He's a cowboy, rancher, adventurer, and storyteller . . . and he's not real. Oh, he's real in a literary sense because he's the cowboy voice of author Philip Martin Cawlfield. And there's a story there, too. Phil had gone on a brief vacation with his then girlfriend, an outing one Easter weekend, and ended up stopping off to visit with a friend in east Texas. He met a few interesting people and came away with a story, or at least a story line. Several months later he had written his first Duhon story, The Duck Ranch. That was just the start of what has turned into a series of novella length stories that are showing up in The Altos Cuentos Trail: The Adventures of Two Old Cowboys. The first two volumes of that series are out now in paperback, and more will follow.
But back to Cletus Duhon, the focus of this blog. Although he's just a pen name, Cletus has taken on an identification that makes him more than just part of the stories he writes. Phil created him as a voice for his cowboy stories, but he has used him extensively as a blogger. Perhaps that's what did it (give him a personification), but he's now got a history. I've Googled him several times and find that he's even got a criminal record, or at least you can conduct an internet search for one. He's got an address, phone number, and even a ranch (that doesn't exist either). So the question is this: In this digital age can you create a big as life character like that? Apparently you can.
I remember reading once about a group of students at a university who created a student. They got him registered and enrolled in classes. It took a team of students to work this ruse, but the got him up to being a junior before getting caught. They'd enroll him in a course, let's say English 101, then have one of the team members attend class and take tests for him. And they'd pick a team member who was good at that particular subject, and that's how they got caught. It seems this imaginary student ended up winning an award because his grades were high, and somebody had to show up to receive it. Professors started talking then, comparisons were made, and the jig was up at that point. I don't know exactly what point this team of students was trying to make, but they made at least one point. If you're clever enough, you can make the unreal appear to be real. And if you can do that, what's real turns out to be what people think it is.
Cletus Duhon seems real to readers because his name is on the books they read, and he's a character in the book. His narratives are always about what he's involved in, meaning first person or up close and personal . . .and that makes him more personal, more familiar, and more real. When it gets right down to it, I'm not real either, at least by name. D. Paz Dalton is also a pen name, with the man behind the pen being the same author who created Cletus - Philip Martin Cawlfield. I sometimes wonder if this is wise. Perhaps it would've been better to keep that secret, to just allow people to think we actually exist. But sooner or later someone would recognize how much alike we all look, that we have the same address and all that. And as writers, there are differences between us - different voice, different style, and different stories to tell. And it's fun. Today I'm D. Paz Dalton, writing about Cletus Duhon. I'm OK with that, and I'm not crazy . . . yet.
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