Meeting my pseudonym

I have been reading about Lewis Carroll recently. In particular, I have been reading about the fact that his real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and that he first adopted his nom de plume when he was 21.

Reading about this reminded me of my own pseudonym, and the time that I met him.

When I was about 17, I chose the name "Robert Kane" to be my pseudonym, if ever I needed to give a false name, either when publishing classic children's literature or when apprehended by the police. I chose this name because I reckoned it would be easy to remember. The reason for this is that my parents initially planned on calling me Robert (my uncle Robert apparently talked them out of it, so that my name is now Dónall Eoin Roibeard McCann). As for the name "Kane", it is close enough to McCann to be easily remembered (and, in fact, I have read in more than one place that it is an anglicised derivation of McCann, although I can't attest to the veracity of this claim).

So, for a few years, I used this name when I needed a convenient pseudonym. I never used it as a fake name for the police, but I did write a few things here and there that were attributed to Robert Kane.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was studying for a year in Valencia, Spain, and Robert Kane began posting to the forum used by my university ultimate frisbee team in Dublin! As it turned out, one of the new players that year was actually called Robert Kane (also known as Blonde Rob) and was just as surprised as I was that somebody else was using his name.

Since then, I haven't used it as a pseudonym, but I have failed to come up with an alternative that I find suitably fitting and similarly easy to remember.

I'm sure C.L. Dodgson never had the problem of accidentally bumping into Lewis Carroll...