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Your Reviled Alias
The Utility of Pen Names in Postmodern Fiction
© 2014 James LaFond
OCT/7/14
Within the past month 3 writers have asked me if they should use a pen name, and one hopeful writer—of fiction no less—informed me that the ‘edgy nature’ of what she wants to write has her looking at finding ‘a less out there’ way of expressing herself. Below is an email from one of the three writers that have contacted me in response to the online pulp project Pulp Fiction Resurrection about entertaining your non-donating asses [that’s alright, I’m a slut, not a whore, so I still love you] gratis without suffering economically for it.
Dear Mr. Jim,
I would like to donate a series to your site.
But, due to the content of some of my writing—I would like to operate under an alias (only because I am interested in Social Work, and most agencies have strict guidelines for content that can be posted on any internet outlet under our names)
Sounds good Karen,
A pen name has been the choice of female authors down through the ages.
I hope you're the next Mary Shelley, only happier.
First, to my readers over 30: Do you remember reading books off the magazine rack—okay, readers over 40—and wondering how cool it would be to get paid to do what you love, namely read and write? Well, our Millennials are now looking at writing from the opposite perspective; how cruddy it would be to be unemployable because you wrote a story that some Manhattan fag hag found to be in poor taste.
So Karen—and use a pen name other than Karen as that email can be traced—if you plan on working for a public corporation, a municipality, or the state government, you need to use a pen name, even if you plan on writing Mary Poppins Flies Again, as opposed to my Mary Poppins Does Port Washington. There is no telling what will become politically incorrect. I can tell you that there is no possibility of getting this novel The Perfect Freak published commercially and that my picking a Ukrainian cabby for Randy Bracken's victim here was done 3 years before Ukrainian's became martyrs. So we cannot even predict our incorrectness a few years out, let alone decades away.
I managed a supermarket of all places, a ghetto dump where my degenerate boss used to get sodomized by drug dealers on his sister’s desk while he snorted coke. And, even as the front man for such degenerate enterprise, I held off publishing my most controversial Harm City material and fiction until I resigned. I once walked by Allen standing at his register reading my book The Logic of Steel in a majority black business in which I quote violent felons using the n-word. I walked up to him and told him not to let me see that book in the store again. I banned my own book—that has to earn me a place in some hypocrisy hall of fame! I think he was hurt that his show of interest in his boss’s other line of work was not appreciated. But losing 80 K a year for a $0.93 royalty check is not my idea of positive microeconomics.
Now that you have chosen an alias, you are still not safe from the Federales, who will not even let you snort their coke while they bend you over your sister’s desk. If you are looking to ever work for the federal government you need to do the following to protect your literary ass:
1. Only write on a computer that is offline, totally unconnected.
2. Do your other business on a non-writing device.
3. Do not network your computer with your other devices.
4. Use a misleading alias of three names or initials.
5. Find someone you trust who is not related to you to upload your work and act as the author.
6. Find a geek to let you know the least traceable form of external storage that cannot be traced to your computer like a bullet to a gun.
7. Take transfer payments in cash or barter.
8. This puts you in a position to be screwed by that person. But the feds are most certainly better endowed and less likely to use protection smaller than a surgical glove.
Still, if you are targeted they will find out that you are the author, so forget politics or corporate leadership positions.
One of the most prolific vloggers on the planet just dropped off the map a month ago. He is an anarchist who went from three videos a week to none in 4 weeks. I’m afraid to even be the first to ask the online community if they know of his fate. A friend said to me last night, "I bet some guys showed up at his door.”
Remember, we now live in a world where a Texas high school student who makes a joke to a Canadian on Facebook can be incarcerated, beaten, raped and tortured, based on the complaint of a Canadian woman.
Don’t be a jerk like me. I fully expect to be killed or incarcerated based on this website’s content. I am happy though, because based on my last serialized novel on this site, I am forever unemployable at above poverty level by any publicly traded company or government entity or contractor. I have had three readers [not the same three that are considering writing for the site] write me snail mails over the course of the past two years telling me that they like my work, wish me the best, and will try to keep up with my writing through third parties, but they could not risk having purchases or their web traffic traced to www.jameslafond.com. These were not whack jobs, but the most respectable people I knew to be my readers. And really, I’m about the smallest guy out here, am totally apolitical, only write politically incorrect fiction, book reviews and urban survival advice, and am an extraterrestrial besides! Being an online STD may get me douched by the Vaginacracy, but thanks to the endangered art of writing my odor shall hopefully survive the social organ that expels me.
‘The Infernal Wind’
author's notebook
The Criminal Perspective
eBook
the greatest lie ever sold
eBook
plantation america
eBook
search for an american spartacus
eBook
wife—
eBook
on combat
eBook
winter of a fighting life
eBook
barbarism versus civilization
eBook
cracker-boy
"Allen"     Oct 11, 2014

I'm sorry for having read your book at the place of business. The work was so unfulfilling (which improved drastically when I started throwing up freight), and my desire to learn more about what you wrote about so intense, I wanted to read it whenever I had a moment.

While I heeded your words and never brought that book back in again, I have not lost the lust for reading one bit. I still crack open a good fantasy book on breaks at my jobs.
James     Oct 11, 2014

And Allen, your cruel task master appreciated every moment of your unfulfilling toil.

Switching into self-promotional gear...

So glad to read that you are reading on some lesser tyrant's job site...and might I suggest Fruit of The Deceiver you young infidel! It and it's unholy sequel, Forty Hands of Night, are available on Amazon.

Keep up the hard work Bro.
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