Hi, I'm Sue, and I write spanking books

If you're friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed I changed my profile pic recently. Yep, to a real picture of me. I needed to change my profile pic anyway, because I'd noticed other authors using the same exact image on Twitter and Facebook. Having the same profile pic as other writers isn't good for your branding as an author, or so they say.

I'd been wanting to use my real picture for a while, but I was holding back because I wasn't completely out of the smutty writer closet. While many people in my life already knew about my naughty writings, there were some people who hadn't a clue. I worried. I kept thinking "what if so-and-so finds out what I write?"

So I decided to test the waters. I told some people who didn't know, just to see how they'd react. Since my youngest child starts kindergarten in a month, some of my friends and acquaintances were assuming I'd go back to work soon, and I've been fielding this question for months now. Whenever someone asked, "so where will you be working next year?" or "you're not just going to stay at home, are you?", I started telling the truth. I even told them my pen name.

Guess what? No one gave me any judgmental looks. Not even when I used the words "spanking romance" and "bdsm." Quite the opposite in fact. People were curious, and many admitted to enjoying erotic stories, even stories with spanking. One of my friends even confessed to me that she spanks her husband. I'm sure I'll run into someone one day who gives me the "oh my god, you're a pervert!" look, but it's okay. I feel ready for it.

My middle child is very much into taking pictures, and when she overheard me talking about needing an author photo, she insisted that she be the one to take it. She followed me around for days, snapping my picture, yelling at me to hold still and say cheese. In exchange for a good author pic, I owed her two trips to Dairy Queen. This isn't my new profile pic, but it is my favorite picture she took because it pretty much sums up my summer. 

I guess what I learned from the whole coming out process is that there are more open minded people in my life than I'd previously thought. This makes me happy.