Hi, I’m Maia

What’s in a name?

Author smiling happily in her living room

This may surprise you, but puns and wordplay are two of my life’s great loves. When I first thought of the phrase “stag literature,” followed immediately by “stag lit” (fiery => spicy => smutty, you get the idea), I really wanted my pen name to incorporate “stag” or some variant thereof. After ruminating on it for a couple days I settled on Rosamund Stag, an homage to my Italian grandmother Rosa, but it never felt quite right. A pen name is, inherently, a persona, so the fact that this one didn’t exactly feel like “me” was not unexpected. She is, after all, a made-up person. But she is also me. I couldn’t help but feel like I was shoehorning something that didn’t fit, all for the sake of including the word “stag” (you might say it was shoe-antlered in, teehee. No? Okay…). If Rosamund Stag were a character in one of my stories, her name would be one of Dickensian significance, like Mr. McChoakumchild. Which is all well and good if you’re Charles Dickens, but to me it felt forced. While reflecting on this, I realized that this whole shoehorned pseudonym situation represented a larger internal creative struggle I’ve been having recently.

I decided to begin writing under a pseudonym so that I would be free to write about whatever I pleased, however smutty, however dark, however much I thought others might judge. But, writing as Rosamund Stag and equating her with “stag literature” meant that everything I wrote needed to have some sort of erotic angle. As I explored other works-in-progress that I’d been noodling on, I found myself thinking about how to tweak them to make them fit in the erotica genre, sometimes at the cost of the integrity of the story. I was hamstringing myself - the exact thing I had been trying to avoid by using a pen name in the first place. Something needed to change. I asked my sister.

She suggested a few options, all riffing on my real name. I had been toying with Maia because it is also quite close to my real name and, more importantly, because of The Lord of the Rings (like many writers, I am not unusual in that both my childhood development and appetite for fantasy were heavily influenced by Tolkien, so I won’t bore you with those details here), but I hadn’t yet verbalized it. As soon as I shared it, I knew it was exactly right. My sister and I spitballed a bit more, then she casually threw out a string of surnames, each a direct ancestor of ours. Woodhouse was one of them.

Maia Woodhouse. It was perfect. It felt like me.

So here I am. Maia Woodhouse. Hi! The erotica won’t be going away, I will just be expanding my repertoire. I might make Stag Lit a publication within the Maia Woodhouse substack, and publish non-erotica works outside of Stag Lit. I’m still figuring that out. My subscribers would, of course, get access to both. If I do make that transition, I’m not sure how that will manifest on your end (for example, you might get another “Welcome to Stag Lit” email), so I appreciate your patience and understanding as I grow on this writing journey. Thank you so much for being my supporters and readers. I value you more than you know.

💛 Maia

P.S. You may have noticed that I won’t be sacrificing my much-beloved double entendre - you can’t spell Woodhouse without “wood” 😉. Sometimes you really can have it all.

Thanks for reading, lovelies. What do YOU think of the new name? I always love your feedback

💛 Maia