My Other Me

My pseudonym finished the first draft of his novel the other day. He's pretty excited about it. I cautioned him about the untrustworthy sense of euphoria that accompanies the completion of a first-draft. "You'll start questioning yourself in a day or two," I said. "By the time your agent gets back to you, you'll hate it."

My pseudonym reminded me that I'm the same way when I finish a draft, and he's right, of course -- what right do I have to take the wind from his sails...or his sales, for that matter? Who knows, his manuscript might actually sell. I passed it along to my agent out of sheer goodwill and wished him the best.

"Thanks," he remarked, and I couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic or not. After all, he didn't have to remind me how pseudonyms can sometimes surprise you. Everyone's favorite example, Richard Bachman, started out playing farm league but by the time he was through, his sales were as big as Stephen King's. Ed McBain made a lot of money for literary author Evan Hunter. More recently, an excellent writer named Peter Abrahams found New York Times bestselling success with his pseudonym's new novel Dog On It, a mystery narrated by a dog. It's a fun book with a great voice, and Abrahams' pseudonym deserves all the success he's getting.

Of course, I feel obligated to remind my pseudonym, it's also possible that my agent will hate the book, that publishers will reject it, or if--against all odds--it actually gets published, the reading public will ignore it utterly. At this, my pseudonym just shrugs and tells me he'll probably just write another one anyway, just for fun, and if he doesn't, who cares? After all, he reminds me, as my shadow, he's just a slight tilt of the sun away from slipping back into blessed nonexistence.