Pseudonyms

On March 6^th, I talked about what I’ve all written, fiction-wise.  (That post was titled Autobibliography.)  Now I’d like to talk about who I’ve all written as. 

For not having a lot of completed works of fiction under my belt, I certainly have a fair number of pen-names. 

 

Mike Snethen

All right, I suppose that technically “Mike Snethen” doesn’t qualify as a pseudonym as it’s my actual name.  But it was the byline that I started out writing stuff under. 

All my early stuff was “written by Mike Snethen”.  Two-part story in the 8^th grade school newspaper.  Six installments of an unfinished serial and a monthly column in Matrix Extracts (the newsletter of the local Doctor Who fan club).  Along with a few other odds and ends. 

Then, one day, I was musing aloud about how great it would feel to walk into a bookstore, go to the science-fiction section, and see my name on the cover of a book.  Dad was there when I was talking about this, and what he said to me is something that has always stuck with me.  Words of encouragement?  Nooooo.  Definitely not. 

What Dad said to me was, “Don’t even think that you’re going to put MY last name on the cover of some God damn outer space crap book!”  (“Outer space crap” was how my father pronounced “science fiction”.  Yeah, it’s a weird speech impediment, but growing up in my house it’s one that I got to understand pretty quickly.) 

Dad hated sci-fi with a passion that’s normally reserved for a racist’s hatred for minorities.  And because my focus as a writer was sci-fi, he never had a good thing to say about my writing.  He’d’ve most likely been much happier had I wanted to write westerns. 

(I never even tried to explain to him that I DID have an idea for a western, but it was based on the fact that the real life American Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1885, which led me to create a Native American with psychic powers as a main character.  But I CAN picture what Dad’s face would have done had he heard those near-blasphemous words coming out of my mouth.) 

Anyway, that was the day I first realized that I was going to have to come up with a pseudonym. 

S. Christian Michaels

My official pseudonym came to me a few days later when I was walking down to the local library.  As I walked, I was thinking about what I could possibly use as a pen name.  One of the first thoughts I had was to simply reverse the order of my name.  Going from Michael Patrick Snethen to S. Patrick Michaels. 

But while I liked the simplicity of just flipping the components of my real name, I have never held any love for my middle name.  Patrick had to go.  So what could I replace it with? 

As it happened, that question was in my mind as I was walking past the church.  Noticing that, I decided to try Christian in the slot, and it seemed to fit. 

I had wanted to spell it Kristian, but decided against it because it seemed too feminine.  (It’s actually the Scandinavian spelling of Christian, and is gender-neutral.  But I wouldn’t learn that until years later, when I’d already burned the pseudonym into my brain.) 

Once I had come up with it, I started using it.  My Doctor Who stuff for Matrix Extracts was suddenly credited to S. Christian Michaels.  (Which made one of the group’s members concerned that someone had ‘stolen’ my column.)  All of my story ideas migrated from intending to be written by Mike Snethen to being written by S. Christian Michaels. 

Keith Nemsen

I actually have no idea exactly where in the timeline this one falls.  But at some point I was sitting there with a pencil and a notebook, playing word games with myself.  And during that particular session, I discovered that if I rearranged the letters in “Mike Snethen” one of the possible outcomes was “Keith Nemsen”.  That sounds like a real name, right?  All of a sudden, I had a new potential pseudonym to play with. 

At first, I had no idea what I’d be using the name for, but eventually I came up with two possibilities.  The first was that he’d be my personal Richard Bachman.  The second was that he’d be my personal Kilgore Trout. 

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with those names:  Richard Bachman was an alias used by Stephen King when he wanted to write and publish more books that his publisher wanted the Stephen King byline attached to each year. 

Bachman was credited as the writer on five books before people discovered that Bachman = King.  At which point King retired the name, killing the author off.  Since then, there have been several ‘discovered’ Bachman works published.  (Completed manuscripts found in an old trunk, as the story goes.) 

Kilgore Trout, on the other hand, was a character in many of Kurt Vonnegut’s books.  Trout was a down-on-his-luck and woefully underappreciated sci-fi writer.  Most of his short stories were purchased as filler for pornographic magazines.  And Trout’s backstory varied from Vonnegut novel to Vonnegut novel. 

Kilgore Trout was named for Theodore Sturgeon, and Vonnegut famously used the character to tell stories that Vonnegut thought had interesting premises, but which he himself had no desire to actually sit down and write. 

Back before the writer’s block set in, I assumed that I’d be writing so many novels that I’d need an additional pseudonym for publication purposes, so Nemsen would make an adequate Bachman for me. 

After my writer’s block was firmly established, I had so many unwritten (and perhaps now unwritable) stories in my brain, that having Nemsen show up in a novel of mine and ‘write’ all of those ideas in short synopsis form became appealing to me. 

So which route will Nemsen take?  Up until recently, I had no idea.  But now I’ve got a project in mind that would be perfect to use the name with.  But I plan on talking more about that in a post next month sometime. 

Maestro Takatak, the Cosmic Buffalo

I had a friend named Russ Fletcher (more commonly referred to simply as The Fletch) that was active in the zine community.  He had a zine about a comic book inspired character named Slitheron that I contributed stories for (some of which were straight prose pieces, others were comic book-style collaborations with my artist friend Michael Reinsch). 

The Fletch had another zine project called StarGate (no relation to the whole SG1 mythos), that was just miscellaneous whacky stuff.  I started writing a column for that, just whatever odd topic was lodged in my brain that month.  But where the Slitheron stories were written by S. Christian Michaels, I wanted something different for my non-story related work in StarGate. 

And so I adopted the pseudonym of Maestro Takatak.  Maestro as the master of an instrument (in my case, the computer keyboard), and Takatak as the tak-a-tak-a-tak-a-tak onomatopoeia commonly assigned to typing.  (Much later on I discovered that Takatak is the name of a really disgusting sounding meat dish popular in Pakistan.) 

A couple of years after Maestro Takatak’s byline started appearing in StarGate, I ended up creating my second zine of my own (the first having been The Two-Way Sampler, a Max Headroom fanzine that lasted all of five issues) called 93.5.  It was intended to be an unanchored and basically themeless publication wherein I wrote whatever was of interest to me at the moment.  It, too, was written by Maestro Takatak. 

But this time, there was a rider to the name.  I was now Maestro Takatak, the Sonic Buffalo.  Partway through 93.5’s run I gave myself a promotion (Promotion?  Upgrade?  Evolution?  Who knows.) from Sonic to Cosmic.  And I remained Maestro Takatak the Cosmic Buffalo for a good long while. 

After a reasonably lengthy run (somewhere between 34 to 38 issues, depending on how you chose to count them), I stopped producing 93.5.  But it wasn’t long before the zine bug bit me again, and instead of restarting the old one, I created something new.  A zine entitled Look What My Wretched Brain Made Me Do. 

I did about 6 or 7 issues of that one, and then transformed it from an ink-on-paper zine into my first real attempt at blogging.  My first several attempts at blogging were under the Maestro Takatak the Cosmic Buffalo byline. 

But for my next big blog project, I was going to require a new pseudonym

Zeitgeist the Clown

The name Zeitgeist the Clown started its life off attached to a character concept I intended to appear as at a sci-fi convention.  Zeitgeist was intended to be a synthesis of clown and anti-clown, and the whole fairly complex concept just never really gelled for me. 

(I did end up using the name for a costumed clown character at a sci-fi con, but not the one I had originally intended.  Being allergic to greasepaint, my brother and I used the instructions for a duct tape bondage helmet, and using white duct tape and colored sharpies, made me a clown head to wear.  My Aunt Mary sewed me an oversized tuxedo costume, and then off I went to the convention.  Of course, once I got there the desk clerk informed me that the hotel was no longer allowing guests to wear full facemasks anywhere inside the property for security concerns.) 

But I was bound and determined to use the Zeitgeist name, and so it finally ended up becoming my ‘scene name’ when I attended a local BDSM / Kink / Fetish convention (as research during the time when I was trying to break through my writer’s block by penning erotica). 

The erotic stories didn’t really happen as I had hoped.  (Although, there was one story I forgot to mention in my “Autobibliography” post.  I wrote a short erotic story entitled “Love Letter” that was published online at the Literotica.com site.  I also published two poems there.  A limerick and a haiku.)  But I did end up with a new blog out of my research, a sex blog from the point of view of someone who was into kinky stuff, but not actually having any of the sex I was writing about. 

I eventually made over 100 posts there, most of which were long posts (like the posts here tend to be). 

Battlegorilla

When I started getting seriously back into LEGO around 2011 or 2012, I discovered the online LEGO community, and realized that I’d need a nom du brick.  I wanted a two word name whose first word ended in LE and whose second word started with GO.  Sneaking “LEGO” into the middle of my name. 

I made long lists of appropriate words, then started making combinations.  I actually wrote down Subtle Gonorrhea even though it was an obvious NO.  My personal favorite was Miniscule Godzilla, but that was just slightly too long to work as a user name on most message boards.  Eventually I settled on Battle Gorilla. 

Eventually the LEGO bug and the blogging bug collided, and I was suddenly posting entries in Battlegorilla’s LEGO Blog.  It started on Tumblr, died a horrible death not long into it’s run, and then restarted as a version two kind of thing on Blogger.  And once again, died a horrible death not long into it’s run. 

Banthalo

The most recent pseudonym was Banthalo, which started off simply enough as a username on a social media site.  (And, in case you’re curious, a Banthalo is a mythical hybrid creature that is half Bantha – fictional animal from Star Wars – and half Buffalo – real life animal from North America.)  This username then followed me to several other social media sites, including Reddit.  (I have at least a posts-worth of stuff to say about Reddit, but I’ll save that for a future installment.) 

It was actually spending many insomnia-riddled nights posting weirdness in the AskReddit forum that made me realize I needed to start blogging again.  I never bothered to tally up my wordcounts, but it certainly felt like I was writing a post’s worth of material every night. 

Miscellaneous Screennames

And I used to post on a lot of different nerd-themed forums.  One of the ones that I posted a lot on were an action figure forum, where I used the very clever name ZeroPointsOfArticulation. 

I started posting on a Fantastic Four messageboard (that was part of a larger Marvel Comics messageboard system) as The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thingamajig.  Not that anyone ever referred to me by that name.  The first guy to think my name was too long rechristened me TELBET.  Eventually even I was calling myself TELBET. 

And there were some Star Wars boards where I went by the name Nguurrrng.  That was the name of my Wookiee character in the Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG.  If you don’t think it sounds like a classic Wookiee name, that’s because I spelled it phonetically the way a Wookiee would pronounce it. 

And Last, But Not Least…

I realize that this post is getting long, so I’ll make this short.  There’s one more name I’ve been called, and although I haven’t written anything under this byline, its definitely pseudonym-based if not an actual pseudonym. 

One year for Christmas, my friend Michael Reinsch got me a present, and took very special care in writing the “To:” tag.  Who was this present officially for?  S. Buffalonian Mikatak.  A lovely fusion of the multiple names I was using at the time.