I am home from the hospital in time for Christmas and will be back to normal activities, including blogging, soon. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.
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Regarding pen names
All y’all know me as Alma Alexander. Easy. Alliterative. But it was not always so. My maiden name and first author byline was Alma Hromic.
But back in the day when “The Secrets of Jin-shei” was first published, I got a call from my agent with a deal-breaker issue. The publishers didn’t want to put the book out under my maiden name, because “it was too difficult to spell, say, or remember”.
Granted, that’s been an issue ever since I waded into the English-speaking world. The English language mind cannot seem to get itself around the fact that two consonants such as H and R can follow one another. They keep on helpfully introducing a vowel between the two when they write it down, even if I am SPELLING IT FOR THEM AT THE TIME. Spellcheck tosses its cookies and offers up “chronic” or “chromic” as alternatives. Other people equally helpfully assume that the H in front must be silent when pronounced. It isn’t.
I’m not the only who has ever faced this, of course. At LitHub, Emily Temple gives us
An Incomplete Guide to Proper Literary Name-Dropping
starting with Vladimir Nabokov, J.M. Coetzee, and Ayn Rand (It’s pronounced “ine,” like “eye” with an “n” at the end.)
Read the whole article at LitHub HERE
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How to choose a book
If you are still searching hard for gifts, I’d like to remind you there is only one indispensable present for any occasion.
While there are hundreds of wonderful reads out there waiting to be discovered, I have a few suggestions involving… surprise… my own books. If you don’t know them, let me help you decide which ones might be of interest to you and your gift recipients.
If you loved Harry Potter… try my Worldweavers series (Gift of the Unmage, Spellspam, Cybermage, Dawn of Magic). It’s the story of a girl who couldn’t do magic, then grew up to be the greatest mage her world had ever known.
If you loved Jo Walton’s “My Other Children”, . try “Midnight at Spanish Gardens”
If you love Guy Gavriel Kay… try “The Secrets of Jin Shei”, “Embers of Heaven”, or my newest, “Empress”.
If you love Cassandra Clare or Suzanne Collins, try The Were Chronicles (Random, Wolf, Shifter)
if you Loved John Scalzi’s “Red Shirts”, try “AbductiCon” in which time-traveling androids kidnap a hotel full of Science fiction fans and take them for a loop around rge moon.
You can get further information and links to sales points on all of my books by going to “My Books” in the top menu under the header.
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