Introducing Joss Korvus

If you are brave enough and have time enough to trawl through the back catalog of blogs on this site, sometime around Novemberish of 2011, you will find a discussion on the pros and cons of this author using a pen name. This author's real name being John Potter. All that time ago in 2011, I decided I needed all the advantage I could get. If the name Potter on my book caught peoples attention, then why not.

The trouble is, as I gear up to publish two books this year (2014), I need a recognisable and easy to find brand name. If you type John Potter to any search engine you will scroll through pages and pages of architects, musicians and singers, professors, war veterans, American footballers and a few inventors, long before you find yours truly. While a popular book will always be easy to find by title - type in Chasing Innocence and you will see what I mean - finding other books by the same author requires finding the author. Which means John Potter isn't cutting it.

So it's time for Potter to be branded. In a world full of mingling cultures and names, you might imagine finding a unique name is difficult. It is, and I won't bore you with the protracted details and research it took finding one.

Eventually I found the best way to create a good pen name is not to use an actual name. For instance another author with the last name of Potter came up with Ali Knight, which is a firstname and a noun seldom used in names.

My grandmother, on my father's side, had the maiden name of Crow, which I have always liked and is one of the reasons this site and my publishing company are called Creative Crow. I couldn't use Crow itself as a pen name because it is a very popular comic and movie brand. Fortunately I was rescued by a fellow writing buddy, who suggested I use the name Corvus, the name given to the wider crow genus. I loved that idea and found very little correlation to any popular myth, media or naming convention outside of the Crow world. I chose the firstname of Joss to compliment Corvus because Joss is also very rare and not coincidentally the firstname of my favourite writer - Joss Whedon. Paired with Joss, Corvus didn't quite work on the printed page, so it was amended to Korvus and in the process became more masculine and thriller authory, I believe.

So now we come to style. The real John Potter is a nice guy, a little quiet in new company, a little too passionate about knowledge, funny given a following wind or two pints of guinness and completely devoid of style. The real John Potter always dresses like he got up late, buys for comfort and doesn't have Gaiman's looks, charisma or intellect to make that look cool. So Joss Korvus would need to be a little different. Joss is afterall a brand. He is going to be stylish. Thank goodness he only exists as a name on book covers and as a profile picture here and there on the web.

Imagine neatly trimmed hair, a shorter beard,
different facial features and squint.
Joss Korvus will be wearing a white shirt.

Joss Korvus is a man who wears his hair short (much like mine except neatly trimmed), is rarely found wearing anything other than cowboy boots, fitted jeans, white shirts and dark jackets. He has a simple suaveness about him. An easy style and a charming smile.

Photos of Joss Korvus will follow, just as soon as I've got my hair cut, bought a suit and worked a little on the smile.

Yeah, and don't talk to me about the pitfalls of living an alter ego's life. I've read the Dark Half you know. I'm in control.

To be continued...

NaNoWriMo - The Handyman Day 30

Potter survived with a little
mad look in 'is eyes

It is done. November is over. In the last 30 days my hair has grown unreasonably long, as did the hair on my face - at unreasonably strange angles too. Some of the summer lustre has disappeared from my skin - now paler. And I do believe there might be a bag or two more under my eyes. Maybe that's just from the count of my years and not just 30 days in November.

NaNoWriMo has at times felt a little like trying to run on ice. It has been impossibly, dangerously fast (god it feels good writing adverbs and adjectives) and at others, like I was getting nowhere.

Above all I entered the month hoping to learn a little more about the kind of writing process that works for me. As ever these things often end up revealing the obvious. I discovered writing isn't about hitting a daily count or monthly targets. It is about giving yourself time to write every day, even if that time is then spent researching the obscure and arcane. It is about finding some way of progressing the story each day even if it's in building the detail of the world and not the word for word. I learned writing is about being imaginatively fearless, believing in what it takes for you as an individual to write the best story and not worrying about others or hitting those targets. I learned I can write upwards of 2k in a day with a full section of the story plotted in my head. That it sometimes takes me two or three days of no words and lots of pondering to get to that point. It is more efficient for me to take these days of no words rather than writing 6k of words because I need something on the page to hit a target, only to later find the story doesn't need those words. Or worse being blind enough to justify keeping them simply because I wrote them.

It feels like I have tried everything this last year in learning the best method for my writing, with the irony being that I've come full circle to the process I started with while writing Chasing Innocence. I do know that the initial translation of mental imagery to the page is the part I struggle the hardest with.

For the baying millions waiting to hear my final count for NaNoWriMo of November 2013 of the common era - it is 23,433 - the most words I've ever been aware of writing in a single calendar month.

I will be continuing with The Handyman now to completion and will be posting progress through this blog, if only revealing the word count infrequently.

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