my first roadtrip wednesday. or, hopping on the bandwagon.

In case you're a stranger to the concept, Road Trip Wednesday is a weekly bloghopthing hosted by YA Highway wherein, uh, they ask a question, and you answer it.

Fun!

*This Week's Topic* If you couldn't use your own name, what would your pseudonym or penname be?

found here.

Well, YA Highway, I'm glad you asked.
Now, I'm worlds away from querying, let alone having an agent/selling a novel/actually having to worry about stuff like this, but it is something that continually picks at my brain.

Because, you see, my new last name?

Is a doozy.
Seriously, let's play a game. If any of you {who don't already know the answer} can pronounce Maughon correctly, using your best phonetic spelling in the comments, I will give you some sort of prize.

And my maiden name? I love it, truly I do, but when you Google "Julie Palmer," this is what you get:

hello.

I'm not even kidding, and that is one of the less-disgusting photos. I mean, I'm all for girl power, but body-building? Kind of looks bad on EVERYONE.

(Amusingly, on page 2 of the Julie Palmer image results, there was my own blogger profile photo. Haha! Things are already looking up.)

So, as you can see, the pseudonym/penname situation is one I mull over a lot. One idea I always go back to: nicknames.

I have a lot of them, and I generally love them. JP Maughon would be a wicked penname, if I wanted to go the initials/gender-ambiguous route. I've also always loved Jules and Jules P, but what would I match either of those with? Other than the enigmatic Maughon, I mean {which, don't get me wrong, would be ideal, just... difficult}. Another nickname I've had since birth is Dodie, but I'm not so attached to this one as a penname. Dodie Smith owns it, and I'll never be as brilliant as she was.

And, of course, my fondest nickname is Julie Bird, which is where Juliemybird comes from {I added the "my" because twitter already had a juliebird, and because of Mine That Bird and Calvin Borel* [hey-oh, Kentuckian here]}. I really, really wouldn't mind being published as Julie Bird... something. Palmer, I guess. Easy to pronounce, easy to remember. Fewer body-building connotations. I would miss the Maughon, though. Worth the confusion? Of course, it didn't stop Maugham... which Maughon doesn't even rhyme with {hey hey, I just gave you a hint}.

*if you have ten minutes to spare, and you don't absolutely hate horse racing, check out that video. The most amazing thing to me is that the commentators don't even see him coming.


So, there you have it. Lots of variations of my name, some easy, some mystifying. It would be fun to teach the world how to pronounce Maughon.

Then again, I could always go all-out pseudonym.

what?

In which case, Ariadne Skunkwater. Definitely.

The end!