The Convoluted History Of My Penname

It started with a science fiction book idea with the working title “Squadron 289”. The book never got past the first chapter to this point in time. Pico was created as a sassy hot-tempered female starfighter pilot. I gave her the family name Triano because it rolled off the tongue. Her name was short for Piccolo, a name given her by her father. She hates it and won’t let anyone call her that.  She was a long black-haired sharp-tongued beauty. The book got shelved but her character took on a life of her own.

While I was still kicking the story around in my head, my children discovered online role-playing games: Specifically Runescape. I started playing with them in an effort to kill two birds with one stone. Pico seemed well suited to the role of discovering what kind of people my kids would be dealing with especially my daughter. This also would give me a chance to interact as one of the book characters I created theoretically improving my writing while screwing around online. Incidentally I did create three other characters from that story on Runescape for the same purpose. Whether it really taught me anything is a matter of debate.

Still not done with her. I found work online writing forum content and needed both male and female pseudonyms to maximize my earning potential on the site. Pico quickly filled the role again. To stay in character I wrote up a fictional contemporary profile for her. I kept her basic appearance and personality and gave her a hometown. As per her profile she worked in a call centre (poor thing) and lived in Pierrefonds, Quebec. She remained drop dead gorgeous but had a very unfortunate looking birthmark high on her right calf, which looked like something unsavoury dropped out of her shorts. Her full name became Piccolo Viola Triano, a play on pvt being short for private.

For some reason people react more positively to this particular name than any other pseudonym I’ve written under over the years (and there have been many). I do not understand why. I’m not one to fight something that just plain works and so when joining www.writing.com Pico Triano officially became my penname.

Pico is actually a masculine name but it doesn’t really matter. I am in fact a man but I don’t have any qualms about writing from either perspective. My favourite avatar shows Pico in her original incarnation with a chameleon tattooed on her shoulder. I think as a writer I need to be a bit of a chameleon to get inside the heads of the many characters that I need to create to make stories come alive. 

My first novel gets released on Saturday. I’ll begin trumpeting the news all over Facebook and anywhere else I can think of late that evening. I hope my readers like my work. It’s been an exciting wild ride to this point.