Seb
asked
Jason Pargin:
Hey Jason! I recently read What the Hell Did I Just Read? and was impressed by your afterword. The message you give is essential and the tone is perfect 🙇 I'm wondering now if you decided to reveal your real name on your book covers in order to detach David Wong from reality some more and confine him to fiction only, or is it simply coincidental?
Jason Pargin
Well I never wanted people to think "David Wong" was the actual name of the author, the cover flap and "about the author" section always had my real name in there, going back to the JDATE hardcover (same with my online writing, my real name was always displayed at the end and in my social media profiles, going back to 2007 or so).
With the first book, putting the protagonist's name on the cover was just supposed to be a continuation of the bit I had been doing online, where my writing was framed as the work of a drunken, angry, mentally unwell small town white guy who had chosen that as an alias because he had enemies who were trying to track him (something he explains at the beginning of the first book, which establishes him to the reader as something of an idiot as that is a terrible alias for him). It was a bit I was borrowing from Lemony Snicket, where author Daniel Handler portrayed his books as having been written by one of the shady characters in the book, and that character was so eccentric and ridiculous that you'd never think it was a real person. It's supposed to add some flavor to think everything you're reading came from the hand of this weirdo.
But of course as my writing got more popular, not everyone was going to be aware of that context (I came up with the pseudonym when my work was being read by less than a hundred people) and it really doesn't make sense when writing other books that don't feature the character. So in retrospect I should have just had my real name on there from the beginning.
With the first book, putting the protagonist's name on the cover was just supposed to be a continuation of the bit I had been doing online, where my writing was framed as the work of a drunken, angry, mentally unwell small town white guy who had chosen that as an alias because he had enemies who were trying to track him (something he explains at the beginning of the first book, which establishes him to the reader as something of an idiot as that is a terrible alias for him). It was a bit I was borrowing from Lemony Snicket, where author Daniel Handler portrayed his books as having been written by one of the shady characters in the book, and that character was so eccentric and ridiculous that you'd never think it was a real person. It's supposed to add some flavor to think everything you're reading came from the hand of this weirdo.
But of course as my writing got more popular, not everyone was going to be aware of that context (I came up with the pseudonym when my work was being read by less than a hundred people) and it really doesn't make sense when writing other books that don't feature the character. So in retrospect I should have just had my real name on there from the beginning.
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