Now many a young writer will attest to the difficulties of slogging away in hum drum offices re-writing press releases or just simply making up plausible sounding news. Others toil away in porous garrets pondering over plot lines and leit motifs taking breaks only to look at porn on their neighbours wireless network. Behind the enthusiasm and dreams of doing multi-million dollar publishing deals lies the realisation, no the desperation, that one lives like that tree that fell in the forest; completely unheard of.
One way to circumvent obscurity is to dabble in a litte bit of duplicity - adopt and adapt a famous writer’s name. This idea came to me when I was reading some industry fodder announcement about Thoby Young – “not to be confused with Toby Young, the much-liked polemical writer(sic)”. Anyway this Thoby with a ‘h’ – (is he generally not liked for his moderate infused writing?) made me think. How much more authoritative would any of my several million manuscripts be if under the title appeared the name Samuel Beckett or Anton Chekov or Harry Potter? Easy as that.
I have posted off my first draft of a wonderful light-hearted tale of an Albanian Albino who overcomes his fear of throwing things to become an Olympic hammer-thrower and marry his childhood sweetheart – who is still a child – as she has some rare disease which causes her to be forever nine-years-old. And my new pen name – it had to be Joyce, Jammes Joyce – not to be confused with the largely unread and repressed Dubliner who could have a done with god damn sub editor.
Tags: James Joyce, Jammes Joyce, Thobi Young, Toby Young, writing
