I suppose you’ve already worked out that Alex Butler is my pen name, or I wouldn’t be writing this blog.
I use a pen name so that I can keep my life and my writing life separate from each other. If I can sit down and be Alex Butler when I want to write then everything in my real life becomes white noise and I can kind of ignore it all.
So where did Alex Butler come from? It’s a bit of a strange story about how I actually got the name and then how it became my pen name.
During school my friends and I used to cosplay a lot. I had one of my costumes at school for a convention that weekend and one of my friends got at my wig. One of the teachers came by while she was wearing it and thought she was a new guy in our class. We made a joke out of it after that and she spent the rest of the day wearing the wig trying to convince the school she was a guy.
Not long after that my friends and I created male versions of ourselves, and my male side became Alex Butler. The name sort of came to me in a sort of random way like everything else that seems to happen to me. I’ve always loved the name Alex, and at the time we were into Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler). From there our male sides began to get their own personalities, I wrote stories involving them, we drew pictures, made them Facebook pages. They became almost real people to us, and as more and more of our friends got versions of themselves as the opposite gender it became even bigger.
After we graduated I slowly stopped calling Alex my male self and instead Alex became my muse, I’ve always considered my muse to be a second half of me. When I started to get really into my writing again I found it hard to actually sit down and write, so I started telling myself whenever I sat down at my desk Alex would come out and write, and my other self would ‘sleep’. Alex to me is always going to be a male simply because that's how he started.
So I write under a pen name, because to me when I’m writing I’m Alex, and it doesn’t seem right to use my real name, feels sort of like I’m stealing from someone else.
Alex Butler