I know the prompt asks about a nickname, but I haven’t used my family nickname in so long, I think there’s only maybe a handful of people who occasionally call me that. My pen name, on the other hand, that one has a fun story.
You might be saying to yourself, “Don’t you have two pen names?” I mean, yeah, I guess so, but one is so close to my real name that it might as well be me. My name is Bobbie, hence the B. in B. Isabel Writes LLC, and Isabel was my confirmation name way back when I was trying to fit into various molds society expected of me. Read my poetry book, When Can We Be Soft?: Poems of Female Resilience, for more about that.
Anyway, back to my actual pen name, Leya Layne. Because I write various genres, and some of them are much less work-appropriate…at least the kind of work I do, I knew I needed a new author name when I decided to put our Carol’s Christmas Awakening a couple years ago. I just had no idea where to go with it. I turned to my fiance, then “My guy” for anyone who knew me, and asked him for ideas.
Unbeknownst to him, he would become the idea. The day after we met, we were texting and sharing details about ourselves, including our last names. Well, I fumbled the typing of my name and had to quickly correct it with a second text. My last name starts with an L, and the word I initially typed also started with an L. He thought it was so funny that he started calling me LL or Ls. Thus, I decided that my romance pen name would have LL as the initials. Leya Layne is dedicated to him and that nickname, and her logo came from him being a a bassist.
