Posts in the "Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms." Category

• To Be or Not To Be, that is the question

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  There are good reasons for an author to use a fake name.

  If you write something so scandalous that it might get you arrested, or sued, or attacked by angry mobs, then you are probably wise to consider using a pseudonym.  Or maybe if you’re already so famous and prolific that you’ve saturated the market, and your only satisfaction now will come from seeing if you can repeat your success with a false identity…in which case you should probably be killed.

  But beyond those circumstances, it’s hard to understand why an author wouldn’t want to use his or her own real name.  I mean, you will only live so long; why not grab what little credit you can in this life? Presumably you’ve poured hard work into your book, long months or years of effort that you will never get back.  Hopefully you are proud of it.  So why would you allow a fake name to be attached to it instead of your own?

  Good question…and it’s one I should be ideally qualified to answer, since I recently did it myself.

  I’ve spent the last year or so inhabiting the identity of one “W.G. Marshall,” fake author of the novel Enormity.  My actual name is Walter Greatshell, genuine author of a number of books, including Enormity.  My latest work, Terminal Island, is being published under my own name, and I have to say I prefer it that way.

  So why did I use a pen name for Enormity?

  I guess it goes back to something someone told me around ten years ago, when I signed the contract for my first novel, Xombies.  I was asked if I wanted to use a pseudonym, and when I said no, the person replied, “Just remember: if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.”

  I didn’t really get it at the time.  It sounded vaguely insulting, though to whom I wasn’t sure.  But its meaning became more clear to me once I realized that my name was likely to be linked with the words “zombie author” for the rest of my life.

  Now, zombies are great, don’t get me wrong, but I like a lot of other things just as much, and the idea that I had struggled for twenty years to become a published author only to be permanently relegated to some zombie ghetto was ridiculous—especially since my book was never intended to be a Zombie Novel at all. No such genre existed when I wrote it; it was just a novel, a tribute to books I loved as a kid, like Earth Abides and Ice Station Zebra and True Grit.  Little did I know that zombie fever would soon sweep the nation, rendering my intentions moot.  Like it or not, I was a zombie guy…probably forever.

  Aha!  Now I understood perfectly what that advice had meant.  Fleas indeed—when I wrote my third book, Mad Skills, one review site dismissed it as “a new book by the author of a couple of zombie novels.”  Ouch.

  I wanted no such prejudices interfering with my book Enormity, so when Night Shade proposed the use of a pseudonym, I jumped at it.  And I think it worked—the book was treated totally objectively and favorably, without a hint of zombie prejudice.  The only problem was I got no credit for it, so there was no crossover between fans of Enormity and fans of my other work.  Also, I had to maintain two identities, which meant I spent twice as much time networking, half of which felt like a waste since I was promoting the career of a nonexistent person.

  In short, I didn’t like it.  So with Terminal Island I gladly dispensed with the nom de plume.  Not that it makes much difference, since I’m hardly a household name.

  But if I’m ever going to be, that name will be Walter Greatshell.

  Thanks for reading!

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• Pseudonym starts with ‘p’

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  Here’s the thing. I did not expect to get published. I had enough to think about in even finishing a book, let alone sending it off to an agent. Still, in my far-off dreams on the subject I had considered that any form of my name(s) would not work well on the cover of a book because, just as Courtney Schafer complained about her own, nobody spells them correctly. Ever. So when people were suddenly using words like “contract” and “payment” and then I also heard “pseudonym,” decades of correcting credit card representatives and RMV workers had me primed to agree.

  There is a strategy to pseudonyms. You want to appear on the right place on the shelf; send a message about your identity (‘Raven’ sends one message, ‘Suzy’ another); show some musicality or rhythm your real name doesn’t have; and leave certain bits of information out of the picture, in many cases  gender. (more…)

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• The Great Unmasking

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  I said last week that I would reveal my true name today, the writer behind T. Aaron Payton and The Constantine Affliction, and if you’ll dim the lights and start the drumroll and prime the fireworks…

  Oh, I won’t be coy: T. Aaron Payton is a pseudonym for me, Tim Pratt. Ta da! All is revealed.

  I’ve done other books with Night Shade — my collection Hart & Boot & Other Stories, and an anthology, Sympathy for the Devil. A couple of years back I was chatting with Night Shade editor Jeremy Lassen, and he asked if I had any novel ideas I could pitch him. I said, “Well, there is one thing…”

  Back in 2009 my agent sent around a proposal for a book that was called, at the time, Death (and other afflictions), and which I thought of as “Steampunk Zombie Jamboree.” One of my friends had commented that lots of zombie books were selling well, and lots of steampunk books were selling well, so obviously the perfect commercial novel would combine steampunk with zombies. (That’s actually something that Cherie Priest has done, and very well, in her Clockwork Century novels.)

  I started thinking about that throwaway comment, and saw a way I could write such a thing and amuse myself immensely in the process, though it wouldn’t be exactly like most steampunk, and the zombies wouldn’t be exactly like most zombies, and there’d be this sex-changing plague, and some embedded literary references, and, actually, it likely wouldn’t be very commercial at all…. So I wrote up the first few chapters, and a synopsis, and sent it off to my agent to shop around.

  The big publishers passed on it. I got various responses, but more than once we heard variations on, “We like all the steampunk stuff, but this sex-changing plague stuff is too weird.” To which I could only shout at the moon, “But the sex-changing plague stuff is the only thing that differentiates it from all the other steampunk! If I take that out, I’m not writing anything a dozen other writers couldn’t do better!” So I gave up on the book, with sadness because I loved the characters, and shelved the proposal.

  Until Jeremy asked if I had anything. And I thought about how welcoming the Shade could be to things that were weird. I pitched him the idea, and he was enthusiastic, and now… here we are, among the afflicted.

  Why the pseudonym? Partly because this book isn’t like any of my other books — it’s my first time doing a historical, my first time doing steampunk, my first time mangling London geography, and the first time I’ve written anything quite this over-the-top at novel length — so they wanted to differentiate it from my other work. I did something similar with my Marla Mason urban fantasy series, which I wrote as T.A. Pratt. I’m told it all has to do with branding. And I’m fine with branding, as long as it doesn’t involve hot irons.

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• Personally, I’m holding out for a Nom De Guerre

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  According to dictionary.com:

  pseu·do·nym – [sood-n-im] noun a fictitious name used by an author to conceal his or her identity; pen name.  Synonyms : alias, nom de plume.

  nom de guerre – [nom duh gair; Fr. nawn duh ger] noun, plural: noms de guerre  [nomz duh gair; Fr. nawn duh ger]  an assumed name, as one

  

  Still looks like more fun than my day job.

  under which a person fights.  Origin: French:  literally, war name

  

  I have heard other professional writers advise the use of a pen name.  Apparently the deal is that if you get a few books published and they don’t sell well, you are frequently not able to sell any more to the publishers and it’s all very sad.  The work around is to switch to a different name and genre where your previous experience plays to your benefit and the publishers over there don’t know you were a flop.    So you don’t use your real name when writing in case you have to dump it and get a new one.  That’s just what I heard.

  My real name.  What does that even mean?  This is a time in the world’s history when you can have a fully-fledged online avatar for every aspect of your life, every mood swing, or every day of the week if you so desire. This is a time when we must all swallow the bitter irony of Facebook insisting that only perverts and criminals would use a pseudonym on social media while it sells our identity down the river to every credit card thief and relentless advertiser it can find.  (more…)

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• The Name Game

  Say my name! Talking Pseudonyms.

  Before I launch into this week’s topic (pseudonyms!), as an engineer in the space industry I just have to shout out a big WOO HOO for rover Curiosity’s safe landing on Mars.  Talk about an amazing feat of engineering, y’all!  I’m so excited for my friends at JPL.  (I worked there for several years while I was a student at Caltech.  On a project intended for Mars, no less, though sadly the end for us was not so happy.  The Russian launch rocket failed, and the experiment I worked so hard on is somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific, glub glub.)

  So!  Pseudonyms.  Back when my agent was first submitting The Whitefire Crossing to editors, I totally thought I’d use a pseudonym if the book actually made it to publication.  I had a couple of reasons: (more…)

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