On Monday,
Riptide Publishing will release my novella,
The Beginning of Us, as an ebook -- for sale on the Riptide website for $3.99. The book will be featured on various blogs Jan. 27-31, as well.
Really? I've wanted to be a "real" writer for so long that I just can't believe it's finally happened.
But maybe I've been "real" for much longer than this. Maybe it happened when
The English Journal published an essay I wrote in 2004, or maybe it happened when I completed my first novel manuscript (a macabre, overblown gothic look at Iowa farm life) in 1999, or maybe it happened when I started keeping a journal at the age of 13, in 1990.
Or maybe I'm not a "real" writer yet, because
The Beginning of Us is just a novella, just an ebook, just a little romance story about a girl who falls in love with an older woman.
In his memoir and writing guide
On Writing, Stephen King argues that a writer should not require publication or positive reviews to feel justified in saying, "I am a writer." If you write, you're a writer. Especially if you have a writing practice -- a writing life. Every night when TK goes to bed, I try to write 1,500 words. Sometimes I get too tired. Sometimes I write twice that. I'm a writer.
King also says the first draft of a manuscript should be written
only for the "Ideal Reader", a person to whom he refers with the neat acronym "IR". King's is his wife. Mine is Ali. It will always be Ali. In
The Beginning of Us, I talk directly to her the entire manuscript. In the novel I'm writing at the moment, I write every scene wondering (and knowing, I think) how Ali would react to it. I imagine watching her read it, waiting for the head-thrown-back laugh I loved so much, or the "Hmm" and the "Huh" she would murmur when she reached parts she especially loved.
So I'm a real writer, and I write for a woman who can't tell me what she loves or hates anymore.
And I'm an imposter. I say I write fiction and all of it is real. Every character, every event -- it's all so real I watch it unfold in my mind like a movie, and then I just write down what I see and hear. Every protagonist has my tall thin frame; every beloved woman has dark curly hair. Again and again. Someday, I'll have other stories to tell, but right now all I want to do is find ways to tell our story different than it actually happened.
Ali? I've written a novel someone wants to publish. What do you think? Tell me. Tell me. Please.
