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A very strange thing happened recently: Twisted Tales, my collection of short stories, started to sell well. It is strange because, although I did not formally retire the book in January, I have not advertised or promoted it since then. Yet in one day, it sold over thirty copies in the U.S. and one in Vietnam. I can only attribute this renewed interest to the organisers of National Writing Day, who shared part of the first story in the book on Twitter, on 21st June this year. They described its opening descriptive passage as, ‘utterly stunning’. Spurred on by this, I used the first story from the collection, Sacrifice, a ghostly tale with a twist, for my first reading at the Coleford Festival of Words at the beginning of July. I suppose the lesson is that we should never underestimate the power of social media, as several politicians discovered to their cost during the recent General Election. I enjoyed revisiting my ‘grown up’ stories so much, that I have decided to concentrate my efforts on finishing my historical, conspiracy theory novel about the last days of Oliver Cromwell. Apart from my usual reluctance to engage in the intensive research required to write about any period of history, I encountered a new difficulty: the need for a pen name. I remember my fear when Peter Capaldi was appointed as the twelfth Doctor, was that innocent children would google him, and accidentally stumble across one of his Malcolm Tucker tirades from ‘In the Thick of It’ Although I do not intend to include anything similar in Chariot of the Sun, my children’s stories have a steady and loyal following and I would not want to endanger that. I decided, therefore that a pseudonym, will be needed … but which one? Suggestions from members of my family ranged from a distant ancestor, Enoch Homer who, to put it mildly, was a bit of a bad lad, to the flowery, Viola Glabella and the ‘punny’ Sue Edge! In the end, I opted for an anagram of my surname, plus a female name beginning with the same initial as mine, and settled on Hannah More. Applying the ‘Google test’ - no-one wants a nom de plume that is the same as an axe murderer, so I thought it best to check - I found this: Hannah More (2 February 1745 – 7 September 1833) was an English writer and philanthropist. She can be said to have made three reputations in the course of her long life: as a poet and playwright in the circle of Johnson, Reynolds and Garrick, as a writer on moral and religious subjects, and as a practical philanthropist. Source: Wikipedia That will do nicely, thank you!