Thanks for the fish...

Fewer than two years after I began writing, this individual is quitting - or at least this named individual is quitting. I have decided to go down the pseudonym route so well trodden by others.

Not only one pseudonym either. I have created 3 for different genres and will be submitting my first story as XXXXXXXX XXXXXX (you didn't think I'd be revealing the one I'll first be using, did you?) in the new year.

Authors take on pseudonyms for a whole raft of reasons. They may have crazy friends and family who wouldn't understand their writing spicy erotica, perhaps they're well known in some other field or have written already in another genre. You can't imagine J K Rowling not taking on a pseudonym if she decided to dip her toes into war novels.

I believe it's going to be enormously liberating writing as "someone else"...I confess to being childishly excited about the whole process, so much so that I question why it took 18 months to reach this point.

Now, obviously I will lose the publishing record of Mr. NC but that doesn't bother me. One of the reasons for this move is that I am going to start submitting to higher markets in 2011. I will undoubtedly fail in that venture but it's the only way to improve. Many of the stories I've had published so far are, to be frank, not things I'm proud of, mainly due to the markets they were subbed to. Others, though, are fine pieces of storytelling. I will still have those stories. They'll never cease to exist, cease to have been written by me.

I will update this blog if I have anything else "out there" accepted but apart from that, this is the end of the line for this blog.