how I come up with pen names

I play this game sometimes. You know the one. The "if I was a published author" one. And I've always thought, even when I was little, writing long and involved stories about princesses and their adventures, that I wouldn't actually publish under my real name. When I was little, I decided my pen name would be "Paula Cattani," which was the name of the daughter of the police inspector from La Piovra ("The Octopus," it's an Italian series about the Mafia) (oh my god, Wikipedia, why do you call it a "miniseries," IT HAD TEN SEASONS WTF). And OK, her name was actually "Paola," by my grandfather calls me that sometimes, so it works, too. IDK about it now, though, there are a lot of people with that name (although there don't seem to be any writers by that name, in either variation), and I want something ~~~unique.

This probably works better for people with non-English names, but basically, I ended up taking family names and Anglicizing them.

• From the root of my mom's maiden name, I got "cart," which makes the last name the rather obvious Carter.
  
  
• From the room of my maternal grandmother's maiden name I got "yew" (as in the tree). I was a little lost as to what to do with that, until through some lucky clicking on Tumblr, I discovered that, in some backwards etymology, "yew" is related to Eboracum, which is the Latinized name for York, so that works out pretty well. (see the Wikipedia entry for more, if you want)
  
  
• My last name means anything from "pagan god" to "idol" to other things along those lines, and, well, IDK what I'd do with that.
  
  
• The root of my paternal grandmother's maiden name is the name of a town, which I'm gonna say derives from the word for the fava bean, so I guess I could dig into that and get something like Fabia/Fabian, if I go with the ancient Roman family name. Or I can just go with Lecter?

Shut up, I totally have different a name planned for when I want to write torrid paranormal romances.

wherein I freak the fuck out

I posted this on Tumblr the other day, but I figured I'd share with you guys, too.



When I was in New York for the first time a few years back, I went to a bunch of museums (mostly because it was too damn hot to do anything outside). I bought a book of tickets to various museums and attractions (ah, Empire State Building, where you stand in line to stand in line to get into the building and stand in line, and then about four more lines before you get to the terrace and have to fight your way through all the crowds NEVER AGAIN OMG), and one of them was the Guggenheim. I’m not much for going to museums and looking at paintings (at least these ones were nice to look at, there was the time my mom took me to MoMA and I got seriously freaked out looking at the Picassos and had to sit in front of the Pollock for twenty minutes until I calmed down) (I prefer things like the Natural History Museum - DINOSAURS YAYE), but hey, I had the tickets, so I went.

Anyway. I was at the Guggenheim, going around, listening to the audio guide thingy, and there was this painting, Manet’s Before the Mirror. And there I was, getting kinda tired of walking around most of the day, and there was a bench in front of it, so I had a seat. And for some reason, I couldn’t take my eyes off it, and just kept staring and staring and staring…

I don’t know if it was the fatigue, or the heat, or just me hallucinating in the middle of the goddamned Guggenheim, but I could swear that she moved. To this day, I vividly remember her turning her head to look over her shoulder and stare back.

I got out of there pretty damned fast after that. I wonder if I’ll ever have the guts to go back and look at it again. @____@