Adding an Another Author Name

 und a story that I hadn’t put on any blogs. I’d written it as a submission to a magazine, but it had been rejected and I’d forgotten about it. I think it’s about ten years old or so, and when I re-read it, I very much enjoyed it, because I couldn’t remember what happened and it was a nice surprise.

Then I remembered about the whole ‘even books of one page can be published on Amazon’ thing. I thought for a moment, decided that I would go for it, and now An Inexpensive Ring is on Amazon at 77p, or Kindle Unlimited. It’s a sweet, absolutely non-spooky story with kittens and an imminent mother-in-law, with a cover made on Canva.

As I said last week, I want to keep expectations realistic. Anything non-spooky is being put under the name Mari Medana. I did wonder whether I should choose a name that was perhaps more suited to Romance and Women’s Fiction, like Skye Summerdown (I checked, and at time of typing there is no author of that name, which was a relief). I kept the Medana part and used Mari as the first name, after my grandmother.

Then I got to thinking about author names. I got the author name Lyssa Medana because I wanted a name in a hurry and it’s the name of a character that I played in a long-running roleplaying game. It doesn’t really suit me. I’m an old, rather sheltered, white woman who last left the UK in 1984. My pen name doesn’t reflect that at all and I’ve been approached by all sorts of people and groups who have placed me everywhere but in my home of Yorkshire.

Then I thought of the variety of names of authors that I’ve seen on Amazon. There are some which bring out the snark in me, but, as I said, I’ve no room to talk, and I wonder whether I could have done better than Mari Medana. The name suggested by AI when I had my test request for a book cover was Eliana Vaelor and it sounds far better than Mari Medana. Still, I think I’ll stick to Mari and see how things go.

I’ve found another story that is a teensy bit spooky, but I could absolutely put it in Women’s Fiction with a straight face, so there may be more coming from Mari. I quite enjoyed the change of pace, so who knows how it will play out. I’m not writing full romances, though. That feels like far too much work and after watching the hard work my friend Holly White has put in (on Wattpad, with a Quidditch based romance), I’m happy to stick mainly to werewolves.

And speaking of werewolves and spooky stuff in general, I’ve been thinking about Further Tales from the White Hart. I have spent so much time fighting with this, trying to expand it and getting confused, that I’ve abandoned the struggle. It’s getting published in the same form it had when it was first posted on my blog. As the dratted story is still too darned short for Amazon to convert it to a paperback (long story due to all sorts of issues with previous publications), I’m bundling in all of the Back at the White Hart stories, which I am likewise refusing to convert from 36k words to almost double that to make it work, Dark Pictures, which also could potentially benefit from an expanded re-write, and a handful of stray stories. If it doesn’t convert to a paperback after that, I may cry. If all goes well, and the odds are against it, the whole thing should be ready by the end of October.

Currently not available but watch this space

But, at the end of this, apart from a couple of stories that are being saved for Horror Month, one or two stories that have been kept back for a potential full novel with Darren King as the main character and another couple that are held for a planned Steve Adderson story, that has allllll the stories set at the White Hart together in the three volumes of Tales from the White Hart, More Tales from the White Hart, and Further Tales and Collection Stories from the White Hart and the odds of a collected volume at the end of it are high.

And that’s one less thing that I need to worry about before I get to writing about werewolves.