That's not my name

When I first signed on with agent Elana, I asked her whether my last name was going to be a problem.  I mean, let's face it, I'm not luck enough to have a short forceful name, ala John Green, or something alliterative, like Gail Giles. I've got a mess of vowels and consonants in my last name that nobody really knows how to deal with. Heck, I even have an uncle who, after a trip to Europe, announced that he was going to pronounce it different from the rest of us, having consulted with the good European people about how it should be pronounced.

But authors like Zusak, Levithan, and Pfeffer give me hope, and I'm sticking with the name I was born into.

The best way I've found to explain the pronouciation is this: It's BAY-shores, plural, like shores of the bay. I explained it that way to my future husband, when I met him at the college paper, and he teased me for months--"hey, Pam Shores-of-the-Bay!". But maybe that was just because I was so skilled with the one-pica tape and he was trying to get my attention.

So, with apologies to the Ting Tings:

They call me 'BACH-oars'
They call me 'Ba-SHORES'
They call me 'BACH-oose'
They call me 'BAY-shore'
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name

They call me 'BUH-shores'
But I'm not that
Bach-Buh-Bas
Always the same
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name
That's not my name