If I ask you your name, do you give me a one name answer?
I’ve been thinking about names because I’ve been watching my husband go through the process of applying for a green card for his mother. It turns out she has EIGHT legal versions of her name and none of those include the first name she has gone by her entire life.
My mother-in-law (referred to hereafter as MIL) was born in India and was given a name–first name, father’s first name, family name–by her parents, but she went by a nickname. Think of it like, her name was Alexandra John Smith, but everyone called her Katie.
In her community, women get a completely new name when they get married. When my MIL got married, her father-in-law had the job of naming her–first name, husband’s first name for her middle name, and new family name. He’d already named another bride in the family Katie, so MIL got a completely new name. And it’s a name that no one ever used and that she didn’t really like. Let’s call her Wilhelmina George Johnson. She doesn’t answer to Wilhelmina and she never writes it out. Her legal signature has always been her initials, WG Johnson. Except that time she signed her passport at W Johnson.
She and my husband have had to track down multiple documents and affidavits across two continents to prove that she has been legally identified as Alexandra John Smith, Alexandra Smith, Wilhelmina Johnson, Wilhelmina George Johnson, W Johnson, WG Johnson, Mrs George Johnson, and Wilhelmina G Johnson. But everyone knows her as Katie.
So what’s her name?
Many of us in Scribe Hive use pen names as authors. My pen name, Jill Jenkins, is my real first name and my grandmother’s maiden name. Seems straightforward, but landing on it was a winding path. I knew I wanted to keep using my real first name. First problem solved.
I’d used my married name when I’d written professionally in high-tech marketing and when I was active in special needs parenting circles. I didn’t want there to be any cross-over between those worlds and my fiction writing, so I chose a pen name.
I couldn’t use my maiden name since Jill Donley is the #1 selling Realtor in North Carolina and she’d already bought the URL I wanted, had a very active online presence, and every search on her name (my name!) brought up pages and pages of beautiful houses in Raleigh-Durham.
“Jill + my mother’s maiden name” belongs to a cookbook author.
I settled on my paternal grandmother’s maiden name, Jenkins. It’s alliterative, two syllables, and in the top half of the alphabet. And I was able to buy the URL. I thought I was set.
And the Universe laughed.
Turns out, there’s another indie author out there named Jill Jenkins. She wrote a thriller about an underground sex business and nefarious other schemes. I write YA fantasy. We are not the same Jill Jenkins. And there’s a German writer that goes by Jill J. Jenkins. Both of these authors I discovered well after my initial investigation and URL purchase.
As much as I would like this naming business to be clear cut and simple, it just isn’t. Like life, it can be messy and confusing. But my reasons for picking my pen name still hold true for me, and I feel like it fits where I am with writing and publishing these days.
All of this to say: Hi, I’m Jill Jenkins, Author.