The Mystery of Clancy Steadwell: Writing, Anonymity, and the Anti-Brand Approach

A pseudonymous author navigates fiction, Substack, and the balance between privacy and creative freedom.

Clancy Steadwell is the mustachioed pseudonym of a fiction author. Clancy's Substack is primarily featured on Substack, a mix of literary essays, reviews, and contemporary lit-fic short stories. He’s appeared in the Substack Post and the 2024 Substack Featured. He recently published a novel, the big T: a novel, and a

Clancy, welcome:

[CS] Hey Vince! Thanks for having me.

[VW] So, you are the first pseudonym I’ve ever interviewed, which intrigues me. In a world where authors are almost required to cultivate a “brand,” you’ve created a nearly anti-brand. What led to this decision, and when did you adopt Clancy Steadwell?

[CS] Hmm, great question. Well, sometimes I deeply regret it. Because you’re right, of course: we’re expected to cultivate a ‘brand’. The people who do this best do it as authentically as possible, and, honestly, the reason I decided on the pseudonym is because I can’t really do that. I can’t allow my real life to intermesh with the digital. I don’t know if it’s a psychological block or what, but if I do, I feel like some part of myself is being stolen and mishandled, like I’m kinda swapping my soul out for something else, a kind of Faustian bargain. I think you said it best: ‘anti-brand’. My brand is not being a personal brand. I’m a character, an entity who writes fiction, and I prefer it that way.

[VW] I imagine it has to be freeing. You can be more edgy. You don’t have to worry about mom or your friends reading a story or an observation and giving you hell about it.

[CS] Haha, it’s funny because I think a lot of online anonymity is correlated with troll-ism and edginess, but I don’t really see myself that way at all. In a way, I don’t think I’m edgy enough, and there are a lot of folks who won’t forgive me for that. But you nailed it on the mom and friends thing. Not that they’d give me hell, but I don’t want them knowing about it. In real life, only my significant other knows about and reads PNP, basically only because it’d be impossible to hide it from them. I don’t want people in real life thinking I’m the ‘writer guy’. I’m not sure why; it just feels too personal to share. In case you can’t tell, I’m very private.

[VW] Has there been a moment when you thought, ‘Maybe I should put my own self out there,’ or have you considered releasing any works under your own name?

[CS] Definitely, it’s a temptation I face all the time. The biggest is actually just to start a totally separate non-fiction Substack under my real name and write essays and stuff there and then, as soon as it becomes more popular than Clancy Steadwell (wouldn’t take long, I like to think), just unveil the whole thing as CS all along. I’ve also contemplated going Live with like a mask of some kind, like a Daft Punk kinda thing. Ultimately, though, I think I am protecting myself from my own narcissism by doing things incognito. I couldn’t handle any kind of attention on my real self. So when I started this whole thing, it was definitely a pre-emptive sort of decision, like ‘I better go at this anonymously in case it’s successful and I lose my head’.

[VW] Do you think there is a risk for overexposure or a tendency for authors to tie their own value to their name, so that when a work doesn’t get many purchases or reads, the author doesn’t feel as valued?

[CS] Yes. In a way, my pseudonym is an act of cowardice; or at least, that’s how it will be seen by many. It’s not me that they dislike. It’s not my writing. It’s Clancy Steadwell’s. So while I don’t get to experience the ‘highs’ of validation, I also don’t experience the lows, and this is to, once again, protect me from myself. Are you my therapist? I think we are really breaking ground here.

[VW] I met you through Substack, where you have cultivated quite a following. What drew you to Substack, and why do you like the platform?

[CS] I’ve said something like this before but the years before I got on Substack I had been imagining an application like it and thinking I could be really successful writing there, wishing it existed. Then it turned out it existed all along. My biggest regret is probably not finding Substack earlier. I’m not sure how I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have been successful at all until Notes, though. I’m a writer, and Notes is a community of other writers. I connect well with other writers. That’s why I like it.

[VW] You’ve even published your novel the big T, on the platform. Why there and not through Draft2Digital, Kindle, or other platforms?

[CS] Simple answer is that I just don’t really care to know those other platforms, and my audience is mostly exclusive on Substack anyway. I wanted to try and break new ground, be at the frontier of something, do something different. I have this really annoying habit of going against the grain and trends and stuff, which amounts to self-sabotage in most instances. I’ll get it right someday.

[VW] You also were included in a collection of short stories “The Midnight Vault,” which is ‘an expansive anthology featuring 29 mesmerizing tales that span the genres of science fiction, horror, and the unknown.’ Tell me about that process.

[CS] ‘The Midnight Vault’ was mostly an effort by J. Curtis and Sean Thomas Macdonald, along with Shane Bzdok. They put the whole thing together, scheduled everything, approached the writers. It was fucking amazing. What this community can achieve is breathtaking. I contributed but one small story, The Halcyonium, which I had great fun writing.

[VW] What is your writing process for your short stories? Do you stick to a formula or structure or discover the story as you go?

[CS] I use Obsidian for notetaking and have a big ‘vault’ of story ideas, some of which are sort of half-finished, some not even close to being so. I get ideas like anyone else does: from living. I am someone who does like a rough structure or outline of a story before I write. I’m a very ‘story-driven’ or maybe ‘plot-centric’ writer, so I need to know the beginning, middle, and end before I start writing something. I’ve been trying to write a lot more recently, but I feel like it’s kind of diluted my quality, so I’m trying to take a breath and let ideas more fully foment before publishing. That involves a lot of passive sort of meditations on the rough ideas while I run, do the dishes, rake leaves, etc., in which the story becomes more fully realized and some of the more important sentences get written in my head and really stick. This is how I know something is worth sitting down at the computer for and getting it out.

[VW] What’s next?

[CS] I have an idea for a novella, which I’d like to publish physically in the next year (if I can find the time to write it), along with a physical collection of my short stories from Substack. We’ll see how the physical edition of the big T does. Planning on that being around maybe next month. I have some further plans for that which I’ll elaborate on in my own time. In the meantime, though, I’d like to start offering more of my ‘retros’ posts (in which I retrospect on past stories I’ve released) for paid subscribers, continuing to do finding the lit (in which I list my Substack literary finds) and writing short stories.

[VW] Thanks Clancy.

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