/lit/ - Literature

how do people come up with the names for their literary alter egos?

A film of sleep slime saliva coated the back of his tongue: the stagnant taste of beer oxygenated by heavy snoring. He got up to piss, as he had several times in the night, and squirted what was left in the unflushed bowl, before boiling the kettle, opening the blinds, and readying the coffee in the bottom of his mug. He sat naked at the breakfast table and eyed his underwear at the foot of the bathroom door, glimpsing for a second, what, in the chronology of his mind, had only been moments ago: when he kicked them off in tremendous heat and returned to bed, stumbling in the dark. He felt with his arse where the leather of the dining room chair peeled back and exposed the scratched material beneath, and waited patiently to become accustomed to the sensation; drinking coffee, eating toast, wasting the sunlight reflect from the traffic below in distended arcs along the eggshell ceiling.

An old dormitory building a few streets behind them was occupied by foreign missionaries: young American girls, Christian visitors, on holiday from their rewarding journeys through Papua New Guinea. They often knocked on his door and loitered out in the hallway: making pests of themselves; smiling, laughing; extending invitations out to lunch; asking would it be okay to just sit down with every one for a few minutes. They had disturbed the peace. Who let them up was a mystery. He already tried for Vincent behind the front counter a few times but he was away somewhere, and Vinesh did not have any answers: raising her eyebrows at every question; tilting her ear as though it would make any more sense—a stupid woman; stupid live-in wife he bought.