Imposter or storyteller?

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.