First things first. If you haven’t signed up for our mailing list and gotten your free copies of our Post Mortem stories, “Getting Back” and “Brothers,” why not do it right now? Go ahead … I’ll wait.

Okay, you’re back. All signed up for the list? Got the stories? Good.

The release of “Getting Back” to list members marks a first for me: the first time I’m officially revealing that I was P.W. Sinclair, under whose name that story appeared in Post Mortem. Now, I understand this isn’t exactly earthshaking news. It’s not as if there were hundreds of people, or even dozens, or (let’s be honest) even one, spending sleepless nights wondering about P.W. Sinclair’s true identity. But I still want to explain who P.W. was and how he came to be.

I invented P.W. many years ago, when I was publishing my magazine, Horrorstruck. He was born of necessity. From the very first days of the magazine, I had wanted to conclude each issue with a lighthearted backpage column – not humor, necessarily, but something a little lighter and fluffier for loyal readers who had just worked their way through 50 or 60 pages of horror analysis, news, critiques, and articles about the hardships of being a freelance writer. The problem was, I couldn’t find anyone willing to take on the task. I had plenty of people who wanted to write for me, but they all wanted to be Tom Monteleone, whose MAFIA columns were making waves and drawing lots of attention. I tried to explain. I said, “I already have a Tom Monteleone in the magazine, and as luck would have it, he’s not just a Tom Monteleone, he’s the Tom Monteleone. I don’t need another one.” To no avail. Everyone wanted to be the next disseminator of controversial opinions. Nobody wanted to write a few hundred words of goofiness to wrap up each issue of the magazine.

So I did it myself.

As for the decision to use a pseudonym … I honestly didn’t think about it very much. I just did it. Part of it, I suppose, was wanting to avoid yet another page of Paul F. Olson in a magazine that already had a lot of Paul F. Olson. Part of it may have been embarrassment or self-protection: wanting to hide behind another identity in case my attempts at humor fell flat, as they sometimes (often?) did.

I chose the name quickly and easily. In an early unpublished novel, written just after high school, I had a character named Louis St. Onge, a DJ who went by the radio name Pat Sinclair. I thought about that novel one day, and decided it would be fun to fall back on that particular character – an inside joke that was so far inside I was the only person in the world to know about it. For some reason, “Pat” seemed a little too definitive for Horrorstruck, so I added a bit of mystery by using initials instead, and P.W. Sinclair was born.

To be continued …