Better Late Than Never
Please allow me to introduce myself …
So in August of 2016, I discovered the Weekly Knob prompt challenge on Medium and asked S Lynn Knight and Aura Wilming about joining. Up until that point, I hadn’t shown anyone my fiction for over 20 years.
I might not have done so last year either, but life happened: That same month, I got laid off from the company where I’d worked for 21 years. I’m not going to badmouth my former employers; they were as kind as they could be about everything and gave me plenty of notice instead of booting me straight out the door. A very generous severance package took some of the sting out.
But not all of the sting. That place was a huge part of my life and my identity for so long that there was no way it wasn’t going to hurt when I left.
So there I was: a middle-aged lady who’d just had one of the cornerstones of her world knocked out from under her.
What to do next?
I settled on reinvention. I’d won NaNoWriMo for the last five years and was itching to try my hand at some shorter pieces again. Sandy and Aura let me join the Knob as a writer, and I was thrilled when I got the Saturday morning email telling me that the Knob had accepted and published my first submission.
And then! People actually read my story and said incredibly kind, supportive things. When I got an email that afternoon telling me that my story had ten recommends, my jaw dropped. That story even made a brief appearance in the old editor’s sidebar that Medium doesn’t do anymore. I felt like a writer for the first time in far too long.
So a door closed and a window opened. I decided to use this unexpected time to try to sell some short pieces and start querying one of my novels.
But it occurred to me recently that I just kind of deposited myself here on Medium and started posting fiction and not much else.
Shaunta Grimes laid down a challenge to her Ninja Writers to put up a Medium post every day in May, and I’ve chosen to accept. I figured I might as well start off by finally introducing myself after all this time.
So: I’m Nicole. I’m in my late forties. I was born in New York City and my family moved to Maryland when I was six, and I’m determined to get back to NYC to live one day.
I’ve been married long enough that I have to think about it and count on my fingers whenever someone asks me (it’s been 17 years). We live outside of Washington, DC. We used to have four cats, but it’s been a rough couple of years and we’re down to two.
In 2011 I was a Jeopardy contestant, and I’m hoping this isn’t the last really interesting thing I ever do. Getting a novel agented and published would be dream fulfillment right up there with getting to tell Alex Trebek my witty personal anecdote.
The last time prior to 2016 that I shared any of my fiction was in a creative writing class I took at Georgetown University back in 1994. The instructor’s idea of effective critique was to toss my story draft in a wastebasket in front of the rest of the class. That’s probably a big part of the reason why I didn’t share any of my fiction in public for a very long time. I wasn’t in a good place back then anyhow and didn’t need to seek out extra shit from the F. Scott Failgeralds of the world.
Though I’ve had the account for years, I’ve recently become pretty active on Twitter, so I’m @insomnicole over there if you’d like to say hi.
I’ll probably have more to say about myself as this challenge month rolls on, but that’s enough for now. It’s nice to meet you.
This is part of the Ninja Writers May Post-A-Day Challenge. If you enjoyed this, I’d ❤ a recommend heart. You can find a listing of my fiction on Medium here, and I blog occasionally over at my personal website.
