Writing On The Edge

I’ll start with a confession. My real name is Deborah.

So why write under Debrah?

Because someone beat me to it and by the time I was ready to publish my first novel, they’d already written several books in a quite different genre using my name as a pen name. Well chaos can be interesting sometimes but not where the books you’ve penned are concerned! So to start with I published under the name that most people knew me by in my professional capacity, but having taken the bold step to leave all that behind and just write, I decided to simply be me.

Writers are always on the edge – the edge of an idea, the edge of other people’s lives, the edge of reason. It’s uncomfortable but challenging, and challenge causes innovation, fluidity and change.

My name in its purest form – Deborah – is also the name of a dimensionless number in rheology, characterising fluidity:

“… the mountains flowed before the Lord…” in a song by the prophetess Deborah (Judges 5:5). It is based on the premise that given enough time even the hardest material, like mountains, will flow… and therefore change, so what else then would I write about, but change – and how even the smallest one might transform many lives …

So the chaos of losing my name has transformed me too. Deborah is now Debrah – it’s exactly the way everyone says it anyway. I now write under Debrah Martin, but you will find my first novel, Chained Melody written under the name of Debbie Martin.

You can find more about me and my work on:

My website: www.debrahmartin.co.uk

My Facebook page: www.facebook.com/DeborahMartin.Author

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