I wrote my first books under a pen name for many reasons, but, foremost among them, was my lack of courage. I had to invent a persona that was brave enough to show the world 90,000 words of my writing, because I sure wasn’t.
The people I was most afraid of weren’t my family and friends nor were they the total strangers. No, they were all those people who exist in between. The acquaintances. Those whose potential judgments are tangible to me but whom I don’t know intimately enough to share my naked thoughts with. I would sooner show my actual boobs to these people than give them a flashing peek behind the trench coat that hides my fears and childhood wounds and the life of mistakes that grew so fertile in that soil. (Parts of me that, whether I like it or not, seep into my fiction.)
My boyfriend at the time, well-intentioned, but to whom my agency felt often invisible, told everyone my pen name. I asked him multiple times not to, told him I was using one for a reason, but he didn’t hear. He rubbed noses with me cutely and told me not to be coy.
So I watched this name “get out there” and shifted my strategy to accept this vulnerability that was so against my plan.
It was fine. Mostly. Until it wasn’t.
My writing and publishing began to hit bumps in the road, and I could no longer summon this brave persona, because she was just me, and I was weak.
I’d had big visions for her. She was not only the one with enough confidence to independently publish romance novels—and the *gasp* gall to think anyone might read them—she also had all the tattoos and piercings I’d dreamt of but never gotten. She thought of witty retorts in the moment, rather than on a day’s delay. Her mind was uncluttered and present. She didn’t care what others thought.
Now I need her and she’s in the mirror. She’s me. Un-tatted. Un-pierced. Undecided.
The impulse is to go make a new pen name. The pen name I’ll write horror under rather than romance. A secret I’ll entrust to no one. My dark storyline. The ultimate privacy. And this remains deliciously appealing when I’m ready…
But I’ve realized I have to integrate “her” first—my original pen name—or she’ll hang over me like a cloud. I have to accept that any persona I make up to carry my work forward is still a part of me and subject to the same pitfalls… but that the hopes and dreams I imbued in her, those are a part of me too.
As for what this integration looks like, I don’t think going out and getting a piercing is going to cut it. I suspect it looks more like understanding we share the same values and are more similar than we are different. I only put her on a pedestal because I fear I fall short of acting on those values. But maybe she falls short sometimes too.
Maybe we all do.
