What’s in a Name?

There was always something off, to me, about my name. The one my parents gifted me for my birthday, the one on my government issued ID. I didn’t know it as a child but sometime in the last fifteen or so years, I have worked out that it’s just not very musical. First and last, especially, are nothing but hard consonants strung together with short vowels.

It’s very abrasive.

Around middle school, I tried dropping my first name and just being Gabrielle—or Gabby or Elle or Brie—but that’s next to impossible in a small town where all the kids go to school in the same building. People get used to one thing and balk against change.

Did I grasp the opportunity to change it in college? Nope. I, too, had become so accustomed to introducing myself as Desiree that as much as I hated it, I couldn’t stop. And before long, the damage was done and all of my new college friends were on board with this thing I abhorred.

Out of college and starting a new job? Same song, different verse.

But when I started publishing, I took that as an opportunity to be known as something different. Because as much as I hated the sound of all those hard consonants and short vowels, I thought it looked just as bad. A pseudonym, a nomme de plume, a pen name was never about anonymity, for me. It was always about aesthetics and what I personally found attractive.

What I can’t tell you is why I opted to keep the D.

It seemed like the right choice at the time and was for more than fifteen years. But when other people started talking about me and my writing in more professional terms, I wished I had just stuck with Gabrielle.

It seems frivolous, now, to change it. If changing it were a need that would be different. But to simply change it because it makes my skin crawl to hear people say it aloud . . . that sounds like a lot of extra work I don’t need to heap upon myself.

A person can accumulate a lot of backlog in twenty years. There is a lot of work out there in the world with the name D. Gabrielle Jensen on it. I’ll stick with what I have, for now, and see how I feel in another couple of years. Maybe some notoriety and fame will change the way I feel.

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It’s All Too Much

Three years ago, I signed up to have my trilogy “traditionally” published.

Not traditionally as in one of the major, well-known publishing houses but a small press publisher who, at the time, only had a couple other authors on their roster, not counting those who had submitted short stories for their anthologies, which were actually the flagstone of their business. The executives of this press had been privy to the creation of my story and characters and felt like I was creating something they wanted to represent.

Fast forward three years and I haven’t finished a thing since the third book in that trilogy. I can’t. I just keep getting in my own way, criticizing the original trilogy, trying to find opportunities for improvement. As a result, I have compiled quite a wish list of things I want from and included in this next book [series].

• More humor but also more darkness for contrast
• Better mystery/better clues
• Higher stakes for all characters
• Tighter story telling

And the thing is none of these things were a concern of mine until publishing this trilogy. And it’s not even because someone criticized what I had already written. No one has told me my trilogy is bad. No one has said I should have done this or should have done that. No one has said much of anything, actually, and maybe that’s the problem.

Whatever it is, is paralyzing. I can’t write because I have set up too many hurdles for myself to jump, to many mountains to conquer. I am so accustomed to writing a publication-ready (though it could be better) draft on the first go that I don’t know how not to. And not knowing how to jump all these hurdles—without tripping—on the first go has made it impossible to even approach the starting line.

Another Prompt Post

What bores you?

Truly? Being at home.

Not always but I am 75% more likely to be bored by being at home than anything else.

Even as a kid, I hated being at home. Anytime I’d go somewhere with my parents, I would stall and hope for just one more stop before we went home.

Days off from the day job are excruciating in their duration. I understand why people want to go to bed at 8pm. It’s not because I’m tired but I’m B O R E D and cannot fathom anything to do to fix the problem.

Because the thing no one talks about when it comes to boredom is part of the reason you are bored is because you are tired of your normal pastimes. You’re bored of the television. You’re bored of your art projects. You’re bored of . . . basically every option available to you because those options are always available to you.

Sure, I enjoy crocheting. Do I reach for it when I’m bored? No. Because it’s monotonous and I need something stimulating. I take a lap, or two, or five, around the house when what I really want to do is jump on a plane to anywhere and take a lap or two around some different scenery.

Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a plane. Let me take a couple laps around Walmart. If they didn’t close at 11 and my boredom intensifies at 11. But I’m always looking for someone to go out with me. Go out for appetizers or coffee or dessert. Go painting at the pottery studio. Go thrifting. Whatever.

Just get me out

Of

This

House!

Measuring Success

“How do you define ‘success’?”

This is something everyone should take the time to consider, and reconsider because it will change. But it’s an especially important question for anyone trying to blaze their own trail. Authors, artists, musicians, entrepreneurs . . . all need to evaluate and re-evaluate our definition of success in order to ensure we are still working toward it.

For me, it is comfort. The ability to do things without worrying about them.

I happened to be visiting Denver at the time of the first game of the NHL Western Conference finals between the Colorado Avalanche and Edmonton Oilers. I gave a moment’s worth of serious consideration to buying tickets, only to be sidelined by the price.

Success in my art would mean avoiding those moments. In most cases, I prioritize experiences over possessions and that opportunity to experience a playoff game on the home ice is one I may not get again. I want to be able to see those opportunities and take them, without hesitation.

One of my dearest friends is getting married in California in September. When she first announced her engagement (with a ceremony planned for 2020), I didn’t think anything would keep me from helping her celebrate. Now there is too much standing in the way. Success would mean not having to make that choice.

Success, for me, is not “all about money;” it is, however, about having the financial freedom to gain the experiences.

What about you? What does success mean to you?

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Masks and Mental Health

In Asian countries, it is not uncommon for people to wear masks. They wear them in crowded spaces because in their cities they have some very crowded spaces. And in some places they wear them because of pollutants in the air.

This is a foreign (if you’ll pardon the expression) concept for much of the western world. And because we are not used to the practice, we’ve had some adjusting to do over the last 18 months.

And some people have not adjusted well.

I am one of them.

And the stupid thing is I’m not in the anti-mask camp. I have some opinions about the state of affairs but I’m not vehemently anti-mask or pro-conspiracy or any of that. I have seen, not first hand but through the eyes of others, the worst of the worst.

But I’ve seen a lot of other ugliness in the last year and a half, too.

So, I wasn’t really sure why I was having such an averse reaction to the whole situation. I couldn’t quite pin down what it was about wearing a mask and seeing people in media wearing them that was bothering me so much.

Because my only reaction to seeing other people wearing them in real life was that person is wearing a mask.

But seeing fictional characters on the television wearing masks really gets under my skin.

And I finally put things together.

There are a couple of things happening here. The first is my own self esteem. This is the reason I struggle with the idea of wearing them personally.

I spend every day staring at myself in a mirror. For hours at a time. Before all of this started, the person I saw in that mirror was short and overweight and dressed in unflattering clothing that accentuated the short and the overweight.

But that person could smile.

See, I was bullied for a few things as a kid but one major one was a condition called strabismus.

I actually didn’t have a word for it until just a few years ago. But as a kid it was a “lazy eye.” Technically, they’re different but similar conditions but according to the one and only optometrist who took the time to really examine me, I don’t have a true lazy eye because it responds to stimulus.

ANYWHO . . . I didn’t know that until my mid-20s but even if I did know that as a kid, imagine being a kid trying to explain the medical tech to other kids. But I have spent the better part of 35 years watching people look behind them to see who I’m talking to, even when I address them by name. And I spent most of my childhood being called cross-eyed.

Because I wasn’t diagnosed, properly or at all, until my 20s, obviously nothing was done to fix the problem. Though often the fixes don’t work and have to be done again and again, especially when they are performed on adults. So I still have a weird, wonky eye that makes people look over their shoulder for the other Jim or Sally standing behind them. And I’m still a little self-conscious about it.

No, that’s not true. I’m only self-conscious about it when someone or something calls attention to it.

Like covering up the lower half of my face so all that is left are my eyes.

I think my personal aversion to wearing a mask comes from the fact that it is constantly calling attention to this traumatic thing that I hate about myself.

I also figured out that while I’m not hearing impaired (I actually have impeccable hearing, probably because my vision isn’t perfect), I have trouble hearing people talk. I think it’s a form of dyslexia, maybe, but I hear the sounds they just don’t always make it to my brain in the right order. Which is why I hate talking on the telephone.

But then I realized . . .

What do talking on the phone and wearing a mask have in common?

I can’t see your lips.

I’m not, technically, reading people’s lips, but if I can see your mouth moving I am far more likely to understand what you’re saying to me.

And I think that is part of why it bothers me so much to see fictional characters in masks on television.

The other reason is . . . it’s fiction. It’s meant to be an escape, not a reminder.

I just caught up to the abbreviated 2021 season on New Amsterdam and Daniel Dae Kim just joined the cast. In the episode I watched most recently, they were talking about the virus in the past tense because things had calmed down from the chaos they had endured in the early months. One of the other characters says to Kim’s character, “Hearken back . . . ” and he cuts them off saying, “I’d rather not hearken back to a time when thousands of people were dying every day.”

That sums up my feelings about wandering into pandemic episodes of television shows after the fact. I’m still about a season and a half behind on Wolf’s Chicago franchise so we’ll (hopefully) be well past all of this when I hit pandemic episodes of those shows.

And I don’t want to hearken back.

I want to move forward and I want my means of escape to be escaping, not reminding.

That was a lot of thoughts for very late in the evening (or early in the morning though I haven’t gone to bed yet) but I had an epiphany . . . a couple of them, and needed to get them out of my head.

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Starving Artists

Some days I feel like those singers they used to feature on American Idol. The ones who had been told their whole lives they had the “voice of an angel,” but when the angel sang it sounded like a wounded cat.

Except with writing instead of singing.

I read through these elegantly-crafted blogs and even just social media posts and I question whether I am capable of conveying emotions and meaning in the same way. I have been writing, professionally, for twenty years, casually for thirty-five. But there are still moments when I feel like I no longer control the words in my mind. I can no longer guide them to the page in the ways I once did.

I have never wanted anything more than to entertain people with my work, to give them an escape from the mundanity of their everyday lives. But then I hear people talking about books they have read, emoting over the prose, choking back tears at the beauty of the story, the tragedy of the characters, and I don’t believe I am capable of eliciting such a response.

I see other authors gushing their gratitude over the number of books they have sold solely to their Booktok community or their Bookstagram community and I doubt the potential for that to be me. Because I am not writing books that touch people’s souls or change their lives. I never wanted to. But is that the reason I feel like I am back in the third, fourth, fifth grades, listening to my teachers tell my parents, “She’s just not living up to her full potential.”

But, is this my potential? Am I only meant to watch from the outside while others succeed at the dreams I have had, both consciously and unconsciously, from before I even started school?

Without even knowing what was happening, I grew up in a generation compelled to create. Previous generations have all given birth to creative compulsives, this is not new. But somehow the Xennial/Millennial generation has reared ourselves flying a bold middle finger at convention. We saw futures as starving artists and said yes, please. We are bringing back the concept of “patron of the arts,” in the form of crowdfunding, pay what you want models, and subscription services. We are figuring out ways to forge our paths while bucking convention. We have chosen to be hungry and homeless in favor of creation, in hopes of one day “making it” with our Etsy shops and our Bandcamps.

And for some, it’s working.

Just not for me.

Bored

What do you do when you can’t even figure out what content to produce to keep yourself entertained?

I have lamented this on here before (which is part of the problem) but I don’t know what to share with people. I have no interest in producing MORE writing tips or editing tips; the internet is saturated with them.

I don’t feel like I get any engagement from behind the scenes content–research bits, character sketches, that sort of thing–and lack of engagement is the quickest way to reinforce my belief that I am a boring human.

I think that’s it, ultimately. I am boring. People tell me that I’m interesting, that I have a lot to say, but when I ask them for guidance, they just repeat themselves. “You’re not boring!” Okay, but I think I am so tell me what it is about me that makes you think I’m not boring? Maybe the thing that you find interesting would be interesting to other people. I might still think it’s dumb but at least having someone say it’s interesting to them gives me hope that I just think I’m boring because I have to spend all day every day listening to the same stupid stories.

I know that those same stupid stories are new to other people and I can’t accurately gauge their entertainment value. But in this case, no news is not good news. No engagement IS engagement. No engagement is rejection of my offerings from the vox populi.

Sometimes it’s an algorithm thing. But my anxiety doesn’t understand that word. My anxiety says, “No one liked this, that means it was terrible. Whatever you do, do NOT repeat this.”

If I post too many more of these, this is going to be my brand. At least in this arena. WordPress is going to start marketing me as the Debbie Downer who has nothing valid to say. Because I keep presenting myself in that light.

I have things to say. I have A LOT of things to say. I’m just not sure if anyone wants to hear them.

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Overwhelm and Too Many Irons

I set up this blog because I have previous experience with WordPress blogs being pretty discoverable. The free ones. The paid ones are not and I am still striving for passive organic growth. I need platforms I can just water occasionally and let them grow on their own while I focus on everything else.

I close out every one of these with a link to my Patreon and I’m pretty sure that’s getting me nowhere. I’m a pretty realistic person and I understand that supporting a Patreon, even at the rate of $3/month is not something you enter into lightly. Reading a free blog is one thing. Subscribing to a free blog is one thing. Giving money to someone every month is a whole other ballgame entirely.

So I get it.

What I don’t get is what I’m supposed to be posting.

I have yet to find a groove with this free platform that will bring in the traffic my previous attempts brought in while also engaging people enough that they will want to go off campus to check out something else. And I have a lot of free content on my Patreon.

I don’t produce enough fiction to be able to spread it around like peanut butter. I would love to. I really would. I would love to have some kind of serial work running on every platform. Something here, something on Patreon. Something on Radish, Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad. While also finishing novels on the side.

What I want is to be able to produce the amount of text that my fingers are able to type. Which would be the equivalent of two full manuscripts each and every five-day work week.

HA!

I know that’s not realistic. Danielle Steel does it but she’s a machine and has been doing it longer than I have been alive. Stephen King is probably close.* But the rest of us have to also work day jobs and . . . sleep.

I actually don’t need that much sleep. And a lot of the time I need sleep because of my day job.

Ideally, I would love to have enough content and support to cut back on my day job. I can’t give it up entirely. I am an extrovert. I need people to stay healthy. But if I could work three days a week in a salon then write the rest of the time, that would be an enormous step in a different direction toward “full-time author.”

I just need to figure out what people want from me. What kinds of content am I supposed to be sharing in each place to get the people to follow me?

Until I figure that out, I guess continue watching me fumble along in the dark.

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* Danielle Steel writes up to 20 hours a day on a manual typewriter. The woman is a machine. I don’t have the same statistics for Stephen King (I got the Danielle Steel stats from Jeopardy!) but I do know he’s a pantser like me which is both encouraging and DIScouraging at the same time.

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Regrets

January, 2015 – I faced a pretty big fear and started a conversation with someone on whom I developed a crush over the course of our then three year friendship. It was the first real one-on-one conversation we had had in private and it was one of the most comfortable and easy conversations I had had in a long time.

January, 2017 – I still hadn’t told him how I felt and got that thrown back in my face when he became “Facebook official” with a new girl.

January, 2018 – He started the new year sharing Queen’s Somebody to Love and changing his relationship status back to “single.” I decided to give him some space to heal. Time . . . got away from me.

January, 2019 – He publicly confessed to a lifelong struggle with mental illness and shared that he was starting medication and therapy for it. He told me he’d always be there for me if I needed him. He self isolated, shutting down his social media accounts.

January, 2020 – I signed a contract to publish a book series in which he is the inspiration for one of the main characters. He doesn’t know. Maybe never will.

January, 2021 – I haven’t talked to him in two years and my heart still hurts for him every day. I worry about how he’s doing, all things considered. I worry about his health as someone who seemed to get the flu at least twice every season. I hope he’s happy. For his sake even if that means he’s happy not with me. I hope he’s still doing what he loves. I still miss his voice. I still miss his intelligence, his wisdom, and his humor.

I am still angry with myself for keeping quiet. I’m a strong person but when it comes to offering up my heart to get it broken, I am a frightened child. I’ve been betrayed, manipulated, and abused. I have been blamed for the breakdown of someone’s mental health. I have been cheated on and cheated with. When I rejected the advances of a childhood friend, I learned he was never a friend at all.

I am not harder for it. I still love with everything I have. I’m just the jerk who does it from a distance.

I know that my desire and ability to love someone is not a reason for them to love me back. And them not loving me back does not negate my feelings. I still love him. I hope I’ll see him again some day. I’m not holding my breath for it to happen but maybe I won’t run from it either.

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Out With the Old

I am not a proponent of new years resolutions, generally speaking. While I’m not an extremist zealot about it, I do, sometimes, think seriously about the ridiculousness of time and dates.

Last year was a constant barrage of how horrible 2020 was and talk of yelling Jumanji instead of Happy New Year at midnight and the more those talks continued, the more I thought about this arbitrary thing we call a year.

At 11:59 pm, November 1, 2001, I was not mature enough to drink alcohol. At midnight, sixty seconds later, I magically matured. I feel like New Years Eve is the same concept. 12:01 am January 1, everything resets and all the problems of the previous year are erased.

So I don’t get on board with resolutions.

Goals are a little different to resolutions, though, and I saw someone else talk about the things they are leaving behind in the coming year–everything from judgment to junk–that no longer serves them. So I thought I’d try a little of that.

First off, goals.

I obviously have two books coming out this year. I heard a lot of excuses regarding the status of the first one and why C0VID was to blame for it’s low performance but truly I hope it’s because it’s the first of a series and people are waiting until they can get all three. Because I don’t find comfort in the idea that in a year of homebound free time, the reason people, who are boasting about reading 2-300 books in 2020, did not buy mine.

No, I’m far more comforted by the idea that sales will jump in September with the release of the third book.

But in addition to that, I want to put out some short fiction.

I don’t know that I want to get involved in more anthologies. They are a lot of work for what amounts to “exposure” in the long run.

Sure I have awards from Dragons Within and an LGBTQ bestseller for Fractured Realities but …

A lot of work for very little pay off.

That’s not saying I won’t take the opportunity if the right one comes along; I just don’t plan to seek them out.

In terms of what I want to leave behind–I have taken on a great deal of anger in 2020 and I don’t like it. I am not an angry person but circumstances–

I have absolutely heard people outright refuse to be vaccinated then in the next breath suggest none of this is ever going to end; masks and isolation are life now, concerts and festivals and conventions will never come back. Well yeah, Karen, if you refuse to get a FREE AND SAFE vaccine, then, yes, you’re correct. It will never end.

But I don’t want to be angry. I am a positive, kind, pleasant person. My customer service voice IS my normal voice. I want to be that person again.

So I guess that’s my how we’re starting 2021 post. If you want to follow along on these quests, follow me here and join me on Patreon.