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Why Choose the Name Hermux Tantamoq?

28 October 2002

'The letters I'd drawn said nothing and I had to give up my assumption that it had to be a regular name and come up with something I'd never heard of, and for the first time with words, I had an authentic literary experience... I realised I didn't have to try and tell the truth, that I could lie - in fact, I had to. I do, though, have to tell emotional truths.'

'At the end of the day, Hermux is a real imaginary mouse. I was drawn into the stories, it wasn't premeditated and began as a game that had to be played at long distance. I had to make my wife, who was on a buying trip in South-East Asia, laugh, and if I could do that when she wasn't there in person, I'd succeeded.'

Michael Hoeye, speaking in Publishing News about the anagram game which produced the name of his mouse Hermux Tantamoq, main character in his stunningly successful self-published first children's book Time Stops for No Mouse.