L.M. Elliott: My writing name is L. M. Elliott. I use the initials for Laura Malone, and I initially did that with my first novel which was Under a War-Torn Sky. So when I first wrote that book, there was some concern by my publisher that, at that time, while girls tended to be easy "crossover readers", at that time, there seemed to be some hesitancy among preteen and teenage boys to pick up a book written by women and specifically books that were deemed "war books" or "boy books", that it might cause a few readers to not pick it up if it was clear that the author was a woman.

And at first I hesitated over that a little bit, just being kind of feminist in my thoughts, but my daughter, who is very practical, asked me what I thought was more important, my name or the book. And I felt the book was more important, so I decided that L. M. Elliott sounded fine by me, and actually I've come to really like it, and it feels very authorily.