On People Knowing Your Name

Good Ol' Royale Palm

When I walk around the docks these days after leasing an office at Royale Palm for four years, I know almost everyone's name who works or lives on a boat here, and they all know my name too. The marina is a low key liveaboard basin, one of last in the Fort Lauderdale area. To be known is a comfortable feeling. Whether or not you agree with their politics or have said anymore than hi, you have this brotherhood of sharing space and understanding who each other is in a basic way. And I think these feelings apply to being an writer too.

You see I feel the same way sometimes with regard to my writing. I get that same comfortable sense sometimes when talking to someone or seeing something I have written referred to or repeated elsewhere. I exist and people, whether they disagree or like what I wrote, know me. And I know them.

At first there was a bit of startled feeling like being caught wrapping a line around a winch the wrong way when people engaged me about what I had written. And I still dread criticism although I internalise negative comments as a compliment that what I say matters and the reader cares. You grow a thick and scaly skin in life. You become numb to the novelty. In a sense you become comfortable with the situation through experience in the same way you become comfortable with your fellow liveaboards at a marina. You settle down in a comfort zone.

When people talk to you about your writing, how do you feel? Do you smile coyly, start to sweat, run the other way, or wink at them?