Gerald C. Matics -- Author

When I first started writing seriously, I asked myself a pie-in-the-sky question:  Should fame and fortune ever come looking for me, what name do I want it to find me under?  This might be an easy question for most people, but I struggled with it a little bit.

The reason?  For most of my life I hated the sound of my own name.

I can't explain why that is, really.  Oh, I'm sure I could go all Freudian (or maybe it's Jungian, I don't really know) and blame childhood trauma.  I could go on about how one of my sisters -- I'll never reveal which one it was, so don't ask me which one did it, because I'll never say which one was responsible -- used to butcher my name on purpose because she knew it bugged me.  I could blame it on the fact that at about the time I started school Gerald Ford was president so I was called Gerald Ford a lot.  But in the end, it doesn't really matter.  The point is, it took me most of my life to embrace the name my parents gave me.

Once I finally did,  though, I began using it exclusively in in my day job as an editor with a legal publisher, so in a sense I'm stuck with it in that respect.  In my fiction writing, meanwhile, I shopped around stories in several genres under "Gerald C. Matics," but it turned out that the first one to catch on, "Enthralled," was a horror story.  Recently that was followed by "The Sisters," another horror piece.  Again, it's just the way that it worked out.  Now, if I were to hit it big as a horror writer, I would not complain even once; horror is obviously something I enjoy, and there are at least a few people out there who think I'm not completely wasting my time writing it.

But a great many authors have had the experience of having their name so thoroughly associated with one genre that it's nearly impossible for them to attract readers when they break out of their genre and try something new; I'm too lazy to look up specifics right now, but Stephen King wrote something years ago -- well before Lisey's Story won him critical praise as a serious literary novelist -- about the "horror ghetto" and how difficult it is for a writer to lift himself out of it.  His own agent warned him that he was "gonna get typed" as a horror writer and would never be able to publish anything else.  (As I remember, though, a few best-sellers down the road when King mentioned he wanted to write something a little different for his next book, the same agent argued against it, asking him to please at least write something haunted into the story.)

For many of these authors whose body of work spans genres, the solution is to use a pseudonym for different kinds of stories.  King himself did it with Richard Bachman.  Nora Roberts, one of the most successful romance writers ever, also pens stories as J.D. Robb.  Ann Rice has written under at least three different names.

In any event, I have a hard drive full of other stories in different genres for which I hope to find homes someday, and I'm wondering whether it's worth the trouble to assume another name under which to publish them.

I'd like your input on this. Take a second, go back to The Home Page, and scroll down to the poll on this question, then vote your conscience.