Day 4 fannish: username

[tielan]

Day 4: What are the origins of your penname/username?

My original username for fandom - seldear - was from Cousin T, who I've spoken of before. Back in our adolescence, I was "Sel, Dear" and she was "T, Dear" and when I was fishing around for a yahoo username at age 19 - back when it was considered very inadvisable to put your real name out there on the intarwebs - I went with 'seldear'. And then I just kept it, for email accounts, for user names, and so forth.

I only shifted the LJ name when a toxic aunt found my journal (thanks to my sister) and went and read all the entries about our family, most of which I hadn't locked since my family are not tech-savvy. She then emailed me a multipage letter about how I'd mischaracterised her, her relationship with my uncle (the blood relative), her relationship with her daughter, and I paid for a token to change the journal name just enough that she wouldn't be able to find it again.

The 'tielan' username came about in the early 00s when I wanted to try my hand at writing slash, but without having the 'shipper' label attached to me from SG1 fandom. 'Tielan Firefingers' was the name of one of a quartet of mercenaries I'd sketched out while daydreaming at school, and so I used the name for those slash stories, and then eventually for the Stargate Atlantis stories that I was writing at the time. I ended up separating out my fanfic writing from my 'real life' entries for a few years and just wrote under the penname 'tielan' since then. Around the time we switched from LJ to DW, I gave up on the 'seldear' username, and have been using 'tielan' almost exclusively for journalling.

Comments

[wpadmirer]

I like both your user names.

Mine, WPAdmirer, comes from when I started writing fanfic (also slash) and I was freelance writing. I needed a name that wouldn't be traced to me because I was working for a lot of magazines that were tech savvy. Walker Percy is my favorite writer, so I chose WPAdmirer. I've kept it, even though I no longer hide the fanfic, because I just like it.

[beatrice_otter]

Interesting! I'd never heard either origin.

[thothmes]

I’m an Egyptologist manqué, having gotten off that path only in grad school when, among other things, I realized that it meant life in or near a major city, and neither I nor my husband wanted that and with his medical career to pay the bills it was not necessary, and as a child one of my favorite books was Mara Daughter of the Nile. Tuthmose III became my favorite pharaoh as a result, and Thothmes is a variation on that when Tuthmose was already taken. Had I been ten or fifteen years younger, I might have chosen Hatshepsut, because the intervening scholarship has fleshed her out more. Here he is in my icon.