I have a new novella out today, so why does it have a different name on the cover?
There are all sorts of reasons to use a pseudonym. Maybe you want to try something different, but don’t want to let down your legion of loyal fans who have come to expect something specific from you. This is not even remotely close to a problem that I have.
Perhaps it’s because you just want to put out a bit of a silly project. Believe me, the writer of Guy Fawkes: Demon Hunter is more than happy to put out a ridiculous project in his own name.
Well maybe it’s a desire to write in a different genre. Chase Tatham, after all, writes action thrillers. But this book is very much a horror, and I’m a horror writer.
The purpose for Chase Tatham was because it was a different genre, and it was beyond silly, but C. Spook Tatham is different. I even invented a ridiculous concept of my pseudonym’s pseudonym, with C. Spook Tatham a pseudonym of my pseudonym Chase Tatham, and wrote of the indignation of my alter ego stealing my genre.
But behind off of this silliness, these layers of subterfuge, this bluff within a bluff, there’s a serious reason. I don’t think I could have written this without donning the persona or my pseudonym’s pseudonym. You see, I’ve really struggled to complete any longer writing projects recently. Part of this was the deep disappointment I had over the failure of the Guy Fawkes: Demon Hunter series. I had great fun writing them, and the few readers who discovered it seemed to enjoy it, but it was, without a shadow of a doubt, a massive flop. And failure makes you less keen to plod on, but the stories are still there, swirling around my head, so it would only be a matter of time before they crept out into the world.
But then, in April 2024, my dad died quite suddenly (it’s probably what the papers would have dubbed died peacefully after a short illness. I never realised how awful that statement is until that moment; there’s no comfort there). When I felt like writing again, I started a few different projects and nothing stuck. I got a couple of short stories written, but anything longer stalled in the first couple of thousand words.
What I used to do when stuck like this was go for a walk. I’d run things through my head as I traipsed through nature, maintaining only the awareness around me not to step in dog shit. As I did, a solution to whatever writing problem I had would come into my head, so when I got home, I could get on with it.
That didn’t work anymore, though. When I went for a walk, all that was in my head was what had happened to my dad. How could that happen in what is supposedly one of the best hospitals in the country? How can I accept that he was just unlucky? Unlucky is stepping in that aforementioned shit on the walk, not a rogue blocked duct in the pancreas leading to it killing off the organ and poisoning the blood, spreading failure to the rest of the vital organs and being dead at 71 when you’ve barely had a major health concern at any moment prior to that. That is absolute horseshit. And the solitude that was my space to work through writing conundrums was utterly consumed by it.
But this wasn’t in Chase Tatham’s head space. Somehow, that was different. When approaching the project in that alter-ego, I could manage. When going for a walk, the door to that hospital ward was closed off, and I could think about how to tackle that beast from the underworld that was causing havoc for the denizens of Little Elmswood.
Now the book is out there, now that it’s done, I feel like I’ve overcome a beast of my own. I’m ready to get writing again under my own name. There are a couple of projects battling for completion (and I do need to deal with a few hangovers from the end of my teaching career, too).
So does that mean an end for Chase Tatham, and his pseudonym, C. Spook Tatham? Of course not. We need to see Bryan Knight’s next adventure, The Right to Bear Arms at some point, and C. Spook Tatham already has a draft written of a story about spiders from space…
If you’re interested in what came of this mess, it can be found here.