Some time ago, when I first starting singing again after my voice changed, I noticed that my vocal range was defined by E-flats: the E-flat an octave and a major sixth below Middle C, and the E-flat a minor third above Middle C (chest voice only, of course). This is no longer strictly the case--when I'm warmed up and in full voice I've generally got a few more notes on the top, and my voice is often not in top form so my useful range on the bottom is short by a note or two--but it's still a good approximation.

I also play the French horn; although I don't play in an ensemble as consistently as I used to, for several years I was in a series of bands and orchestras, often three or more at a time. Orchestral French horn parts are often in keys other than F (the modern canonical horn key). This is mostly attributable to the fact that the French horn has not always had keys, and in order to change the key of the instrument, one had to add pieces of tubing (called crooks, because they looked not unlike the business end of shepherd's crooks) of different lengths to it. Thus, for different pieces (and sometimes different parts of the same piece-- damn you, Wagner) the player would change to a D crook, an E crook, etc. Which crook the player was to use was indicated by the notation "Horn in x" where x was the name of the crook. Since a lot of orchestral music is German, I often saw the German notation of "flat" in a key signature, that being the postfix "s". Thus, for example, "E-flat" would be notated as "Es". (Be patient. The relevance will become apparent eventually.)

When I was in high school, I learned to play bridge and Mao (a truly evil card game involving memorization of completely arbitrary rules) on the bus ride to school (which tended to be about an hour long). The inveterate players, of which I became one, became part of a group known to ourselves as "The Knights of the Icons", in which each person was associated with a royalty card. My preference would have been for the King of Spades, but the originator of the KOI, Richard, reserved that for himself, so I got the King of Diamonds instead. After a while, I came up with the notion that as one graduated, one would become an Ace of one's choice--since I was the oldest member by a space of two years, that left Ace of Spades wide open for me. This came to pass, although in sort of a bridge in-joke I became known as either the Ace of Spades or the Ace of No-Trumps.

In the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, our choir went on a trip to Austria to perform in an international choral festival. During the trip, another KOI, Judson, who speaks German relatively well and is in any case enamored of things German (such as his mother), picked up a deck of German playing cards. They were almost indistinguishable from American playing cards except for the fact that the royalty was marked with different initials--B for "Bube" in place of the Jack, D for "Dama" in place of the Queen, K for "Koenig" instead of "King", and "Es". Apparently "Es" is the German transcription of the English word "Ace", and they figured that they could fit both letters on the card. Of course, as soon as I saw the card I said, "Hey! E-Flat!" (followed by the dissertation on horn music, found above). Thereafter, I referred to the Aces in that deck, and sometimes others, as "E-Flat"s.

Of course, this meant that instead of "Ace of [Spades/No-Trumps]" I got called "E-Flat of ...", instead, and when I realized the connection to my vocal range, I decided that "E-Flat" was a good sort of nom de whatever (guerre, plume, amour, convention de science-fiction...) that had the additional nice property that it was highly unlikely that anyone would confuse me with another E-Flat, or consider it to be derivative of someone else's notion (in the way that calling myself Green Lantern, for example, was).

Postscript: When I went to a Mile-High Con (science fiction convention in Denver) some time ago, I found that there is actually a fictional character named E-Flat--apparently a centaur in one of John Varley's novels. I haven't confirmed this for myself yet, but someone actually asked me whether I'd named myself after that character. Oh well.

Post-Postscript: During the summer of 2001, I read the John Varley novels in question (TITAN, WIZARD, and DEMON). I can now confirm that there is no character called E-Flat, or any variant thereof, in any of them. Whew! :)