When I started to write romance, there were a lot of things that made a pen name appeal. There was general privacy: it made it more difficult for creepers (past and potential) to find me. There were the search engine perks: I could keep my brand more focused and less diluted by my history of varied interests.
But the drawbacks were equally clear: An annoying bureaucratic layer added to everything I signed up for. General confusion. The nagging idea of being untruthful—I generally share that I use a pen name, but I remain conflicted about the inauthenticity of it when I interact with readers.
The real thing the name choice came down to was this: I knew I was wading into a challenge. I was marching my mentally ill self up to the gates of the publishing world and I knew I was going it alone. That’s a tall order. It was going to take courage, courage that I didn’t possess at that point in my life.
There’s a part of me that’s been brave before. There’s this girl inside of me who pushed herself to ride the biggest roller coasters, to pose nude for artists, to travel alone overseas, to get in the faces of those who harassed my friends. There were beautifully oblivious parts of my life where I “put myself out there” for better and worse. Where I wasn’t afraid to fail. Where confidence lived.
In these times of my life, I was blissfully estranged from shame. These times preceded the era where I realized (or cared) that my me-ness was too much for some.
Shame took seed early in my adulthood and I possessed an apparent vulnerability to it. It flourished. The events and people who planted it there are mostly out of my life now, but the things they’ve said still play on repeat in the O part of my OCD brain.
Subconsciously, I suppressed more and more of myself. I masked who I was to please others. I cut me down. I came to embody, ironically, the sort of inauthenticity I despised.
So when I decided to attempt my greatest exposure of all time, when I said “fuck it, let’s write”—I knew I needed to tap into that brave girl inside me. It felt safer to keep her separate. I needed someone I could pour my hopes and dreams into, without fretting over their fragility. I needed to create someone with armor, someone who barreled ahead like the “old me.” And then, slowly, after time and work and therapy, I could merge all the bits back together.
“I needed someone I could pour my hopes and dreams into, without fretting over their fragility.”
So my pen name is my proxy. She stitches up the rifts of my ego-dystonia. She has the tattoos that I’ve always wanted but don’t get because of my OCD. She has the nose ring that I think would look really good on me. She is goofy. Less filtered. She takes chances on jokes. She confidently self-promotes. I am working my way back to her…
This summer, while dining out with extended family, I proudly announced that I was trying to get a “monster fucking” romance published. I absolutely glowed as a fork or two clinked to their respective plates. That had been her speaking—the old me. It was the first little sign that she was making me stronger. That we were merging. That I could still break past the filters and be me.
My mom—who fifteen years ago may have expressed some secondhand shame at such a line—told me after dinner that she was proud of me.
And that’s why I have a pen name. I have her so that I can explore memories of myself in a less vulnerable way and mine those memories for the traits I wish to reincorporate. I don’t want to be precious about my pen name forever. I’m proud to write genre fiction and want to shout it from the rooftops. Someday I will. Someday the name will just be a brand and I will just be me.