Her surname was luck of the draw.

Lynn
Townsend (real name K. T. Hicks) wanted a name that sounded more appropriate
for erotic romances. Her real name to her sounded like someone who should write
Tractor Romances, which were what her Russian Studies professor called “a
series of Stalin-era propaganda novels that were about farmers and farmers’
daughters who would sneak off to talk about Comrade Stalin behind haystacks.”

So
there you have it. Writers create pen names for a wide variety of very
interesting reasons. If you use a pen name, what’s your story behind it?

ABOUT ELIZABETH BLACK

Elizabeth Black
writes erotica, erotic romance, speculative fiction, fantasy, and dark fiction.
She also enjoys writing erotic retellings of classic fairy tales. Born and bred
in Baltimore, she grew up under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Her erotic
fiction has been published by Xcite Books (U. K.), Circlet Press, Ravenous
Romance, Scarlet Magazine (U. K.), and other publishers. Her dark fiction has
appeared in “Kizuna: Fiction For Japan”, “Stupefying
Stories”, “Midnight Movie Creature Feature 2”, “Zippered
Flesh 2: More Tales Of Body Enhancements Gone Bad”, and “Mirages:
Tales From Authors Of The Macabre”. An accomplished essayist, she was the
sex columnist for the pop culture e-zine nuts4chic (also U. K.) until it folded
in 2008. Her articles about sex, erotica, and relationships have appeared in
Good Vibrations Magazine, Alternet, CarnalNation, the Ms. Magazine Blog, Sexis
Magazine, On The Issues, Sexy Mama Magazine, and Circlet blog. She also writes
sex toys reviews for several sex toys companies.

In addition to
writing, she has also worked as a gaffer (lighting), scenic artist, and make-up
artist (including prosthetics) for movies, television, stage, and concerts. She
worked as a gaffer for “Die Hard With A Vengeance” and “12
Monkeys”. She did make-up, including prosthetics, for “Homicide: Life
On The Street”. She is especially proud of the gunshot wound to the head
she had created with makeup for that particular episode. She also worked as a
prosthetic makeup artist specializing in cyanotic blue, bruises, and buckets of
blood for a test of Maryland’s fire departments at the Baltimore/Washington
International Airport plane crash simulation test. Yes, her jobs are fun.
 😉

She lives in
Lovecraft country on the Massachusetts coast with her husband, son, and four
cats. The ocean calls her every day, and she always listens. She has yet to run
into Cthulhu.

Visit her web
site at http://elizabethablack.blogspot.com/

Her Facebook
page is https://www.facebook.com/elizabethablack

Follow her at
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ElizabethABlack