Hello, My Name Is…

Regina Cole

Well, sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s Gina Lamm. And it was Gina Mosley. And it’s always been GinaCole.

I find it interesting when people tell me the stories behind their names. I like the story of my birthname, anyway. And my pen name is an extension of that, so I thought it might be neat to share.

I was born a poor child… Nowait, that’s another story. My birth certificate reads Gina Nicole Mosley. If I’d been a boy, my name would be Eugene, after my dad. I love my dad more than anything, but I am so glad I wasn’t named Eugene. (I could have had it worse. His first name is Elmer. So, yeah. There’s a legacy of oldtimey names in our family.) My mother has a stuffed monkey that she adored as a child. Its name was Nicky. So I’m named for my father and a creepy-ass stuffed monkey.

My namesake and me!

But since I had the luck to grab that second X chromosome, I was dubbed Gina, barely dodging the Eugene bullet. When I was little, I was adamant that I NOT have a nickname. My dad came up with one, but it didn’t last more than a week, and he’s since forgotten what it was. Whenever he’d try to call me by the nickname, I’d cross my arms and scowl and say, “NO! I am JUST GINA.”

Needless to say, for most of my childhood, I was referred to as “Just Gina.”

But my grandfather (also an Elmer, with the interesting middle name of Columbus) decided that he didn’t care if I wanted to be “Just Gina.” He’d give me a nickname and it would stick. And it did. He called me GinaCole, which I accepted only because it was just a conjunction of my first and middle names. But nobody called me GinaCole except for Grandaddy.

When I was a teenager, I completely reversed my nickname preferences. I hated that my name was so short that it couldn’t be easily chopped down into a convenient nickname. Like “Jen” for Jennifer, or “Steph” for Stephanie. My sister halfheartedly called me “G”, but it didn’t really make me feel special, or familiar in the way I felt a nickname should.

I got to college, and confided in my friends there. They decided that my granddaddy had it right. I was GinaCole. And to this day, whenever I talk to any of them (which is nowhere near as frequently as I would like) they call me GinaCole.

 

My first book was published under my married name, Gina Lamm. But then my career sort of diverged in the middle. I decided that having a pen name would enable me to write in different directions, keeping me free to chase the muse breath wherever it would take me. But what to pick?

I toyed with the idea of something completely different than my birth name. Something exotic and interesting. Maybe Penelope, or Rosalia.

But I wasn’t any of them. I was Just Gina, or I was GinaCole. So, in the interest of keeping true to myself, I added a couple of letters to distinguish it from my real name, and Regina Cole was born.

 

So you can call me Gina. Or Regina. Or Reggi. Or GinaCole. Or G.

But I’ll always be Just Gina. Or JustGinaCole. :)