What’s in a name anyway? Mark Twain is really Samuel Clemens. Stephen King wrote under the name Richard Bachman for a while. Lewis Carol is secretly Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Stanley Martin Lieber legally changed his name to his penname after achieving worldwide recognition as Stan Lee. But what’s wrong with my real name? Well, I guess my penname is my real name in a technical sense, but it’s not really what I go by. My friends all call me Chris. Or just Perkins. Or a bunch of other nicknames derived from the syllables thereof. But just like Spider-man, I have secretly been C William Perkins since the age of fifteen in my own little fantasy world. When I finished every last line of a new story, there was only one thing left to type before it was finished, the byline: C William Perkins. In those early days I was all about J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and it seemed pretty obvious to me that the good authors had good pennames made with initials.
I like my name, don’t get me wrong. A kid needs to have a name that can be short and casual for their friends, and long and distinguished for their professional careers and I’ve always felt Christopher has that vast potential concealed within it. Kins, Perks, or Perky (ugh), are all fun and playful, but Perkins is also the name of several established businesses (and no, I don’t just mean the restaurant). William is my middle name and my father’s name and though Christopher ain’t bad, William has that extra flare of English literary veracity that a distinguished and thoughtful philosopher-type author might have (besides everyone knows my dad’s real name is just Bill, so William was totally available). But add my fifteen year old logic about initials to the mix and you have the golden by-product of a brilliant alchemist’s secret spell: C William Perkins. The C is so stoic and confident, standing there all by itself on a rounded edge, never rolling one way or the other, but never stiff either. The organized vertical lines of William are stable and reliable. And Perkins practically winks at you as the proud P rolls through the middle consonants to smirk with that sly S at the end. Together you have a strange consummation of poetic flourish and rhetorical acumen. When you see C William Perkins on a romance, you know the love will be layered with tragedy and profound ardor. You see that same name on a comedy, and you know it will be socially subversive and full of clever wit. See that name on a mystery and you know it will be rife with unexpected twists and conniving misdirection. Slap that name on a niche steampunk-western type of science fiction sub-genre and you can literally taste the turn of the century optimistic fortitude where the last frontier to be tamed is the future. The day I pieced it all together, I knew with all my heart that one day a real flesh and blood novel would eventually sit upon someone’s bookshelf (mine at the least). Collecting dust like all the other great works of history maybe, but still. Real. I knew that name was destined to appear as black ink on leather binding. I knew that with that name I was a real writer. And I haven’t stopped since. -C
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