What's In A Name?: The Story of a Pseudonym

      A recent post by Lisa Kramer at Woman Wielding Words pondered the topic of real names versus pseudonyms.  I've mentioned before that I use a phony name--like anyone might not have guessed it. This is as good as time as ever to explain the name.  In deference to Stephen T. McCarthy, who asked me about this many blogging months ago, I give you the origins of the Arlee Bird name.

      It was long before Google was around, so search engine status had nothing to do with the pen name.  I was in college and trying to become established as an author.  It was obvious even without the benefit of Google that I had a very common name.

        I've never made a point of trying to hide my real name on my blog.  Actually it can be found in several places, but most readers have probably never noticed that I was born with the name Robert Lee Jackson.  It's a name that perhaps is a few Google notches short of John Smith, but my real name is shared with a lot of people living now and who have lived in the past.   Check your phone book and I'm sure you'll find at least a few of them listed in your town.

         So trying to break in as an author I felt like I needed a name that would not be shared by thousands of other people and would be somewhat unique.  At first I submitted stories as Lee Jackson, but the name just didn't work for me despite being the name I'd gone by all of my life.

          Then I began to experiment with names.  I began to sign my writing as Ohio Franklin Jackson--after all it was the early 70s and people were experimenting with unusual names.  Having been born in Ohio I adopted that as my first name and Benjamin Franklin was one of my heroes at the time so I paid tribute to him.  I decided this name was maybe too quirky.

Image via Wikipedia

           Using just my first initial I went back to my real name as R. Lee Jackson.  There was a very brief period when I got the idea that it might be easier to have a short story accepted if I were female and I tried writing under the name of Mary Tipton.  Where'd that come from?  That didn't last long and I returned to the R. Lee Jackson tag.

           Feeling that starting a moniker with an initial didn't sound quite right, in early 1975 I went from R. Lee to Arlee, since it sounded the same when spoken.  For the next several years I wavered between those two opening names attached to the Jackson surname.

           In mid-1975 I joined a magic show and decided to focus my career on juggling and show business and basically put writing for submission purposes on the back burner.  My business card and all promotional material used R. Lee and I dispensed with actually using Arlee for a while.  I also used the alias of "Jack Clark" when I was acting in behalf of my alter ego of promoter for R. Lee Jackson and his professional activities.  Hey--I felt like I had to wear different hats sometimes in order to make people think I had representation.

          When I decided to get off the road in order to start my kids in school and lead a more normal life, I started an entertainment business in Tennessee.  When I was putting the business together I began thinking of a name.  I don't recall exactly how it came to me but I envisioned a logo of a bird tugging at a worm in a hole which  would resemble a music note.  This made me think of the expression, "the early bird gets the worm."  Bingo!  Early, Arlee--Arlee Bird Entertainment.

           Nearly twenty years later when I started Tossing It Out, I decided not to use my real name.  The name that immediately came to me was my old entertainment business name.  I figured there couldn't be many people with that name and it would be unique.  I googled the name and found one guy with that name in Florida, but that was it.   I took it.

           It's kind of an odd name, but it is different.  Now I've taken over Google with the name.  I don't know what happened to the guy in Florida.  It's my writing name now and silly though it may sound I am now Arlee Bird in my literary and blogging life.  I guess I might as well keep the name now.

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       While I'm at it I might as well acknowledge an award given to me by The Word Nerd.  Since I'm telling you stuff anyway I'll play along with this one.  I know I'd said a while back that I wasn't going to do these award things, but what the heck--it's Christmas and I'm being nice.

        And I'm spilling beans.  So in keeping with the rules of the award here are seven things about me that I intend to blog about someday:

1.  I used to be an avid stamp collector.  I still save stamps and have my stamp collection, but I'm not active with it like I was when I was younger.

2. I also have a postcard collection that mostly consists of cards I bought when I was young, but if any of you ever send me a postcard it will go into my collection.

3.  At one time I had a fairly decent pencil collection, but I used all of the pencils back when I was still in school.  Gosh, does anyone use pencils anymore?

4.  Another collection that I once had that was rather sizable was matchbooks.   I won't go into detail about what happened to that--let's just say it went up in smoke.

5.  I joined my first book club when I was about thirteen--Doubleday.  I joined several other book clubs over the years which accounts for my extensive collection of books.

6.  When I was on the road I accumulated hundreds of cassette tapes, most which I still have and are playable.

7.  There is a real possibility that I am a hoarder.

          And I guess Word Nerd knows I that I'm not passing this on to anyone else.  This branch of the chain ends here, but I'm sure it continues through several of the other recipients.  But I will wish everyone

Merry Christmas!

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• Pseudonymity (schneier.com)
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• Blogging: Real Name or Pseudonym? (onecoolsitebloggingtips.com)

My Grandmother's Air Baths

         When I was a child, my mother would tell me that my grandmother used to take "air baths".   She would run around her bedroom naked.  I never had any reason to question this because, though it sounded a bit weird, it also seemed like a logical way to cool off.  This would have probably been in the 1930s or 40s.

           My grandmother was a very staid, conservative lady, a fact which makes the air bath image all the more humorous.  I used to picture her stark naked with arms outstretched running in a circle around her room while a ceiling fan turned above her.  I don't know that she had a ceiling fan, but it seemed like a logical accessory to an air bath.  The incongruity of my very proper grandmother prancing about naked as a jay bird was silly enough to delight my childish imagination.

         Recently I asked my mother about this and she said she didn't recall ever telling me this story.  She said it just didn't sound like anything her mother would do.  I then called my sister to see if she remembered hearing this story.  She said she didn't, but that didn't surprise me since there are a lot of things she doesn't seem to remember.  I know my mother told me this story because I heard it several times.  How would I make up such a thing?

         Out of curiosity I looked up "air bath" on Google.   I found several entries that talked about how Benjamin Franklin used to take air baths for his health.  There was even a blog entry about air baths.  This was enough to convince me that I didn't just make up this idea of air baths.   Actually, on some of these hot summer days an air bath doesn't sound half bad.

          Have you ever heard of air baths?    Do you ever take air baths?