'Unbecoming' is a story about pseudonyms. More specifically, it's a horror story that explores the reasons why writers might be drawn to using a pseudonym, and the potential hazards that might entail. The story was originally published in autumn 2004, in the small press journal, Fusing Horizons #4. For those of you unfamiliar with the journal, it was edited by Gary Fry and published by his Gray Friar Press. The magazine garnered a good reputation for itself, and published familiar names like Ramsey Campbell, Nicholas Royle, Joel Lane, as well as newer writers who went on to bigger and better things, including Andrew Hook, Gary McMahon, Simon Bestwick, Michael Kelly and Andrew Humphrey. I'm not sure how many issues were published, I think only 5 or 6, but in its brief run, it earned its place alongside its forerunners like Peeping Tom, Works and BBR in the UK small press scene.
Given the subject matter, it made sense to publish the story pseudonymously, and the story duly appeared with the byline, Willard Grant, about which more of later. 'Unbecoming' is about a once promising SF and fantasy writer who, after publishing three novels and two story collections, has hit a block. In addition, he had aspirations to break out of what he perceived as the genre ghetto and establish his credentials as a writer of serious literary fiction. Unfortunately, the creative juices stopped flowing until, in an attempt to get round his block, he created a pseudonym and produced a bunch of stories in the old, familiar style. All of these have sold, but when they appear in print--in places like Weird Tales and Interzone--he discovers the stories have been attributed to a writer he has never heard of. As he attempts to get editors to correctly attribute the stories, he struggles to get taken seriously, a fact he puts down to his use of an unfamiliar pseudonym. As his new stories continue to appear, he finds the imposter is not only stealing his byline, but plagiarising aspects of his life.
When he tries to enlist the help of his agent in getting properly credited for his work, he learns that his latest stories are being chalked up to other, unfamiliar names. Persuaded by his agent to give up on short fiction and focus on the novel he's told her he has planned, he decides to drop the alter ego and focus on completing the novel under his real name. He duly finishes the book and submits it, growing ever more impatient as she fails to get back to him. A google search reveals that his three published novels are all credited to three different writers, something confirmed by a visit to a local bookshop. More disconcerting is the discovery that his personal copies of all three books--published under his real name--have been personally signed by these impersonators, with a dedication in each to the pseudonym he'd used for his more recent stories.
The story concludes with the writer finally realising the extent of his own unbecoming. A further, intentional irony, is his continuing ignorance of the identities of those who have stolen his fictions, for all the names used to usurp his stories are themselves pseudonyms used either by real writers, or by characters appearing in actual works of fantasy or science fiction. The first story thief is Cole Trenton, the name of the protagonist of a story called 'Blue Valentine 'I wrote for Crime Wave #2; Racoona Sheldon, Leonie Hargrave, and John Luther Novak were names used by Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree Jr), Thomas M Disch and Christopher Priest; all other names used in the story are pseudonyms used by Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, and Jeff Vandermeer among others. And of course I couldn't resist the opportunity to use the name Harlan Ellison deployed for work he no longer wished to be associated with--Cordwainer Bird. 'Unbecoming's protagonist adopts the pseudonym Ernest Newboy, which derives from the name of a famous poet who appears in Samuel R Delany's Dhalgren; and Newboy's real name i. my story is K. Leslie Steiner, the alter ego used by Delany for many of his critical essays on his own work.
'Unbecoming' was itself inspired by the appearance of my story, 'Double Zero for Emptiness', a fictional account of Stephen King's near fatal encounter with a minivan in 1999, which was published without attribition in the debut issue of Des Lewis's Nemonymous, a journal of anonymously published stories whose authors were not identified until the subsequent issue. Not only did Des's experiment with nemonymous fiction give writers the opportunity to create fictions outside their comfort zones, or the expected genre boundaries, but there was alot of fun to be had in trying to guess who might have written the stories the journal contained. As a further piece of trickery, I later reviewed the debut issue for a review magazine called The Fix, published by Andy Cox, and took great delight in criticising my own story as one of the weaker efforts.
That experience prompted me to write a story that played with notions of authorial intent, identity, ego, and the desire to escape the literary constraints imposed on writers by editors, publishers and readers. Pseudonyms are perhaps one way to transcend those limits, but I figured it would be fun to explore the darker side of creating a pseudonymous identity, and the consequences it might have for one's notion of self.
The name under which Gary Fry published the story was Willard Grant. To this day I don't recall whether I submitted it to him under my real name, asking him to publish it under the pseudonym, or sent it as if it were from a writer whose biographical note indicates that he's "a musician who spends too much time in his own company." I think it's fair to say that not many of you will know that Willard Grant derives from a marvellous Gothic Americana band called the Willard Grant Conspiracy, who released 10 studio albums between 1996 and 2018. The band was essentially Robert Fisher, the only consistent member throughout its history. Sadly, Fisher died of cancer in 2017. I hope he got a kick out of the attribution.
'Unbecoming' can be read on my website here.
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