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Update… Hmm, I’m rereading Sandman and I may have misremembered. I have to follow up on this. Or maybe the character names shift  Here’s a start.

Here’s my original answer…

I often use the name “Gadlen” online. A lot of people have asked where the name comes from so….

It was originally a character in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. (a very sophisticated, grown-up comic). There were these two characters, Gadlen and Hobbes who took care of Dream’s castle while he was away. They are quirky little characters, very much sideline characters… getting just a tiny bit more stage time than the more famous pair, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

I liked that. I liked the allusion to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the buzz about “the two least known characters in Shakespeare”. I loved Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” and how absurd the movie, Shakespeare’s characters, and Gaiman’s characters are.

I liked their jobs, immortal caretakers… janitors in an impossibly beautiful castle. I liked their boss (Sandman #50 still sends a shiver down my back).

I liked even more that when I did a search on the internet in 1992 or so and I didn’t find the word in use by anyone else. It’s good to have a unique name on the internet. Even today, if you google for “Gadlen“, many of the 150 or so links are to me. Having to get an email address like baseballfann5798@aol.com is no fun.

I have used the name in a live action role playing game. I played D. Gadlen J. Chimeran, Dark Hobling of the Fourth House of Inverness. It was quite a bit of fun. I’ve used the name Gadlen all over the ‘net, it’s a bit of a pen name. I’m Gadlen on Gmail, Yahoo, AIM and a mess of other places.