Hi all! Philip K here. As many of you know, this account is a pen name for another author on the site. And the short version of this post is: after a lot of thought, I’m going to switch to running the contests under that author name instead. There, I saved you a long read! 
But, for more context as to why I’m doing this… Philip K was an account that I made as a one-off joke in 2022, when I posted my “Naughty German Twinks vs. You” story for the Turnabout contest. That story was about (among other things) the story challenges themselves, and thoughts I’d had about them.
What I didn’t anticipate was that Martin’s response to reading my story would be to offer me the role of Master of Challenges. Aka, instead of Martin running the challenges himself, it would now be me.
At first I wasn’t sure if I’d accept. I definitely hadn’t anticipated it. And when I decided to accept Martin’s offer, I took it tentatively. I didn’t know how successful my efforts would be. What if people hated what I came up with? Or, maybe I’d run a challenge and realize I didn’t like doing it, and would want to step down.
So I continued using my Philip K account when running the challenges. I figured, why get my main author account involved in something that might end up messy and short-lived? I didn’t want to muck things up for what I thought of as my ‘real’ writer account—I like writing stories too much, and didn’t want the Master of Challenges role to get in the way of that…
But I also like writing stories for themes and challenges. I’d participated in the challenges before, too, prior to taking over from Martin. And per Martin’s advice, I could continue participating in the challenges, as long as I did it only as Philip K—never under my old account. That felt like the most aboveboard way to do it. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And I put all this backstory on my author profile page too, so that it was publicly available.
Lately, though, I’ve been realizing my old reasons for keeping my two accounts separate don’t hold up anymore. People do seem happy with the challenges. And it turns out I like running them, too. I probably won’t be stopping anytime soon.
And at this point, I’ve written five stories as Philip K. This is almost as many stories as I’d written under my old author account. It’s led me to wonder if I should hang up the cape of Philip K, and put all my stories under my original author name, and run the contests under that name too.
So I’m going to do it. I think many of you guessed this already, since I was never subtle about it… My original account is Nutiper (nickname Nu). And with some help from Martin, I’ll probably transition to doing my contest-running duties as Nu in the next month.
Please feel free to share any questions or thoughts you might have on this. It’s somewhat nerve-wracking to make this kind of announcement. I do not like drawing attention to myself in this way—I prefer to just do the work (or write the story) and let it speak for itself. But it feels important to me to make this announcement, so here it is.
Thank you!!
