Welcome to my Substack. You are in the section devoted to “Pretending to Sleep,” my short story about life under Ceaucescu’s tyranical regime.
This short story came about in 2017 for a workshop hosted by Kristine Katherine Rusch. She was looking for stories for her Passions anthology. Stories where the protagonist was passionate about something. The guidelines stated “don’t hurt the little children and fuzzy animals.”
This was the first “discovery writing” story I’ve ever written, i.e. I sat down without any idea about what I was going to write in terms of plot or genre. This story poured out of me in one nine-hour sitting. When my husband came home from work I was bawling my eyes out in front of the computer. He thought someone had died and I couldn’t even talk well enough to tell him why I was crying. I just pointed at the screen and he sat down to read.
I sent the story (then titled The Greatest Crime) in before I lost my nerve. Months later, when we arrived in Oregon for the in-person part of the workshop, I almost pulled it from submission. Of the six stories I wrote for that workshop, this was the one I thought would get me cancelled or make me persona non grata. I was so stunned when Kris Rusch said “Buy” that I thought she said “Bye” and almost got up to leave the room.
It was my first professional sale.
Two years later in 2019, the Passions anthology had not been filled and I pulled my story for self-publication. Since then I’ve had multiple requests for additional stories or a full length novel. One of the reasons I haven’t sat down to write more like it is because it took me two weeks to recover from writing this short story.
But every once in awhile, I do have other things to say about what life was like in Romania, so I started making posts about it on Facebook. Which promptly got me pilloried and my posts suppressed or taken down and myself threatened with bans for repeatedly “violating community standards.” No violations of any standards were taking place other than people being pissed off at me (or at each other) and using their stasi-like powers to report things they didn’t like or didn’t want to hear. Something I hoped never to see here in America.
So when I discovered Substack I decided to take that kind of content off social media. I’m assuming that if you are here and subscribing to my Substack, you at least want to hear what I have to say.
My Substack has four sections: Monalisa’s Musings, which is random stuff I find interesting enough to comment on at some length; So You Wanna Be a Writer, which is about the craft of writing; Works in Progress, where I post snippets from my upcoming novel, Ravages of Honor: Lineage; and this section, Pretending to Sleep, which is about life in Romania during communism. You can be subscribed to all, some, or just one. You are in control.
Welcome.