stormerider | Time for a change… (Reply)

It’s been a rough set of years. I’ve been dealing with a lot of health issues, and I’ve gotten sicker and sicker. Between dealing with the pain and the side-effects of the pain meds, writing had to be mothballed, because I just couldn’t handle it. I was able to think logically, but thinking creatively was just beyond my capabilities. A lot has changed during these years; my health, my identity, my job, which coast I live on, and I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. I started on a new med a few months back that has helped me amazingly; I still deal with a lot of problems, but I’ve been able to pull full hours at the day job, and I’ve started brainstorming on my WIPs again, which is incredible… I had feared that my ability to write might get lost forever. I haven’t actually sat down and created new words yet, but I’m working on getting back up to speed on my WIP Blood of the Goddess.

As part of the identity changes, my wife and I recently discussed names. We’d been wanting to change our legal names for some time now, but we had some mis-communication around last names. We ended up choosing Blackthorne together just recently; it’s what we want to have as our legal last name. It’s going to be our family name. It’s also part of what I want to publish under. I bounced around ideas about domain names and pen names and such with the folks at RD and with Nonny and she suggested Jas Blackthorne, which really fits me. I’ve gone by Jas as an abbreviation for the character name I play in online games for years, and it’s a gender-neutral name. Gender-neutrality is important to me, because I self-identify as genderqueer at this point. This has taken a bit to come to grips with, and I’m still figuring out the details on that. So I’m moving away from the pen name Alan Morgan to Jas Blackthorne instead.

I had originally intended to use a female pen name when I got to publishing my romance / erotica. The more I thought about it over the years, the lest I liked that idea, however. Readers who find out that I’m male-bodied will feel duped, and that is a compelling reason to not go down that path. Some readers may feel duped that I’m using a gender-neutral pen name, but if you’re one of them, I’m sorry; gender-neutral is closer to the truth for me than male is. So I’m retiring Aeryn Morgan and re-posting a few bits of the content I had on that site up here.

I’m also going to be working on overhauling this site; it needs a face lift. The autumn leaves look pretty, but it’s time for something new, to better match the new identity.

The winds of change keep blowing…

Mirrored from Jas Blackthorne.