I spent a good part of yesterday busily beavering away on school work as the semester is grinding to a close. I have one paper written and needing revision, one other needing to be written, and some additional work left this week that won’t swallow up large numbers of consecutive hours. Meantime, I’ve finished the third of the four scenes I’d planned for chapter ten.

These are all of my lame excuses for posting a day late again.

I did get one other thing done yesterday – I finally settled on getting a more appropriate domain name attached to the blog and finally ditched the nom-de-plume I’d originally planned on using.

Why?

Well, I’d wanted the site to have a domain name that was more meaningful and I’d decided that it should match the name I wanted to write under. But the one thing I hadn’t considered fully enough to start with was choosing a pen name. I’ve mentioned before that the name I’d originally planned to use was the Commander name I’d adopted for Elite: Dangerous. A Jenna Moreci Youtube video I came across a short while ago recommended making sure that nobody had already published under that name, since competing with another Stephen King or Charles Dickens would put a novice writer at a significant disadvantage.

I didn’t encounter a problem with that.

What I did encounter was that someone writing under the name Owen Wolfe has been published on Amazon already and, although the only work under that name is an incredibly short volume, if you consider the genre and content, you might appreciate my desire to distance myself from the material in question. I’m not of a mind to go into detail here, but I have no desire to ever write material of that nature, and even less to be associated with it. Not that I’m judging it – to each, their own.

The natural response was to reconsider the pen name and every other name I thought of seemed overly contrived. So here I am. Using my own name and with a website name I hope proves easy to remember and relevant to my content.

On a side note, the cost of hosting with a custom domain name through WordPress.com seems incredibly reasonable. $48 for the year seems like a great deal to me, since from previous experience, once the special introductory rate at Bluehost expired, the cost rose to almost ten times that, and unless you’ve successfully monetized the blog, it becomes a prohibitively expensive hobby.

But $48 I can cope with.

Have a great week.

Categories: Administrative