Names I Shake My Pen At

I was born Cathryn Leigh Adams, but in an effort to not have me be another Cathy*, my parents called me Cayla**.  I suffered their phobia of Kathy all through school, telling teachers at the beginning of the year I was Cayla. Then I hit college. I was burnt out with correcting people and I realized that I could care less if someone called me Cathy or Cat, so I stopped correcting the professors, but I continued to introduce myself to others as Cayla outside of class.

Fast forward a little bit and I join in the MMO*** craze with Dark Age of Camelot. To play you have to create a character, and that character needs a name. I won’t go into how I chose my name, but suffice to say I became Elorie and thus my gamer name was born. For the years in which I played MMO’s my main characters’ names have all started with Elo (I can’t bear to reuse names like some). So I’ve been Eloriana in World of Warcraft and some other Elo in Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (obviously I didn’t play it enough to remember my name, heh).

Anyway, we’ll skip a head a little more to when I joined Protagonize. Now the site is run by a friend of mine from my Dark Age of Camelot days. Since Protagonize is a writing site, not a gaming site I decided to merge my gamer name with my real name and came up with Elorithryn. And lo and behold people started calling me Elo. (not to beconfused with Eloo, the short version of Eloosive who also has an awesome Daily Writing Blog, but I digress).

So back on topic; how many names do I go by at this exact moment? Five apparently :}

·         Cayla (nickname)
·         Cathryn Mullen
·         Cathryn Leigh
·         Elorithryn
·         Elo (nick name)
 

*: The aversion had two reasons. First, one of my mother’s brothers married a Kathy and had two daughters by her and then they divorced. Secondly I think they both knew a lot of women named Kathy at the time.

**: The Cay is from Cathryn, the L is from Leigh, and the A is from Adams and about ten years after I was born Kayla became a popular name (apparently it’s African in origin).

***: MMO = Massively Multiplayer On-line (game) like World of Warcraft.

****: When Saffi posted my excerpt, she attributed it to Cathryn Mullen, rather than Cathryn Leigh. Since Mullen is my married name, and what my e-mail calls me, that’s probably fine.