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Great so read lots of news about being at the EBF!

Fun for all - readers and writers! The best thing is seeing all those readers, just lying on the grass, chatting, eating ice-cream, and reading, while waiting to see an author or just, well, lie on the grass, chatting, eating ice-cream and reading! It feels very real. All book festivals have that feeling, I think. People coming together for one reason: books. But, ok, Edinburgh is a bit special :)

Hi Penny, Hope to see you up in Edinburgh next year!

You are so right, Nicola, a special place with a wonderful atmosphere that brings people back year after year.
The readers who come and listen, sit about reading, talking and enjoying books are the lifeblood of any book festival, but then we writers are readers, too!

Thanks, Addy. And that's more books to add to an already impossibly long list! My favourite is still the last line in 'Little Boy Lost' by Marghanita Laski, but I can't say it here as it would give the story away. It has me blubbing every time. I even stole the name of that character for one of my own stories as an homage to the book but it didn't get picked up. (Still might

This post began with a conversation between Addy and me about a moment in Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce that takes you emotionally by surprise. Addy said, I can do a post on that! And she did - in the most inclusive way! Thanks, Addy! Notes from the Slushpile really feels like a lovely community with this post! Such a blubworthy list!<br /><br />... er but what happened to Millions?

Re Grandfather&#39;s Bench - was this the grandfather married to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkBnHri8oHE" rel="nofollow">fighter pilot gran</a>?

Aw - thanks, Clare. I will have to read it!

I&#39;ve lost Millions! I love Millions! Shame but now an excuse for a future blog for all those lost words.

Ha! No! This grandfather was more Private Peaceful!

Made me cry - a lot. <br />I can&#39;t read The Selfish Giant (Oscar Wilde) or the moment in The Children of Green Knowe ( L.M.Boston) where Tolly &amp; his great grandmother hear &#39;Lully lullay&#39; on Christmas Eve &quot; and four hundred years ago, a baby went to sleep.&quot;<br />Thanks hive mind.

Oh, that&#39;s lovely, I&#39;d forgotten Green KNowe - there is soooooo much beautiful writing.

Ridiculous to blub just at these tiny fragments, isn&#39;t it? But lovely too. Beautiful selection, Addy. I just finished A MONSTER CALLS and was beside myself with grief and wonder. &quot;I don&#39;t want you to go.&quot; *lays head on table and sobs self stupid*

Oh I KNOW!

I&#39;ve cried more at that book than any other!

I have two book moments. The first has taken a bit of finding, it&#39;s Mrs Weasley. She&#39;s trying to get rid of a boggart from a wardrobe but it keeps turning into her dead children - &#39;I see them d-d-dead all the time!&#39; Mrs Weasley moaned into his shoulder. &#39;All the time! I d-d-dream about it.&#39; It was a great way to show the seriousness of the fight against evil has real

Thank you for giving us the chance to discuss this further, Elen - it's a challenging question.

'Because the larger point is that, although gender shouldn't matter in life, it does. And the only way I can see to address this issue as a writer is to attempt to be as genderless as possible – a writing androgyne.'

I'm not at all sure about this. *I* think the way to address it is to challenge it by writing good books openly as a woman rather than being bullied by the status quo into hiding behind an ambiguous name. If a writer genuinely thinks their work will get a better or wider reception if they pretend to be a man (or pretend not to be a woman), isn't that perpetuating the iniquitous situation?

It's a bit like people who claim state education should be improved but send their own kids to private schools - the more rich kids with influential parents who leave the system, the less likely it is to change. The more successful authors who don't come out as women, the harder it is for everyone to say 'look at these successful women authors'. It's the old conflict of personal benefit versus common good. So I'm very glad that your success to date has been under the name 'Elen' and not under initials.

I do see the problem with writing a different type of book and not wanting to lead younger readers to it by being the same person - that's a rather different issue. (Every now and then, I get requests from the Library of Congress to distinguish myself from the 'other' Anne Rooney who has the same birth date and writes very different books. Durrrr.)

An excellent post and a good argument for your choice for your next book. I was keen on initials as a neutral name but think my decision against was because my particular run of sounds felt awkward to say.

Now it's a matter authors do need to think about early on because of the author brand marketing approach. I groan when I see how many series exist under made up and heavily gendered male and female names.

I'm afraid I'm with Stroppy on this. You make a hugely powerful case for why we should fight back against gender stereotyping (towards both boys and girls) in our main characters, in book marketing etc, and I wholeheartedly agree - so why doesn't the same apply to the name that goes on the book cover?

Who gives them that message? We do you say. What message does 'I don't want you to know a woman wrote this' give?

I absolutely see why you'd want a different name to distinguish titles a different audience (though I'd hope covers, blurbs etc would do that job for you), but that's a separate issue, I think.

Its not abut disguising gender but presenting oneself as gender neutral - as some male writers also do. I write for boys and girls and while I have written as 'Nicola' am about to write as' Nick' I do not see I'm betraying anyone by writing as 'N M' . My books are about brave girls and courageous boys and I want both to pick up my books. My stories are all about boys and girls saving each other, often written in part from the girl's point of view. I want to seduce boys as well as girls into reading and if keeping my gender ambiguous makes that easier why wouldn't I? My books say - 'it doesn't matter who you are, you can be a hero' I like to think that the neutrality of my name reinforces that.
Since when do we women have to choose to label ourselves in ways that other women have decided is more appropriate? I find the view that there is only one acceptable way to do that deeply irritating.

Whoops - sorry about the punctuation mistakes!

Funnily enough if you called yourself L N Renner you'd hardly notice the difference.
I'm convinced by the urge to remain anonymous. I've been a journalist all my adult life, so it's natural for me to see my name in print, and if I want to disappear I can use my husband and kids' surname (there's another feminist naming dilemma). I can see why an author might want to use initials to let their work speak for them. But I do think it can be harmful, and I doubt it's as useful a marketing ploy as we think.

Very interesting this. In the adult crime genre many of the best selling (Val McDermid) and critically acclaimed (Kate Atkinson) are women. Men seem to have no trouble picking up boo0ks by women there. The key here is why don't boys read? I think saying that they don't read because it's written by a woman is a cop out. They don't read because they don't read (a whole host of reasons for this - I speak having had a teenage son who simply stopped reading fiction for about eight years, Since the age about 22 he started again)BUT this is not us, the writers, fault. So nothing we do will change this. It's like changing the colour of a price sticker to make an item look cheaper. But it's the economic crisis that's stopping people buying not the colour of the price tag.

Having said all this I LOVE the idea of you using initials to indicate a different type of book. Good for you.

My husband, children's author Greg Leitich Smith, and I often travel and speak together.

It's become expected for people to frequently praise him for simply being a man per se who writes.(Or, for that matter, cooks.)

On a practical level, though, I think relying only on initials requires a particularly marketable last name, one that readers (and for that matter, fellow publishing pros) will be able to recognize.

C.L. Smith would be awfully generic, and C.L. Leitich would be awfully tough to pronounce.

That said, much terrific insight to ponder here. Thank you for a thought-provoking post.

I am going, of course, to disagree with Anne and Susie. If I choose to write under my initials I will do so without feeling in the least hypocritical. I have no desire to 'hide behind an ambiguous name'; merely to take gender out of the equation.

My main point being that I am a person first, a woman second (or tenth, actually, after parent, writer, artist, biker, musician, fencer, spinner of wool, weaver and knitter ...).

To tell me I have to put my full name on the covers of my books as an identifying female tag or I risk somehow letting the sisterhood down seems to me as proscriptive as telling a black or disabled writer that they must identify themselves as black or disabled first, and writer second, so I agree with Nicky on that one.

Anne C: good point about women crime writers.

Anyway, the best thing we can do about gender issues is exactly this: talk about them, express differences of opinion and air the subject. We don't have to agree for it to be a useful exercise.

So thanks for all those thoughts!

Well, some boys read. I've had three sons and they all read - not always novels and rarely my books, but they read and I'm not about to give up on boys as a lost cause just because they are a harder to reach audience.
To my mind it is more important to challenge gender stereotypes that suggest that boys will never read or will only read stories about pooh and/or zombies than to waste time worrying about what gender stereotypes we might possibly reinforce in our name choices. It's trivial: the problem of getting more boys to engage with books is not.

This is a really interesting discussion.

Ellen, I don't think that Anne and Susie said that you were 'letting the sisterhood down', or told you that you have to do anything.

I can't help agreeing with Susie's point - which is simply that your whole argument about why we shouldn't stop girls from being the main characters just to get boys reading then seems to be turned on its head with your argument about not identifying ourselves as female, because this might put boys off too! Not saying you should or shouldn't do anything - just that the argument seems a little contradictory.

But I totally agree with you that we must absolutely use whatever name we want, and for whatever reasons we want. I have struggled for some time about a book that I'd like to get published one day, and for lots of my own reasons (which I'm sure some people would argue with if I made them public!) I would most probably do this under a different name. And I have no responsibility to anyone other than myself and my books if I do this - like you.

I think it's perfectly acceptable for us to balance our ideals with a desire for commercial success, and it's up to each one of us where we draw the line between the two.

Good luck with your next book!

Lizx

It's a fascinating discussion. I publish as Katherine Langrish, and I know boys do read my books. In fact I once did a poll of all my online fanmail, wherever I COULD figure out if the writer was male or female writer's sex (not always obvious) and it worked out about 50/50 for boys and girls writing to me. Personally I think cover illustrations have much more effect on whether boys will pick up a book, than the known sex of the author: but I do have a suspicion that male authors get taken more seriously by adult critics.

Whoops, sorry about the mixed up sentence, but you get my drift.