Stuff about  Aaron Plikt
(Yeah, that's a 'Net name )

A ONCE-BRIEF INTRODUCTION
Or, This Was No More Than One Paragraph Just Last Friday  

I know, it's about time I put up a page that strings all of my myriad online stuff together.  That's like trying to hold down a bathtub full of corks, but here's making an attempt!  For those who don't know me, I'm a flutist, composer, music editor, graphics designer, writer, amateur photographer, and webspinner.  (Lots of those occasionally for money....)  And since none of the above put together can pay the bills, I spend most of my time working for this part of IBM's E-Business project as an e-commerce consultant.

Although I work in Austin (when I'm not traveling, and I travel very frequently), I live in Temple, TX, with my husband, who teaches junior high choir.  I graduated from Lamar University in Beaumont, TX as a psychology major with a minor in music, and I started web design a year and a half later in May, 1996.  My husband has been teaching music since August, 1994, and in a desperate effort to keep up my musical skills, I play flute and piccolo in the Temple Symphony Orchestra for a "small fee." }:-\ .  We are both members of a local Presbyterian Church, whose web meager presence I've managed to set up, and where my husbnad volunteers as a deacon.  To fill my time on various plane trips around the US, I like to read Orson Scott Card books, among other of my literary heroes.  (Holding my breath here so I don't start writing a dissertation extolling OSC's virtues.)  Because of my admiration for Orson Scott Card, I sought out a community of fellow fans a few years ago, and found it in the Highly Unofficial Orson Scott Card List Members' Rogue's Gallery.

Oh, right!  My name!  Well, see, the idea for the name "Aaron" came to me by way of a good friend who happened to be an associate minister at the church I attend.  Just before she left the church for Wicheta, KS, she requested that I continue a part of her work after she moved on, and used the Moses/Aaron metaphor to illustrate her point.  "Plikt" is a character in  the OSC book Children of the Mind.  She's a woman who attaches herself to Ender and devotes her life to studying him and continuing his work.  She's more than a little self-serving in her motives, but she loves Ender more fiercely than anything or anyone else that she knows.  She is his self-appointed protege, and after his death she tries in at least a small measure to become him.  Because of her devotion to Ender, she even shows promise by the end of the book of fulfilling her goal.  Plikt was a professional nuisance, though, even if her heart was in the right place.  I adopted the name, to be honest, because it seemed like an appropriate name for a fan who would go to the trouble to seek out other fans just to find people who were equally agog.  And ... I also thought it sounded kind of cool. ~:-)

Funny thing about my pen name is that I used it for the first time (and still use it exclusively) to post to the Unofficial Orson Scott Card Mailing List.  I adopted the first name "Aaron" spelled in the male way (don't plenty of women walk around with men's names these days??), and the last name "Plikt," which I had never heard outside of OSC's novel.  I was certain that list members who had read that much OSC would catch the fact that a male and a (very decidedly) female name were paired.  I didn't expect the fact to jump out and bite anyone on the nose, but I thought I'd get at least one question.  I got none.  Furthermore, just to see what I could get away with, I avoided the use of gender specific pronouns when referring to myself in my posts.  Every list member assumed me male, due to the spelling of my first name.  Most people evidently filled in the gaps about me in their own perceptions, some even assuming that I had a wife (!!), all from looking at the spelling of my first name.  (Kinda makes me glad I'm not a boy named Sue....)  More befuddling still is that had I not taken an interest in some of the listmembers personally and sought out their friendships, I don't think I ever would have been asked to clarify myself.  Maybe in my next Internet Life I'll sign on somewhere as "Winston C."  Who says respect has to be earned?

ENOUGH ALREADY!  On to the good stuff!