While I’m not the greatest mathematician, and perhaps not even a competent one, I know how to count the number of unread books in my house, divide by the number of days in a year, and determine that I have approximately eleventy billion years of reading material ahead of me if I read a book per day and never buy another book again.
Well, I don’t read a book per day, but I do read a lot. This is largely possible because I read fast-paced books between 45,000 and 60,000 words most commonly; I’m not polishing off Gravity’s Rainbow every three days, and no one should feel bad if they don’t.
But no matter how large my unread backlog is in the shelves behind me, it’s hard for me to pass by a bookstore without at least checking it out, and it’s hard for me to check it out without walking away with something. I used to only make the mistake of “buying a book I don’t need and can’t make time for,” but there are other types of mistakes I can make now. This is how I now own two copies of James Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem. One was found at a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY in mass market paperback form, a form I prefer. The second was brand-new and waiting for me at Barnes & Noble. I forgot I bought the first, which is how I came to buy the second.
Last time I mentioned that Lawrence Block was publishing a lot of his pseudonymous back catalog in either his Classic Crime or Classic Erotica lines. I also mentioned that there are a few books that appeared in both lines, so sexy were their crimes, and so criminal was their sex. Confusing matters even more, sometimes the books would have different titles (I haven’t made this purchasing mistake yet, but give me time).
I just finished Block’s A Diet of Treacle, published by Hard Case Crime; if you had read it in 1961 when it was first published, it would have been called Pads Are for Passion, published by Beacon Books under a pen name that Block used for mostly erotica. Similarly, The Sex Shuffle and Savage Lover were (much) later reissued by Hard Case Crime as Lucky at Cards and Sinner Man, respectively. $20 Lust reappeared as Cinderella Sims.
I recently got excited as I thumbed through a book about Manhunt magazine, and saw that there was an unknown-to-me Ross MacDonald story called “The Imaginary Blonde.” It was attributed to John Ross MacDonald, one of his early pen names (before the other John MacDonald was as well known). That initial excitement lasted long enough for me to discover “The Imaginary Blonde” was in fact an alternative title to a story I already had, called “Gone Girl.”
We all have a complicated relationship with Amazon these days, but I do appreciate that it tells me when I bought something, because as far as books go, I have the middle- or upper-class problem of not remembering what I already own. Not long ago I saw a reprint of an older book that had a very affordable Kindle edition, got excited, and discovered after I clicked on it that I had bought it a few months earlier. Whoops.
Which brings me to my point: there are lots of ways to screw up lots of different things, even in something so seemingly innocuous as buying or reading a book. Which is why I’m still struggling with whether or not to use one or more pen names for what I write. There was an old joke that authors would use pen names for genre work and save their real name for the serious, literary stuff. I see the appeal here, but I’d likely use my real name for crime fiction and pen names for everything else.
Because I can easily see readers getting confused when books of different genres appear under the same author name, especially if one relies on Amazon as a platform to keep one’s work organized and available. And because I have a lot of ideas for stories in a few different genres with very little crossover appeal (presumably), this is a problem I’ll eventually have to contend with. Is it a major problem? Well, no, especially for someone who hasn’t published anything in these genres yet; those books-in-progress don’t exist until they’re out there, and they ain’t out there yet. But it is a modern distribution problem, something independent authors have to contend with.
An example, sticking with Lawrence Block and his many pen names: quite a few of his books have reviews that are some variant of “not up to Block’s usual quality,” which is correct – the book in question was one of his first, was not a crime novel, and wasn’t even something he publicly acknowledged until very recently. But it was listed on his Amazon Author page, and not on a page for Sheldon Lord, the pen name under which the book originally appeared.
If you want a real chuckle, take a look at some reviews for the books Block wrote under the name John Warren Wells; these were ostensibly written by a medical professional who shared lurid details of the sex lives of numerous “real” people that he interviewed and studied. Of course, it was really Block, and it was all made up. But the reviews make it clear that some readers lack all the context necessary for knowing what the book is, who wrote it, and why. Readers who are fans of one pen name and one genre may not be fans of everything that author writes under all pen names, and keeping everything separate seems pretty practical. To my knowledge, there’s no way to subcategorize on an Amazon Author page (though you can, it seems, organize books by series).
I share all this because, borrowing from Block and how he began life as a writer, I spent the last few weeks experimenting with short erotic romance writing, and it has been much more fun than I ever thought it would. I have no idea why. I have never read these types of stories, as a genre. I have no idea who major publishers are (Harlequin?), I have no idea who luminary writers in the field are, I have no idea what the most common genre tropes are. But it has been terrific practice for writing characters, and thinking up plot problems that can be solved by sex or connection.
Why am I sharing this? Because today is January 31st, and I currently have one paying client for my Day Job (which is as a freelance Instructional Designer). All of my writing over the last year has come in the non-contiguous pockets of time when I was not busy with paid client work, and that is scheduled to change no later than Friday, February 17th. That is the last day of my current contract, and as of right now I have no paid work waiting for me when I wake up on Monday, February 20th. Given the lead time that these contracts typically need, it is highly unlikely that something materializes between now and then.
Meaning: I start my gig as a full-time author on February 20th, for an indeterminate length of time. I decided that what I’m doing first is to write (and publish) romantic fiction under a pen name. I will not be referencing it here, I will take no ownership of it here, it will not appear on any bibliography here. These stories (I have several in progress) have nothing to do with crime. But they have been (to borrow a phrase from Lawrence Block again) a wonderful apprenticeship.
Marijane Meaker (who wrote crime fiction under the pen name Vin Packer) supposedly loved pen names because she could invent a personality with each one. I see the appeal of that, and for whatever reason, the personality I channel when writing a romantic short is the personality most likely to actually, you know, finish a story. Since I want to actually finish things, here we are. I have a theory on why that is, and it has to do with the size of ideas. But we’ve wandered enough for one day, and I’ll pick up that train of thought another day.