IWSG: The Pen Name Game

1st Wednesday of the month is Insecure Writers Support Group. Wherein I post about the difficulties and joys of writing.

This might be shocking to my sixteen some-odd readers, but Mencara isn't my real name.Don't worry, I've put some smelling salts next to your chair. Thaaaat's it. Breathe deeply.

My name is actually Christina. After my grandmother died, I took her middle name (Mencara) as my pen name because I've always loved it. Matter of fact, when I got married and changed my name, I almost made my middle name Mencara but I chickened out at the last minute. If I had, I wouldn't be worrying about my pen name now.

In the last few months I've noticed what an enormous pain in the ass it is to have a pen name. I spend a lot of time on Facebook and I tried figuring out how to create a profile for Mencara. What a complete waste of time. You really can't do it, unless you buck FB rules and risk the possibility of being booted by creating a fake profile. You can create a page for your persona but you can't use it to join writer groups like Insecure Writers Support Group. Can't be done.

So I tried using Twitter because it would be much easier to use a pen name there, but frankly, I cannot figure out how to read Twitter conversations. They make no sense to me. Shut up, you damnable whippersnappers. I'm not old. Twitter is just... too young.

Then I began reading about all the nightmares that come along with using pen names. The difficulties getting paid and getting contracts from out of the country, etc. Now that my novel is finally getting somewhere, I'm thinking seriously about my name and my online presence. Based on info from writer blogs and publishers, I'm going to have to use some variation of my real name. It's a bummer but there you have it.

I have several writer friends who are all blessed with interesting, bam-pow names. This is not my reality. I write romantic comedy but I don't have a romantic comedy name. Think about how fitting names like Jenny Crusie and Jane Heller fit the genre of romantic comedy. But I'm Christina Mitchell. It's a name for historical romance writer. A stuffy one. I should write about masked balls and refer to man whores as "rakes". And I should develop a rather keen love of bustles. I mean, everyone likes a good bustle. But I'm not sure I can love them. Ya know?


My first and middle name are nice together. I wondered if they would work. So I Googled the combo and discovered an award winning romance writer, from my state no less, has that name already. I am filled with haterade. I'm not gonna curse her out because one day she might read this. But rest assured when I discovered her name, I lobbed some choice words at my computer screen. I'm sure she's a very nice lady, blah blah blah.

So, I let go of my pen name. I changed my blog address. I changed my header, my sidebar etc. My Google+ profile has been updated and I'm just hoping that I don't lose the few readers I have.

Oh and since it's IWSG, I suppose I should tell you that my book is coming along nicely, though I'm struggling a little with my current chapter. It refuses to be funny or interesting, no matter what I do. I rewrote it, I avoided it, I watched a marathon of Supernatural episodes followed by a marathon of Adventure Time... nothing helped.

Now I'm gonna try chocolate.

Who the hell is this Christina chick?

Things look a little different around here, I know. I've decided to embrace my real name. The URL and the name aren't the same because some ho nice young lady with the blog name I wanted took it years ago and never even posted. Grrrr.

So I'm now www.delusionsofhumor.blogspot.com. I'm still the same writer but now with 100% less pen name. I'll be explaining more about why I decided to do this on Wednesday for my Insecure Writers Support Group post.

Anyhow, sorry for the confusion.

 PS I tried to find a cute meme to put here indicating confusion. Instead I stumbled onto a Tumblr of Supernatural reaction shot gifs and spent way more time than I should have looking at them all and laughing and/or swooning. None were quite right for this post, but what the hell? Crowley says hello.

I'm aliiiiive!

 I'm a bad, bad blogger.  I've been so focused on writing my new novel that I've completely let this blog go. Sorry about that.

But now I'm on chapter six and I've reached a really frustrating impasse. When this happens, I usually become unfocused and lazy. And I have.  Bad for my novel, good for my blog I guess.

I have some interesting things coming up in the next month, so look out for actual posts with actual content.Aren't you exited? Aren't you just going, "Ooooooh"?

My rock star reunion story is going strong and I'm really happy with it, but I feel like I'm still not where I want to be. I gave the whole shebang to my writing group and overall they were really happy with it. We just have a few things we can't seem to agree on.

My character is a hard rock/metal singer. She hates interviews and almost never talks about her history. She was fairly successful. Won a grammy or two. Toured for years. Didn't make millions and millions (because let's face it, most artists don't make Britney Spears or Beyonce money).  Then her band is broke up. Her label dropped her. Her money vanishes. She goes back to her small town for reasons I can't reveal. She's keeping it very quiet but she gets found out.

How will people react?

She's in her thirties and she's famous in a specific market of music. This has been the bone of contention between my writing group and myself. I maintain that your average Midwesterner who doesn't listen to hard rock or metal will have never hear of her, let alone get all excited because she's from their small town. I don't envision her picture on the walls of the diner, for example.

The way it's written, the teenagers know that she went to their school but not much more than that. She never shared any info about her life with the media and she never graduated from high school so she's not really in the year yearbooks or on the rosters.

I don't see her getting overwhelmed by the attention of grown ups whom she never spoke to and who have busy lives. My group thinks that the reaction of folks would be bigger and that people would know that someone from their town was famous and so she wouldn't be able to have kept some of the secrets she's kept. Especially in the age of the interwebs.

This is going to affect the next section of my book and I'm not sure how to handle it. What do you think?

A POST!

 Follow my blog with Bloglovin

If I want to link my silly blog to silly ol' bloglovin, I have to post this silly link advertising them. Nothing is free anymore is it?

Hi. How are you? I'm well thanks. My new hero is being a bitch (such a bitch) and so I haven't been around much lately. I apologize. I promise you'll see more of me in the coming month. When I say you'll see more of me, I mean more blog posts. I'm not gonna get naked or anything. No one wants to see that. Well actually my husband might...

The point is... uhhhhm..... I love Doctor Who?

That's the point of everything really.

Great Article on what it means to "Write What You Know"

I am back! Sort of... see I used to write my posts at night while I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. Then I'd edit and post them during my work breaks. But my work computer is now glitchy and outdated and I cannot post directly and I forget to do it when I go home because Doctor Who is on Netflix and that's important.

Anyhow, I love Kristen Lamb's blog posts. She's brilliant. I'm linking to her. This article is informative, sad and a little beautiful. That is all.

"Write What You Know" and What That Means

IWSG: Admitting Defeat

Insecure Writers Support Group Link Here.

1st Wednesday of the month is Insecure Writers Support Group. Wherein I post about the difficulties and joys of writing. I'm running a bit late this month :)

I've been very unhappy with my manuscript for a long time. I have edited the first five chapters roughly ten times and I've finally made it chapter eleven and I have just been pulling the story out of my rear because I'm not loving it anymore. It could be because I've been editing it for nearly five years and that is four years too long to be yanking my eyelashes out over it and to still not know my heroine's motivation.

So for a few months now, I've been wanting to set the story aside but I was scared to do it. I worried that perhaps I'm just being a baby about editing and that I'll be doing the same thing with my next novel when the process gets difficult. But for the last month I've been on Pinterest figuring out what my next novel's characters look like, what kind of car my heroine drives, creating the name of the small town in which it's taking place. I have been setting up my next story and avoiding my current one like the Red Death.

Then my friend and fellow writer Meika, sent me a link to a hilarious and wonderful blog post called, "25 Steps to Being a Traditionally Published Author; Lazy Bastard Edition" by Delilah Dawson. Seriously if you are a writer, you need to read it. It's helpful and funny and full of cuss words (which I love). So I read it and realized how much work is involved once the manuscript is written. After you've poured your blood and sweat and tears onto the paper, edited them, revised them, eaten your self-congratulatory cupcakes, you still have sixteen more painstaking and exasperating steps to get the thing published. And once I read those steps, I realized that I didn't like this novel enough to take those steps. At least not right now.

So I have set it aside. And it sucks. I rely heavily on my writing group for support and I feel like I let them down. I know it's for the best, but this feels a lot like a failure.

On the upside, I started my next novel and it's coming along nicely. I love my setting, I love my hero and I think my heroine is awesome. So theres that.

Yay?

I'm Obsessed with Poetry Jams

I have an intense love of poetry jams. Spoken word poetry is all about mixing theater with the art of wordplay and those are things I adore. I have never forgotten the first time I saw spoken word poetry. I was fourteen and watching SNL. Usually after that, I tolerated Midnight at the Apollo, because I knew that once that was over, I was gonna get to watch Mystery Science Theater 3000, which was my favorite thing ever. But this night, between the R&B songs and comedians on Midnight at the Apollo, there was a young, white guy. I don't remember his name but I remember him; white t-shirt, scrawny body, carrying nothing to the stage but a piece of paper. And he began to speak and what came out was a bombastic, brilliant, funny poem about himself and the world around him. The audience (mostly black folks who raised some serious eyebrows at him when he took he stage) stood up and cheered and hollered and let him know that he was a bad-ass writer and performer.

I became obsessed. I pulled back my frizzy hair and sat down to write my first spoken word poem. It was about being biracial and it was called, "The Other" because when I took tests at school, I always had to check the other box, for my race and it always bothered me, being not enough of any one thing. I wrote it. I was so proud of it and it was terrible. If I have learned one thing over the years, it's that I'm a prose girl all the way. Pentameter scatters before me. Rhythm and cadence disappear.  But back then, I performed them with zeal. I was a biracial Eminem, all broad hand gestures and pseudo-urban affectation. My town didn't even have paved roads but I wrote like I was Tupac in the ghetto.

I gave up poetry when I discovered how much better I was at prose, but my love of theatrical poetry continues. Thanks to YouTube, I spend a lot of time having communion with writers. People like Taylor Mali Sarah Kaye make my heart happy and poetry jams fill me with child-like joy.Watching spoken word is like going to church. My sad little heathen heart loves having someone standing at the pulpit, up on the stage, making broad hand gestures and preaching  about love and sexuality and faith and technology. I have always connected to my fellow human through words and in this way, it becomes a kind of communion, a supping of the wine. They give the body and the blood and I consume in order to share their humanity. 



I want to share with you this little gem that I found on YouTube. This young man is Marshall Davis Jones. His piece of brilliant but it's a little too theatrical. I think if he toned it down a bit at the end, it would shine even more.  But here it is, beautifully imperfect and so full of wordplay and pathos and... truthiness that I needed to share it with you.

 
I am aware of the irony of posting this on my blog, but... I'm doing it anyway.

Get outside sometime. Enjoy the sunshine, the moon shine (or the moonshine), the hustle and bustle of your fellow people and remember that touch is best experienced with someone or something that can touch you back.


 

When the outside gets to be blinding and all the touching gets to be too much, check out some more fantastic spoken word poetry. 

 

 Worst Poetry by Sarah Kay

What Teachers Make by Taylor Mali  

New Insults by Kait Rokowski 

 Social Anxiety at 130 BPM by Aaron Burnstein

The Impotence of Proofreading by Taylor Mali 

 When Love Arrives by Sarah Kay & Phil Kaye

 This is one of my all time favorites. Note to Self by Ebony Stewart. When I love the way love, I love on purpose.