If you haven’t read part one yet, scroll down. Then come back up here for the rest.
P.W. Sinclair’s Horrorstruck columns never drew many comments, but there were a few kind words here and there, which was nice. I had never expected those backpage essays to generate lots of attention. They were there to do a job, to be a little palate cleanser after a heavy meal, and at that I guess they mostly succeeded.
In the beginning, there were only three people who knew that I was P.W. I knew, of course. So did my wife. So did Dave Silva. But what happened as time went by? Did anyone else ever catch on? To the best of my knowledge, just one person – a good friend and Horrorstruck columnist (Hi, Shelia!) who revealed her suspicions in a brief note. “It’s funny how P.W. Sinclair sounds a lot like you do in your letters,” she wrote. And then the coup de grace: “I wonder what P.W. stands for? Pseudonymous Writer, perhaps?”
I was impressed with her deduction skills and her sense of humor. Maybe she should have been writing the magazine’s back page. I was also amused that she’d given me credit for being more clever than I was. I liked the idea of P.W. standing for “Pseudonymous Writer,” but hadn’t been sharp enough to think of it myself. For all I knew, the initials could have stood for Pendergast Wainwright or Psychological Warrior or Piggly Wiggly.
P.W. might have vanished along with Horrorstruck if I hadn’t made the unusual decision to use the penname on “Getting Back,” my contribution to the Post Mortem anthology that Dave and I were putting together. To this day, I can’t say with any real certainty why I did that. I was really proud of the story, and still am satisfied with it today, so it’s not as if I was trying to hide the authorship of a substandard work. Still, there was almost certainly a degree of hiding involved, since I was feeling a bit shy about putting my name on the cover of the book and on one of the longest stories inside. I also enjoyed the thought of people wondering who P.W. Sinclair was – the only writer in the anthology who didn’t come with any sort of “name” or reputation. And finally, there was some ego involved. At the time, my career was starting to take off, and I think I decided, way back in some dark recess of my mind, that it might be helpful some day to have a pseudonym ready to go, with an established name and a list of credits, all set to use when I had two stories appearing in the same issue of a magazine or four new books coming out in the same month. I was, in effect, trying to give P.W. a leg up in the business while preparing for my own eventual superstardom. I know. Go ahead. Laugh now. It’s all right.
As it turned out, the name P.W. Sinclair never appeared on another piece of writing. After Post Mortem came out, he simply disappeared from the radar screen, vanishing just as quickly as he’d been born on that day I needed a Horrorstruck column and couldn’t find anyone to write it.
If I had it to do over again, I’m sure I’d put my real name on “Getting Back.” If the story is ever republished somewhere, I will use my real name. In the meantime, subscribers to our mailing list will find both names on the tale. It seems only fitting. It seems fair. I’m happy to share credit with P.W. one last time, thanking him for the thankless services he provided me, and I hope you’ll think of him kindly as you read his words.