Becoming J.A. Raithe: The Journey to a Pen Name

Some stories choose their moment. Others wait decades for the right voice to tell them.

I first conceived of The World Below in my early twenties, when the world seemed smaller and possibilities infinite. Armed with boundless ambition and the kind of creative hunger that only comes with youth, I dove headfirst into what I was certain would be my masterpiece. Two chapters in, life intervened—as it has a habit of doing. Career demands, family responsibilities, the relentless momentum of simply existing swept the manuscript into a drawer where it gathered dust alongside other abandoned dreams.

But stories, I've learned, are patient predators.

For twenty years, this tale stalked the periphery of my consciousness. It whispered during long commutes, demanded attention in the space between sleep and waking, evolved in the shadows while I built a life around its absence. Characters aged and deepened. Plot threads wove themselves into more complex patterns. The universe expanded beyond what my younger self could have imagined, growing richer and stranger with each passing year.

By 2025, the story had become too large to ignore. It pressed against the boundaries of my daily life like something alive, demanding release. I realized with the clarity that sometimes comes with middle age that I could no longer carry this unfinished symphony in my head. The story had waited long enough. It was time to honor that patience.

When I returned to the page, I discovered something unexpected: the voice emerging from my fingertips belonged to a stranger. Not the eager, impatient writer who had started this journey, but someone older, more deliberate, shaped by two decades of living and observing. The cosmic horror that had once felt like intellectual exercise now carried the weight of understanding. The characters' struggles with power, identity, and moral compromise resonated with experiences I hadn't possessed at twenty-five.

I realized I needed a name that belonged to this voice—not to who I had been, but to who I had become in service of these stories.

"J.A." felt right immediately: formal, literary, carrying the kind of weight that science fiction demands. But it was "Raithe" that surprised me. The name seemed to rise from the same creative depths as the stories themselves—half-remembered, like something glimpsed in peripheral vision that resolves into clarity when you look directly at it. It felt both ancient and immediate, carrying echoes of the mythic traditions that inform the best speculative fiction.

More importantly, it felt earned. Not chosen from vanity or marketing calculation, but discovered through the same process that reveals character motivations or plot resolutions—that moment when the subconscious delivers exactly what the conscious mind has been seeking.

J.A. Raithe isn't just a penname. It's the identity that emerged when I finally developed the skill, patience, and life experience necessary to tell the stories that have been waiting inside me. It's the voice that can handle cosmic horror without flinching, explore the intersection of technology and mythology with proper gravity, and examine what it means to be human in a universe that might not care about humanity at all.

The World Below belongs to J.A. Raithe because J.A. Raithe was created to tell it properly. The eager young writer who started this journey lacked the tools to build the kind of intricate, morally complex universe these stories demanded. But two decades of living, reading, failing, and growing have forged those tools.

Some stories choose their moment. This one chose to wait until I was ready to honor it.

Now, finally, it will be told.