Painting by Tithi Luadthong
Time for some more burning writing questions.
I’ve been answering these as part of my 10th writing birthday celebration back on February 12.
On Leaving This Extant World and My Other Writing (and Reading) Foibles
Tag Archives: Authors
Should Writers Write Book Reviews?
I review every book that I read on Goodreads.
I do this because I’m a writer with aspirations of future publication and strong book sales.
I’m aware of how crucial reviews are to authors, both in helping produce those strong sales and in enabling one to (traditionally) publish subsequent books.
Should Writers Abbreviate Their Names?
This post is more accurately titled “Should Female Writers Abbreviate Their Names?”, since they are, it seems, the writers who most commonly do so.
The short and simply answer to the question is, of course, “They should do whatever they want.” For I’m not here to dictate otherwise, especially given the numerous different reasons a female writer would choose to use her initials instead of her full name:
- She had a given name that’s difficult to pronounce or spell
- To create a new identify for writing in a different genre
- To maintain a measure of distance from her non-writing life
- Because another author has her exact same name
- Because she dislikes for her given name
- To emulate classical male writers who used abbreviations, such as C.S. Forrester, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.D. Salinger
Just to name a few.
