Lee Future is the pen name of Michael Lee Cook. Does that make Lee Future a real person? Does that make Michael Cook schizophrenic? Is Lee Future just Mike with a pen in his hand, or is he a Jekyll to Mike’s Hyde? Or a Hyde to Mike’s Jekyll? I think of it this way:
Tabloids are a kind of hell. I will never be famous enough to live in that hell, but we can all learn from tabloids the importance of keeping our public and private lives separate. Whether we’re on the cover of Examiner or at a book reading in our home town, there’s public and then there’s private, and I think it’s a good, healthy thing to have both. Otherwise you have to invent words like pubvate or privlic. The second of which sounds like a prescription medication. So Lee Future is public. Michael Cook is private.
I am part of Generation Y. This means I am brand conscious. If you’re trying to sell something, inventing a brand is a good idea. I’m trying to sell writing, so inventing a brand to sell that writing is probably market savvy. But I’d rather not turn myself into a brand. That does not sound enjoyable. Lee Future, however, he can be a brand. Lee’s a bit of a whipping boy.
Lee Future is a nom de guerre. War names are sometimes used by guerrilla fighters to protect their families from retaliation. (I don’t expect this to be necessary for me.) In the French Foreign Legion, conscripts would take on false names to indicate a break from their past. Lee Future is something like this, because Lee is definitely not a lot of things that Mike Cook has been in the past. Lee Future is a persona that helps me focus.
Writing is hard. In my own head it often seems like a war. Because it is hard I avoid it a lot. Mike Cook has a lot of things in life that aid procrastination. He has a family and a mortgage and a job, physical fitness and sleep and food and friends. But I am not myself if I’m not writing. I become discontent, subtly at first and then in ways that affect my entire life. All the time I avoid writing I am becoming less Mike and more miserable. Lee comes to the rescue. Lee has no family and would rather write than sleep. He does not pay Mike’s mortgage (he’s kind of a jerk). So when I’m Lee, when I think of myself as Lee, all there is to do is write, and so I write, and so I become happier and more myself. Sometimes I have to be Lee to be more Mike.
So Mike isn’t schizophrenic. Lee isn’t a new personality or an alter ego or a secret identity. Lee is a persona, like the gentle one you put on when with your grandmother, or the competitive one you put on with your cleats.
The problem with a persona is that it can become a lie or an act. A persona is only true if it lives close to the soul of you. The closer the persona is to who you are the truer it is and the healthier, so that hopefully the persona you adopt around your grandmother is just you, exactly like any other you except maybe you don’t say “fuck†around her.
So Lee Future is a persona exactly like Mike Cook, except Lee writes more often. He wrote this, in fact.
--Lee Future
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