the battle of authenticity
The battle between oversharing, undersharing, and being the person you think everyone thinks you should be.
If you’ve kept up with the my social media, you know that I—uh—don’t really post all that often, and definitely not with any sort of regularity. I find it difficult, to be honest, to balance what I should share and what I want to keep private. In this social media age, the line is getting thinner and thinner it seems.
Some people overshare, others undershare.
I tend to just disappear.1
It’s not that I don’t have things to say, it’s just that what I can say sometimes feels at odds with the sort of internet persona I should to craft.2
The thing is, I write magical books about romance and well-worn grief. The kind of grief that touches us all in one way or another throughout our lives. But when you meet me, I’d rather wax poetic about the art of theme parks or the history of animation or what makes good video game adaptions.
Which I realize is more of a me thing than a you thing.
I haven’t always been insecure about being myself. I can’t really pinpoint when it started. When I was a kid, I couldn’t care less. In high school, I prided myself in being that weirdo who wore plaid skirts over jeans and kept binders full of fanfiction in her locker and anime pins on her book-bag and a camcorder in her clarinet bag. I didn’t really care what anyone else thought.
And to be honest, the fact that I loved anime so much and wrote fanfic so often ended up being good for my future. It allowed me to apply for a Kodansha USA internship and work on the new reprints of Sailor Moon. Writing fanfic gave me the opportunity to find my voice, the tropes I liked, the stories I wanted to tell, so that when I finally did decide to pursue traditional publishing, the 63 rejection letters from agents didn’t sting as much because I’d gotten enough flame reviews from FF.NET to become desensitized to rejection.
Even when I first started publishing traditionally, I was wholly and unapologetically myself. Most of you only know me from my romances, but before the pandemic I’d actually been a young adult author. I wrote a geeky cosplay series called Once Upon a Con. I wrote a robot romance in space called Heart of Iron. I relived my crush on the foxy Robin Hood in Among the Beasts & Briars.
I knew who I was then.
I think I still know who I am, but it felt easier to be me then.
I don’t know if it’s just a Millennial thing, or if every generation goes through it, but even though I write romances now, I don’t feel like I’m what an adult should look like or act like or go through the world like. How do adults look? How do they act? Is there an instruction manual somewhere that I missed while typesetting scanalations for Yu-Gi-Oh?3
I think the problem is that I just feel unrelatable to my readership… aka other adults.
Why? Who knows! And I’m definitely not relatable to the skibidi toilet kids, either.4
I feel like I just don’t have much in common with other people, especially not my contemporaries and the personas they project online. My house isn’t aesthetic, and I take selfies about as well as my 86-year-old grandmother. I don’t go out very often to restaurants, and most of my vacations consist of either my parents’ thirty-year-old decrepit timeshare condo or a Disney trip, and I don’t have big opinions on Taylor Swift or the Bachelor or *waves hands* sports. I like a lot of the same things I did when I was a teenager. Hell, I still have some shoes from when I was a teenager, and those suckers are close to fifteen years old now.
And the silly thing is—you also probably have Converses from 2004, and you probably still listen to Green Day and Bowling for Soup. We probably have a lot of the same “adult” problems in common.
So here are my truths:
I still don’t understand taxes.
I’m in a constant battle with acne because I haven’t found a skincare solution that works.
I adopted three cats instead of kids (and I don’t think having children is a sign of being an adult, but all of my local friends have little ones running amuck, so it still feels a bit… weird).
I don’t host parties.5 See also: all my local friends have small children.
Speaking of my house, it has dilapidated lawn posts instead of a white-picketed fence. Half the grass is dying or dead. Oh, and my Dad comes over every two weeks to mow the lawn with a lawn mower that looks like the kind of creation you’d call shotgun in on the way to Hell.
I am thirty-something, unmarried, and I have logged over 700 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Oh, and I still read (and write) fanfic from a pretty niche anime community.
In almost every reality, I’m probably pretty relatable. Hell, I lament to other single friends daily about the trials and tribulations of not having anyone to split dishwashing duty with, or cooking duty, or bathroom duty, or utilities, or a mortgage—
Anyway.
Maybe it’s simply that it feels like to be a successful romance author, I have to have a successful romance myself. Things that I can post about and say see, I know what I’m writing about.
But the fact is: I don’t!
My life isn’t romantic at all.6
I write the romances I want to see in the world, not the ones I’ve had.
And that brings me back to the top of the post—how do you solve a problem like Maria? How do I craft a social media presence from fiction? How do I figure out how to be relatable when the stories I write are lives I’ve never lived, never will live, never really want to live, either? What do I talk about? How do I share parts of me that aren’t there because I haven’t made them up yet?
I don’t know. I think I’m just rambling. I’m good at that, like I said earlier. You get me talking on a topic and I’m like the Energizer Bunny. I just keep going and going and going and going…
But do I really want to shrug off the idea people have of me for the person I really am? Which would benefit readers more? An idea of me, snatches of half-fantasy truths and realistic lies? Or the real me, battling acne and a perpetually-clogging shower drain and a territorial carpenter bee on my back deck and imposter syndrome and the latest update in Dreamlight Valley and the compulsion to book last-minute trips to Disney World just to try a new limited-edition snack?
I know the answer. But it’s hard.
Luckily for all of us, I’m soooooooo freaking done with giving a shit.
So, I’m going to go turn off my sprinkler in the front yard and finish watching The Apothecary Diaries while I eat Doritos and try not to kill my last remaining survivor in Oxygen Not Included. Then I’m going to play Dungeons and Dragons with some online friends, and feed my cats their ridiculous dinner7, and sign a billion bookplates for my book releasing on June 25th, A Novel Love Story.
Oh! And if you’re reading this between April 17th and April 19th, Barnes and Noble is having a 25% off sale for their members! (And premium members get an extra 10% on print pre-orders!) So you can just mosey on over there and pre-order the BN Exclusive Edition.8
Amazing.
I think I’ve talked about this already. But I’m going to talk about it again because I am nothing if not a broken record because I am nothing if not a broken record.
On a hellish trip home from watching the eclipse,
told me to start talking about Disney animatronics to distract everyone from the sinking feeling of insanity, and I spent the next hour and a half doing just that. And yes, I am wickedly excited to see the new A1000s in Tiana’s Bayou Adventure in person, especially Louis!More importantly, how do you look like the kind of adult other adults tell their kids to run to if there’s an emergency? How do you be the good kind? The thoughtful kind?
Which is one of the reasons why I’ve stepped away from middle grade and young adult novels. While some stories are universal, at the moment I don’t feel like I’m in the same universe.
Unless it’s a Dungeons and Dragons session, but that’s only because I do own a house and no one will call CPS when I trap my kids in the master bedroom.
Unless you count dancing with a cat to Brown-Eyed Girl by Jimmy Buffett at one in the morning.
For everyone who doesn’t care: Fancy Feast’s Grilled Chicken in Gravy, topped with freeze-dried minnows, diced chicken hearts, and maybe a sprinkling of salmon skin if they’re particularly good tonight.
Yes, it’s paperback, and yes, it does have an essay I’m very proud of in the back—and a word search! Be sure to find the horniest trope!
I hear you, I see you, I feel you. I'm constantly feeling like I've missed some critical markers, and now I'm staring down 40 and feel like I have no more clue what my life is going to look like than I did fifteen years ago. Less, in some ways. And yeah, I play Nintendo when I'm stressed out and I still listen to the same music I did in my youth. (I read a really fascinating thing a while back about how our brains are best wired to intake and appreciate music between the ages of 10 and 25, just as a developmental thing, which is why every generation is convinced the music of their teenage and college years is the best. And we're all right! As far as our own brains are concerned). The only thing that's kept me going the past few months is the Disney trip I have planned for May.
It's just... it's hard, and it really is harder for Millennials than it has been for prior generations in a lot of ways. Financially, we're the most-screwed generation in American history, and gods only know what social media has done to our brains and our ability to enjoy life. But... we're here. And I have faith in us to make the best of it, somehow. 💗
Anyway your books are great and I'd happily listen to you talk about Audio-Animatronics.
I have never really related to a post more than I do this one. I am in my mid-30's with two doggos, and a large number of Legos. No one has ever really told me how to adult properly and I think I am discovering that I don't care to do what my parents would think of as doing it right.
Major question: what fanfiction are you still writing??? I am binge reading fanfiction from a series from an author I no longer support because she is the worst. And honestly, would love to branch especially if it means I need to watch a new anime.