This is a blog about things I haven’t spoken of publicly before. Things that I was advised not to share ever, but sometimes not talking about something makes it grow larger until you can’t work around it. I’d been meaning to write this blog and post the attached video for a year, but I just kept putting it off, and then a woman on Twitter posted about her experience. She thought she was a coward, but bravery only exists in the face of fear, and her bravery helped me find my own. She shared her experience with a very creepy man that had verbally assaulted her in her own home. He never touched her, no bruises to show, just horrible sexual language that he had no right to say to her. She was trying to explain to some men that a woman doesn’t have to be actually physically assaulted to feel unsafe or even to feel violated. She made her point, and my first similar experience was when I was only ten-years-old thanks to an obscene phone caller that reduced me to hysterics. It would be the last time I was allowed to come home after school by myself for years after that call. My family and I both worried that he would come find me and do what he’d talked about. Women are more likely to be the victim of sexual based crimes, it’s just the truth. I learned at a tender age that the world was not safe, and there would be other incidents as I grew older that confirmed that even people you knew weren’t always safe havens, but this blog isn’t about that, not really. The every day caution that women have to exert to go through the world is just the nearest shared experience that I could come up with to try to explain how being famous feels when it goes wrong. Okay, how it feels to me when it goes wrong. I’m sure there are celebrities that handle it much better than I do. I am sharing my experience here, my feelings, because in the end that’s all any of us can share.
This blog is an introduction of sorts to the talk I gave at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference in Colorado last year. My husband filmed the talk with his phone, so that’s the quality of it (the volume is low), but it was the first time I spoke publicly about a lot of things that had happened to me in my career. The topic of all the key notes speeches that weekend were supposed to be on things that made you almost give up writing, like rejections, but Mary Robinette Kowal had done a hilarious speech the night before on that stumbling block, so I had to scrap my speech and start over. (By the way I just finished reading her book, The Calculating Stars, and I highly recommend it.) It forced me to think seriously about what had almost made me stop writing. Rejection was nothing compared to it. I decided to talk about it for the very first time in front of a room full of people I’d just met, or didn’t know at all. Now, I’m sharing it with all of you, with the whole internet, because it’s time I took back these pieces of myself that got broken. The only way I know to recover that part of myself is to write about it, and I can’t do that if I’m not wiling to talk publicly about it, so here we go.
Thank you to everyone that came out to see us on tour. I say us, because my husband, Jonathon and our security person were by my side at every event. Security person is nameless at his request. Jonathon especially got pulled into the limelight to help answer questions, but then we’re starting to plan our twenty year anniversary celebration, so we’ve been each other’s supplemental brains for a long time. Most of you married over ten years will understand exactly what I mean by that. Thanks to everyone that asked questions, that told us how much you loved Anita Blake and all the characters in the series. Thank you for sharing how much the books had touched you and your lives. I am still honored that my imaginary friends are your friends, too. I never planned or dreamed that my fiction could mean so much to so many people, and impact their real lives.
