This book made me consider a pen name for my pen name.
I already have a pen name. This book made me consider a pen name for my pen name. We’ll get to that.
In my last post I mentioned, somewhat casually, that I had a manuscript I was thinking about publishing under a different name so that “certain people in my life” couldn’t find it. I called it “the spicy one.” I made a little joke. I moved on.
Several of you asked follow-up questions. Hi. This is your fault.
First, some context that makes this funnier: Harlo Malone is already a pen name. People know that. It’s not a secret so much as a separation, a writing self I’ve built deliberately, one that has its own Substack and its own Threads and its own readers who found me specifically because they wanted to read what I write. I like Harlo. Harlo is doing okay.
The Last Knight made me consider going further underground. A pen name for the pen name. A whole new identity, unknown and untraceable, under which I could publish the thing I actually wrote without anyone I know in real life ever connecting it to me. I spent real time on this plan. It is, in retrospect, a completely unhinged response to finishing a book.
The problem is not the readers who follow Harlo. The problem is everyone else who followed me before Harlo existed.
Here’s the shape of it: the people on Threads, who found me as a writer and chose to sta, they’re fine. They know what they signed up for. It’s the Facebook and Instagram followers, the ones who knew me first as a person and follow my writing the way you follow a friend’s hobby: supportively, occasionally, without necessarily wanting to read anything that would make eye contact at Christmas feel complicated.
My mother is on Facebook. My college friends are on Instagram. There is a coworker from three jobs ago who I have never unfollowed out of sheer social inertia, which is its own problem I’ll address eventually. When I post something here, I share it there, and then everyone who knew me before I was a writer gets to read it too.
This is fine when I’m writing about writing sprints. It is less fine when the book in question involves a homicide detective returning to New Orleans, a vampire turned without her consent, explicit content that is specific and honest and very much intended and two women I love completely working out what it means to become something they didn’t choose.
That last part is the real problem, actually. Not the explicit content, though that’s in there and I stand by it. It’s that I care about these characters more than is comfortable, more than I can easily explain to someone who knows me as a person first and a writer second. The heat in this book exists because the story requires intimacy to mean something. Victoria and Nicola are working through a genuinely thorny question about consent and desire and what’s real when magic is involved, and none of that works if I keep them at arm’s length. So I didn’t. And now it’s visible how much I didn’t, and that’s the exposure I wasn’t entirely prepared for.
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Since the sprint, things have gotten more complicated rather than less. A scene I wrote at 3am shifted what the book is actually about in ways I’m still catching up to. Some things in my own life have been throwing the themes into uncomfortable relief. And I’ve been living with the knowledge that I told several hundred people this book exists, which means I’ve created accountability for myself entirely by accident — not a strategy I would recommend, but apparently one I keep using.
The second pen name idea died the way bad plans usually do: I thought it through to the end. It would mean maintaining a separate identity indefinitely, treating the work as something to be hidden, and deciding that the most honest writing I’ve done is also the writing I’m least willing to stand behind. That’s not a line I want to draw. I’ve written things smaller than they wanted to be. I know what that costs, and what it looks like when it’s done — like something that almost got there.
The Last Knight is not almost. So Harlo is finishing it, and Harlo is publishing it, and the Facebook followers are going to have to decide for themselves whether to keep reading.
I’m not brave yet. I’m just further along than I was, which is honestly how bravery works, not a switch you flip but a direction you keep choosing, one slightly-too-honest Substack post at a time.
And if you’re one of the people I specifically hoped would close the tab at the beginning of this… well. Now you know. Harlo did this. I hope the turkey isn’t too dry this year.
Have you ever written something that made you want to invent a whole new identity just to publish it? Comments are open. I’m apparently in the business of making things difficult for myself and I’d love the company.
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