I am a Brit but back in 1988 I worked and travelled as a student in the US. We rented a car and drove from the east coast to the west and back. We “did” 20+ states and after a near-miss car crash I was musing with my fellow traveller on what to do after University. I said I’d probably become an author and having passed an exit sign for Holland and Tennyson in Indiana (I think it was), I came up with the pseudonym Holland T. Ennyson just in case I fancied writing romantic fiction, it seemed to fit the Mills & Boon type style…
Anyway, with my imminent book deal (science, not rom-com, sorry), I was relaying this tale to Facebook friends and one of them came back with a virtual news clipping from the Canyon Country Zephyr (PDF), which tells an eerily familiar tale of a photographer looking for a pseudonym and picking two names off an exit sign in Indiana, Holland Tennyson. The photographer is Michael Brohm and his pen name became simply Holland Tennyson, without the capital break I created in mine. A weird coincidence or is this just an incredibly obvious way to devise a pseudonym of which I was unaware at the age of 22?
I plotted an approximate road trip route, which took us from Washington DC southwest to Memphis, Dallas, through Albuquerque, on to the Grand Canyon at Flagstaff, then through Las Vegas, Death Valley and on to San Francisco. Return trip headed (quickly) through Reno then on to Denver and Boulder, Colorado through the Rockies, speeding East back to DC with a quick dayfiller in Delaware before taking a Greyhound back to NYC and then from JFK back to LHR…
Meanwhile, having seen Black Eyed Peas musician will.i.am (real name: William James Adams, Jr.) in action on the BBC singing scam The Voice, who is also some kind of ambassador/advisor for Intel, I’m toying with the idea, not of calling myself Holland, but of rebranding as Dav:ID, what do you think?