I am a liar.
A pathological liar.
An ugly, evil monster who will lie at the drop of the hat to people that I love and love me back.
It didn't happen overnight. I didn't mean to be this way. Mom taught me to never lie, and even when I was a little kid, I couldn't lie to her even if it meant I would get in trouble.
By the time I grew into an adult, I had learned that there were some occasions when it was OK to lie. Like, if it were to protect someone's feelings. One time, on Christmas morning, it wasn't as if I could tell my great aunt Mary that the sweater she gave me was hideous.
It never even bothered me to receive a lie sometimes. Like when the girls I used to work with would tell me they liked my hair, or the color of my makeup. I knew what I looked like, they couldn't fool me. And it didn't really bother me because I could lie right back like that in the same way.
"Not tonight, I have a headache." That was usually not true, I just didn't want to fuck the guy all the time. It was before I was published, I was living with him for a little over a year and he wanted it every single night. The irony being that half the time he couldn't get it up anyway. Leading to more lies, "That's alright," I would tell him, "We'll try again later. It happens to everybody sometimes." At that point I could string multiple lies together without even thinking about it.
Still. I had been so naive in those days.
Then I would tell myself that a lie was forgivable if I was just protecting myself. It is true that I could be in mortal danger if my secret was ever known. I could only feel satisfaction about that for so long, and then I'd lie to my own mother again and any semblance of self-respect that I had left would be instantly shattered.
That's the real problem. One big lie leads to another. And another. It is a greedy machine that needs to be fed, lie upon lie, necessary to support the original.
Sometimes I felt so much remorse, it would make me sick. Sometimes depressed. Only I had no right to feel that way.
The remorse didn't keep me from putting an end to it. I kept it all going.
I had fantasies that I would get caught. Wouldn't that be something! My life would then change, and I could showboat who I really was. Suck in the limelight and show off the spoils. Of which there were a lot of. At this point, bottomless.
Then I would think of what would really happen if I were found out. My family would resent me, hate me probably. I would lose my friends, well, strike that, I didn't have any. Then there would be the media. I would be crushed. Vilified. Publicly executed.
I couldn't live with myself either way.
No, no, no, that came out as suicidal. It's not like that. I was simply disgusted with myself.
And I was completely and overwhelmingly stuck.
*
In college, I wrote this one book.
I shouldn't have. I should have been going out to parties. Making friends. Meeting guys. Maybe even getting laid.
Instead, I wrote a book.
A really good book.
Only nobody thought it was as good as I did.
Especially not any publishers.
Mom liked it and she told me so. Dad didn't read it. Novels set in the regency era were not his cup of tea, as he proudly pun'd it. The only thing my older brother ever read was the box his cereal comes in over breakfast, so I didn't even tell him I wrote anything. My younger sisters also didn't read it. If it wasn't on Snapchat, YouTube or Tik Tok, they had no time for anything else.
Fine.
I did eventually get the aforementioned boyfriend. The sex started out kind of good. Only it wasn't great. Too bad. I suppose it was just overrated per everything I knew about it, which was not much. Previously just a string of awkward, bumbling encounters that were over (thankfully) quickly. My ultimate conclusion was that I hadn't been missing anything.
I should have known better than moving in with him in my mid 20's. I had a good job as a technical writer for a medical device company and I freelanced writing sometimes, but the money wasn't terrible and more importantly, it was steady. He liked that and then sort of turned into a sponge. I suppose it felt good to be wanted. Until I wasn't wanted anymore.
That was a different kind of rejection. I'm partly to blame. I should have read what his true character was all about. I could do that in any story, too bad real life isn't just like fiction. And by the time I found out, I lost interest in trying so I moved out.
The book rejections kept coming, even after several rewrites.
I had understood that rejections were a thing, but this was ridiculous. And the feedback was anything but constructive.
So, what did I do? I wrote another book.
This one was the bomb. Awesome. Intelligent. Well-paced development of a great cast of characters, with depth and complex infrastructures.
Everything that the editors hated.
Well, fuck them.
I didn't like them right back.
So much so that I wrote a big old joke on them to get even. Or at least to make me feel better. It would mock them and their stupid publishing companies. I did everything but dedicate it to [insert name of publisher] and then write, "FUCK YOU!"
When the idea hit me, I laughed out loud. I started writing like a demon, chuckling every few paragraphs at just how stupid I could make it.
Centered around a handsome international spy for a secret government agency. He could turn any ordinary object into a weapon and was intelligent beyond any living human's known IQ. He meets a woman who is his intellectual match, beautiful beyond compare, with hands that were lethal weapons. Only she was a double agent. Or was she? She fell hard for him, or was she playing him? Could even be that she was just a top shelf prostitute using a neural altering chemical perfume. The bad guys turned out to be good guys, or were they? Twists, turns, surprises and every damn trope I could think of, I put in there.
I finished it and let it sit for a few weeks, then re-read it in disgust that I could come up with such drivel. I then gave it a rewrite but doubled the explosions and suspense.
Again, I let it sit for a few weeks until I drank a whole bottle of wine by myself while streaming a dumb rated-R movie. In the morning, I woke up at my writing desk, my cheek feeling the checkered pressure lines from using my keyboard as a pillow, and the prose filled with sex scenes that weren't there the last time I proofread it.
I left those paragraphs in.
I mean, they weren't pornographic. Nothing like that. Smutty-light, I'll call them. Only I did notice that my browser history was prompting porn, seemingly random, and some quite kinky. I don't remember any of my 'research' at all.
The scenes wouldn't even be considered erotica. I don't think so. I don't ever read that so what do I know? Yet they were just titillating enough that it would be right on the border of teenage boy masturbation worthy. And then I had to admit to myself, these scenes got me pretty hot and I proofread those parts more than others.
I let it sit for a couple of months. Then a rejection letter came in from my first book. Sure, rejections from my second book were fresher and trickling down to zero, but my first book? I don't even know how many years it had been since I sent it to that publisher.
