Did You Hear?

Things you may or may not know about the many jobs I've had since I was 15:

1. My first job was at Oak Grove Pharmacy. This is now the (WORLDS COLLIDE!)
2. I worked at the Toco Hills for years! I think between 1990-1993. Note: I know nothing about hardware or how to find anything in that store.
3. Baskin Robbins—Athens, GA
4. Lifeguard/Camp worker YWCO Athens, GA
5. Juvenile Probation Officer, Department of Juvenile Justice-Fulton County
6. Yellow Dog Art Gallery—Oakhurst/Decatur (owner)
7. Art Studio-2005-current (co-owner)
8. Author of Wraith under the penname Angel Lawson (published February 2012)

What? You didn’t know I wrote a book? I wrote a book. It’s a young adult novel (don’t be a hater) that has ghosts and boys and girls and local landmarks and I can’t tell you anything else without giving it away.

Of course writing a book (for me) is filled with anxiety and awkwardness. First of all, I barely passed Language Arts. I have terrible grammar. It’s a disaster. The good news is I have a crazy vivid imagination and I can make up a story and let other people fix the mistakes. I mean, I try, and I’ve gotten better, but before I started writing as an adult I had never written anything outside a school setting. So see? Old dogs can learn new tricks and where quotation marks go!

The second awkward moment of writing a book is how someone like myself, who has social anxiety disorder (aka: selective avoidance) suddenly finds themselves in the midst of a personal marketing plan. Your job is about marketing YOURSELF. What a nightmare. You have to put your photo out there and a bio and send letters to bloggers and reviewers and answer interview questions.  I’m not saying I don’t like to talk about myself but this is to the extreme. When you try to maintain an aura of enigma about yourself out of self-preservation, all that goes out the window when you turn around and realize everyone read your interview and now they know! They know that you are completely convinced the zombie apocalypse is real (duh-bath salts) and that you may have taken photos of the college kid’s car down the street to use as inspiration for your novel. See? Awkward.

So my solution to this was making a pen name. I picked Angel Lawson for several reasons, one being part family name, the other being that I have a long time obsession with Buffy The Vampire Slayer and blah, blah mythology blah, Angel + Lawson=greatest episode ever. Anyway, I picked this fake name, published my book and set it loose. Quietly. My friends knew and were supportive and awesome and it only took a matter of four minutes before friends of friends and mothers of friends and well…let’s just say I never told anyone in my family I wrote a book and I had to scramble.

Pen names aren’t all about hiding though. In this day and age of interwebness telling everything about yourself to everyone you “know” on the internet is not always a great idea. It’s not a bad idea to keep a bit of a cover for world-wide marketing.  Then there is the whole thing about how if you are an utter failure you can ditch that name and go make a new one and start over.  Then there is this other part of the writing world where once you pick a genre you are stuck in that genre, which we’ve already established I live pretty much outside the box, so the likelihood of me writing different types of books was pretty high.

Plus, writing books and self-publishing (which I am—and I love for many many outside the box reasons) is like starting a business. I’ve had two businesses and neither of them have had my real name included. Who wants to come to Anna’s Art Studio? Boring. 2 Crafty Chicks is much more exciting, fun and we get to use little birds in the logo.

So anywhere, there it is. I wrote a book. And another one. It comes out in July. Tomorrow, Saturday, June 9^th, I will be at Eagle Eye Bookshop in Emory/Decatur signing books and passing out information on my new book, FanGirl, from 12-1:30. Eagle Eye is awesome and truly supports local authors and indie/self-published authors. Not all of our local shops do this. So come out and see me. I won’t hide. Swear. I’ll even sign your book. With my real or fake name. Whichever you choose.