A Bit About Me
I’m
a native of North Carolina and reside near the Research Triangle area.
My varied life experience allows me to bring a unique and richly
textured background to my writing and gives me some rich resources to
draw upon when creating a new book or short story. Those experiences
include serving as a pastor, working for many years as a security
officer, training and working as a 911 dispatcher, and working for
several years at a small police department as a records clerk. Over the
years, I have also worked in various factories, textile mills,
warehouses, and even sales jobs. That’s a lot of living to draw
from.
The first novel of mine to be published was ‘Feramonger’ in
2000. It was the first one published, but actually, the third one I
wrote. Before that, I wrote ‘Bone Ugly Curse,’ my second
novel. It took many years before it was finally published in 2018. I
published other books in between. My first novel is yet to be
published; I can’t say when or even if it ever will be.
I’ve written and published other books both fiction
and nonfiction, and I’m working on several new projects.
The reason I publish fiction under my full name is due to something that happened a few years back.
Shakespeare once asked, ‘What’s in a name?’
Evidently, quite a bit. In writing and publishing a writer’s name
is his or her ‘name brand’ or trademark so to speak.
It’s something worth protecting.
As far as I know, I’m the first to publish fiction using the name
Walter Lane. This goes back to 2000 with the publication of my novel
‘Fearmonger’ in paperback. Some few years ago, I came
across someone else who had published on Kindle using the name Walter
Lane. To my horror, the books he (or she) published were so atrociously
bad as to be literally unreadable gibberish. They should never have
been published.
I’ll give a brief sample. I couldn’t cut and paste from the
Kindle sample pages but I could from the book blurb for the title
‘Coldfire In The Elegy.’ The writing quality of the sample
chapter was on the same level as the book blurb. This was true for the
other books by this author as well:
‘Here at the Wide Room you can expect many affairs. Want to take
back once again the lifeless? Really does your youngster should find
out an essential lesson? Need to travel into a fairy account or revisit
yesteryear? Tell you the best thing and we will remember to give your
desire! But, you need to remember that everything is sold with a
price...’
Would you want your name associated with that?
When I chose to use Kindle, I was under the impression they had some
minimum standard of quality for publication. I hope that turns out to
be true. Poor writing hurts the perceived quality of all self-published
books. How Kindle allowed these awful books to be published, I have no
idea. And I’m not saying this to be mean just to be clear. My
name was on those books and I’m sure you can appreciate how
frustrating it was for me to see my name on them. I contacted Amazon
about this but got a sweet, gentle brush off. In their email, they said
anyone can publish using whatever name they want. This person had no
contact information that I could find so I couldn’t contact them
about it. Google and Amazon searches would have revealed the name
Walter Lane was already in use. I did that when I first published.
Since there was nothing I could do, and I didn’t want to be
associated with these terrible books, I decided to alter my publishing
name to include my middle name. I’ve gotten used to it now and
think of myself writing as Walter Eugene Lane. I altered my books to
display that name.
After several months the books were taken down. I was glad for that.
But I had already changed the name on all my books so I stayed with
using my full name. Maybe it was all for the best; I don’t know.
There are lots of people publishing these days and perhaps more people
will publish under the name Walter Lane. Who knows? So maybe it was a
good thing to make my name a little more distinguishable. But it was
frustrating having to step away from the name I’ve used all my
life and see somebody else, especially someone who can’t even
compose a decent sentence, use it. If it was some bright new talent
coming along, I wouldn’t have minded so much, but this guy? It
really galled me.
It’s my belief these books were translated, very badly, from an
Asian language by computer and the author just picked a western
sounding name that, unfortunately, turned out to be mine. I’m
certain that no one copied my name on purpose. My ego isn’t that
inflated. It was, it seems, an unfortunate coincidence. But I have
wondered why he used the name, Walter. It’s an old-fashioned
name, isn’t it? It seems like the person would have used
something more contemporary. When I first started writing, I considered
using a pen name. I did a search and found out the name I was
considering was the real name of another writer. After that, I gave up
the idea of a pen name. So I wrote as Walter Lane and then as Walter
Eugene Lane. Me at last.