My username was developed over a long period of time with a few different alterations. When I was younger, I wanted to be a horror writer. (I still do). I didn't want to necessarily hide my identity but my real name is hard to pronounce and I wanted to kind of surprise people with it. What I mean by that is, I wanted to get something published, and then kind of joke around with my friends like "yeah I wrote that" and then slowly make them realize it was actually me.
So I had to come up with a pen name.
I started playing with different names. I think when I was young I was under the impression that I was going to try to be some like serious, macabre horror writer so I wanted the name to pay tribute to people from horror's past. So, I started thinking of ones that may work.
I wrote a few stories under one name that preceded Herbert Holmes, I believe it was Herbert Doyle. Herbert was taken from Dr. Herbert West, the doctor of H.P. Lovecraft's Reanimator. I absolutely love the Reanimator story and for some reason Herbert just kind of stuck. It was also somewhat of a nod to Lovecraft- but only his character and writing- not him as a person. In case you didn't know, as amazing an author as he was; Lovecraft was a piece of shit.
I don't fully remember where Doyle came from. I believe it was from "Tommy Doyle" of John Carpenter's Halloween. Halloween is my all time favorite movie franchise series and without a doubt my favorite day of the year. It's just like.. my life.
Anyways at some point I got bored with the name. I didn't like it as much as I originally had. I may have just entirely forgotten about it as well, because as I'm looking through my stuff Herbert Doyle went to Herbert Holmes without any transition and after a period of time I hadn't written anything for awhile.
I kind of became proud of Herbert Holmes. Holmes was derived from the name of America's first serial killer, H.H. Holmes. The first H stood for Herman, but that was lesser known, so it just happened to fit together so perfectly that it just kind of made me smile a little bit. My real name's Erik, haha.
Anyways, I'm not as scary as I sound. I just like to write about dark and weird things so it seemed fitting to have an appropriate name to go with it. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about it, haha!
Cheers! :)