If there’s a literary tradition I am inordinately fond of, it’s the nom de plume. I love the idea of people working under fake names for whatever their reasons, and perhaps even more so, I love the idea that others can then discover the true identities behind the name through a small amount of detective work; the whole thing seems like a strange, sometimes sadly necessary, game that I find myself all too eager to play on any number of occasions.
(I have, to the best of my admittedly poor memory, only employed a fake name in work once — which is not the same as ghostwriting, which is something I’ve done a lot and, as I continue to work as an editor, find myself doing with no small amount of frequency. The fake name I did use was a matter of necessity, as I was under a non-compete contract at the time but also owed another outlet a story. Shhhh. Don’t tell.)
My admittedly ridiculous joy in the practice might stem from growing up reading 2000 AD as a kid, where there were issues where 4/5 of the stories were written by the same writing team, but using different names to disguise the seeming lack of available talent. Names which were familiar to the kid-who-was-me at the time — John Howard, T.B. Grover — were, in fact, not real people at all, a fact that utterly delighted me when I eventually found out, years later. I’d been a fan of no-one, this whole time!
I was thinking about this recently upon discovering that there’s an Elephant 6 band called Major Organ and The Adding Machine that… well, no-one actually seems to know for sure who it is. It feels like the pseudonym taken one stage further, somehow; a group identity that people can (and have!) made guesses about the truth, but which more than 25 years later, no-one really knows for sure. Imagine if the Beatles had released Sgt. Pepper’s… but kept the act up the whole way through…
I have, on more than one occasion, promised myself that I’d start doing a webcomic under a fake name and just put it out there for people to randomly discover. Maybe that’s a project for 2025.