Mirror, mirror
Little Christine
by Christine Kling
The time is 6:00 a.m. and I am sitting in a dark corner of the lobby of the Hilton Doubletree Hotel in Portland, Oregon. I’m here for Left Coast Crime 2015, one of many crime fiction fan conferences I’ve attended since I first started down this road as a published writer. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I will turn 61 years old, but every time I find myself in this conference environment, I revert to feeling like the little girl pictured at the top of this page. She’s little, vulnerable, and most of all, she wants to be liked.
At the start of this year, I chose my 3 words for 2015 and one of them was BRAVE. I keep trying to remember that word when I walk into the lobby filled with authors and readers and scan the crowd looking for a familiar face. My heart speeds up and my palms grow slick with cold sweat. I feel just like I did back when I was a kid and I was carrying my tray through the school cafeteria looking for a place to sit. Somebody please, look my way and make me not alone.
I don’t have any problem casting off the lines and pulling out to sea in a boat. Sometimes, when I talk to non-sailors about the many miles I’ve sailed across oceans, they will say, “Oh, you must be so brave!” Hardly! I’m not terrified of the sea like I am of this conference milieu where it feels like a high school popularity contest. There are the “cool authors” surrounded by their flocks of fans, but I have never been one of them. I’ve always been a bit of an outsider, content to hug the walls and corners of the room, both hoping and not that someone will recognize me.
Certainly, I have felt fear at sea, and each time I’ve taken off on a passage, I have felt a respect for the many things that could go wildly wrong. But those dangers are familiar to me. Every time we get into an automobile and hurtle ourselves through space at upwards of sixty miles an hour we are also putting ourselves into a familiar danger. We don’t dote on it. So, no, I am not a very brave person — yet. But I’m working on it.
I recognize that it takes a certain amount of courage and ego to put one’s stories out into the wild and invite others read them. It requires even more courage to go to Amazon or Goodreads and read through the reader reviews of my stories. But the most difficult thing of all for me is to walk up to a crowd of writers and readers and feel brave and confident. Most of the time I step off the elevator, see the crowd and feel this instant flight mechanism kick into overdrive. I glance at the doors that lead out to the street and think how great it would be to walk the streets of this city alone. I look around for the nearest restroom. It’s okay to be alone if I choose to be alone, but alone in a crowd feels like rejection. We writers get enough of that.
But I am here for one thing – to network and meet other writers and readers. It’s not enough to just write the books. This business also requires marketing and promotion. So, I step into the crowd.
What is it about writers that makes so many of us introverts? I guess we have to be loners to enjoy spending all the solo hours at a computer traveling through imaginary worlds. And that is what makes life on a boat so appealing to writers, I think. We can sail our home offices away from the crowds. But from time to time, we need to get out and press the flesh. I know it’s been a while since I’ve done this sort of thing when I meet a few old friends and they comment about how long it has been since I attended one of these national conferences. There’s a reason for that.
The lobby is starting to fill as people come downstairs for the first large group session in the ballroom. My panel is at 10:15 later this morning. Our topic is “Write What You Know:Personal Experiences into Stories.” There is a quote that is often wrongly attributed to Hemingway. “It is easy to write. Just sit in front of your typewriter and bleed.” It doesn’t matter who first uttered that idea — most writers, I recognize the truth in it. In order to write stories that will keep readers turning the pages, feeling the tension, not wanting to turn out the lights, I have to be in touch with my own fears, with the vulnerable little kid who might not be the face I see in the mirror anymore, but she’s still inside me. And you know what?
She was also pretty damn brave.
Fair winds!
Christine
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