Back in my misspent youth, I published a zine—a DIY magazine I photocopied and mailed out to the misguided folks who signed up for my mailing list.1 For the zine, I adopted a persona I referred to as Zine Elvis. Zine Elvis was a bloated supervillain with a vast global network of spies and minions. He drank too much and got himself into outlandish situations,2 and he often espoused some seriously sketchy opinions. And not a day went by without someone—usually a distant cousin or old grammar-school teacher—writing me a concerned email about my lifestyle choices.3
For a while, I tried explaining to all these folks that Zine Elvis was a persona, a character, a fictional version of myself. This … never worked. People found it impossible to believe that there wasn’t a grim basis in reality for Zine Elvis. Years later when I published and introduced the world to desperate cyberpunk assassin Avery Cates and his love for a specific brand of futuristic gun, people began assuming I was a gun enthusiast and collector. I began to be invited to shooting ranges despite having never owned a gun in my life, and people began causally implying I probably knew how to
