Author Names and Avatars

Since I’ve only met a handful of other authors in person, and since a lot of people don’t like to post a photo of themselves on-line, there are many authors whose faces I’ve never seen and whose names I've never heard mentioned aloud. So when I see their names somewhere on-line or in an email, I get an immediate image in my head of their on-line “profile” picture. It might be a favorite image of an embracing couple, one of their book covers, or some other symbol they use to represent their on-line identity.

I even had a dream once where I met up with a few authors I know on-line and one of them was this giant picture of her book cover. She was just sitting there at the table, having a drink, chatting with us as a two-dimensional image that included the book title and her name.

I heard somewhere that we can’t dream the face of a person we’ve never seen. That our subconscious cannot create a human face on the fly. Not sure if that’s true or not, but it does have me wondering who all those people in my dreams are and why I’m casting them in starring roles if I can’t recall who they are.

I also found out recently I’d been pronouncing one of my on-line friend’s name all wrong. For almost three years. I even had to correct my sweetie since she learned the name from me. She’d never actually seen this person’s name in print, just heard me saying it. How was she supposed to know I’d mangled it all up?

This got me thinking… I could be pronouncing people’s names wrong all over the place when I’m recommending their books to friends who’ve never read in the gay romance genre. Uh-oh. Sorry about that guys!

Am I the only one?



Award-winning author Sloan Parker writes passionate, dramatic stories about two men (or more) falling in love. Sloan enjoys writing in the fictional world because in fiction you can be anything, do anything...even fall in love for the first time over and over again. She lives in Ohio with her partner and their neurotic cats where her greatest moments in life are spent with her family, her friends, and her characters. You can learn more about Sloan and her writing at www.sloanparker.com.