After years of wanting to change my author name, pen name, pseudonym, whatever you want to call it, I finally did it.

I wanted April as my first name like a day (if that) after I went forward with my old name Emilia Jordan back in 2012 and it only took me about eight years to admit I still wanted April Something as my writing name and to actually change it. I wanted both first and last names to be female names, so here you have it…

April Julia

It’s kinda weird, but I’m kinda weird, and I like it which is good since I’m the one who has to live with it (should’ve thought more on that last time around). I like both names and I like that I don’t love either so much that they’re attached to a main character in a piece of my writing or on mental lists of potential future children’s names if I should ever have kids.

It was clear to me after my last post that I really wanted to still use a pen name to keep my professional, science-y, medicine-y life separate from my writing life so my writing self is not what comes up when people google me for jobs and such, and that I wanted to change it rather than just keep going forward with the name I already had (something I had reluctantly resigned myself to doing several times over the years).

This one came to me on November 11 during morning lectures about…something and I loved it right away. I’ve mentioned before that I see letters and numbers as colors and it was immediately aesthetically pleasing to me in that sense. After mulling it over for six months and sticking with and circling back to the same one over and over, it felt like time to finally put my new name into the world.

And both names are straightforward to spell and pronounce, which makes a world of difference. Another very obvious thing I should’ve thought of before jumping in last time.

Here are my handles for the social medias:

website (here) – AprilJulia.com
Facebook – AprilJulia13
Twitter – AprilJulia13
tumblr – AprilJulia

Basically AprilJulia everywhere but AprilJulia13 on FB and Twitter. Speaking of social media, my graphic still has the old site address in it but all the links should be updated and current. I just sent a message to my graphic design person about getting that changed in the FB/Twitter graphic so hopefully that’ll be changed over soon too. I’m sure I’ll come across some other glitches as time goes on.

To other writers out there (or anyone) who has thought about changing their name but already has a blog/website/social media under a name they don’t want to use anymore, it honestly wasn’t that hard to do, and I’m someone who often struggles mightily with this sort of tech endeavor. After doing some research, I did it all in one afternoon, and would be happy to walk anyone else through the process!

Who knows, now with a name I like rather than one I kinda dreaded, maybe I’ll actually post more.

-April