Romance in HD

Over the years, I have gone by many names. Well, two. I’ve gone by two names. There’s my real name (Holly) and my fake name (Rosalie Stanton). I wrote books under my fake name for a long time until my hatred for that fake name grew so noxious that I didn’t care about selling books anymore. Granted, there were a lot of things informing this (and more on that later), but I first flirted with the idea of pulling a Richard Bachman on my Rosalie Stanton penname in 2019, just after hitting my ten-year publishing milestone.

The suggestion was received with a lot of confusion. Why would I, after a decade of building equity in this name/brand, want to throw all that in the shitter? Was I crazy? Stupid? Self-sabotaging? Probably. But most of all, I wasn’t Rosalie. Not anymore.

So, Holly, how did you become Rosalie Stanton in the first place?

While I’ve been writing stories pretty much from the second I could hold a pencil, access to the internet and its wonderful, terrifying anonymity provided me a place to share my work with strangers for constant feedback. And since I wrote unlicensed continuations or alternative tellings of existing intellectual property, I didn’t have to worry about things like plagiarism (I was young, forgive me). I started writing fanfic when I was 13 or 14, which continued through college. In fact, though I majored in creative writing on paper, my true area of study was Spuffy (Buffy/Spike) fanfiction.

In 2009, though, freshly out of college and out of my mother’s house for the first time, I was ready for something new. After all, I’d done the thing! I’d become an adult! And as an adult, I was ready to be a REAL GODDAMNED WRITER, not just someone who wrote fanfic all day. Because capitalism! Hobbies are worthless unless you monetize! I couldn’t be a REAL GODDAMNED WRITER until someone paid to read my work.

But there was a problem in becoming a REAL GODDAMNED WRITER. A not-small problem. See, my grandfather (who I love and miss dearly) was becoming more internet savvy. He had learned what Google was and how to use it. The last thing I needed was him trying to Google his granddaughter and discovering all the sex-filled books I was in the process of releasing into the world. Not because he would have disowned me or anything so dramatic, but he would have worried (particularly about my eternal soul), and then he would have told my grandmother, who would have also worried (also about my eternal soul). My grandparents were wonderful, loving people, even if afterlife-obsessed, and I didn’t want them worrying about me. I also didn’t want to upset them (deference to authority figures, especially family authority figures, is one of my fatal flaws, as will become very clear). So when that first contract came in, I decided I’d proceed under a nom de plume.

Why Rosalie Stanton?

My mother became obsessed with a small southern town called Natchez when she was 12, and while my brother fought to forge a relationship with my father by forcing himself to love baseball, I forged a relationship with my mother by also falling in love with the Natchez. It wasn’t hard—I grew up in a household that was fascinated with all things Civil War and, with an inherent inclination to gobble up history, I was an easy sell. When I was 12, I asked my mom to take me to Natchez with her. I wanted to tour all the slave-built antebellum homes and blood-soaked battlegrounds, learn about antebellum southern culture, and essentially rubberneck some of the worst parts of American history. To me, this was always innocuous. After all, learning about horrible things is much better than pretending they never happened. I wasn’t there to glory in the past but to study it. All that mattered was my mother and I had something to bond over. And thus began a 20+ year tradition of us visiting the place at least once annually, usually twice and sometimes even more.

And bonus! Traveling to Natchez always, always, always tickled my writing muse. The first novel I wrote was inspired by the architecture of a home I only saw in photos until my inaugural visit (yes, I wrote that book at age 12. It was a thinly veiled rip-off of The Shining. I am nothing if not derivative). Since then, I’ve set countless works (fanfic and original publications) in Natchez. It was my home away from home, a place that I couldn’t visit without wanting to write SOMETHING.

So when the time came to select that nom de plum, my mind immediately took me to Natchez. Specifically, the antebellum homes of Fort Rosalie and Stanton Hall. Rosalie sounded like the name of a romance writer, right? Right.

So, in 2009, Rosalie Stanton was born.

What changed?

Fast forward a few years. I’m a young adult, married to my forever partner-in-crime, Aaron, and we’re having a fight. Well, he wouldn’t call it a fight, and in hindsight, it wasn’t one. But it felt like one at the time, entirely because of my reaction to what he was saying. And what he was saying was (not in these words, but essentially), “You are participating in white supremacy every time you visit Natchez, which profits off selling a sanitized version of its history, and I find that repugnant.”

Reader, I was more than hurt. I was insulted. The idea that my partner saw me like this made me physically ill. My interest in the area has never been “yay racism,” and he knew that—he wasn’t calling me a racist, but he also was, in a way. He was calling out racist behavior that my privilege led me to believe was innocuous. It was not a fun night. The not-argument-argument was heated enough that when it ended, we agreed not to discuss it further to keep the peace. Heated on my side, I should clarify. I was That Defensive White Bitch. And despite this, Aaron loves me enough to put my emotions over reason. He didn’t want to upset me; that wasn’t the purpose of the conversation. It was, however, the result, and also why we avoided revisiting it for a long time.

But that didn’t stop the conversation from living rent-free in my head for years. Even now, I consider that discussion a pivotal moment in my growth. Because he was right. I was engaging in racist behavior. As with all things, my intentions were incidental. My actions were what counted.

Time passed. I don’t know how much, only that all this continued to fester. At some point, I read an article penned by a woman whose ancestors came to this country on slave ships about her experience touring antebellum homes, and I started thinking about things like how slaves were hardly mentioned in the tours of these homes and never as the focal point. I thought about how it was rare to hear the word “slave” in Natchez at all; in its place, the less-offensive-to-white-sensibilities word “servant” was in full circulation. I thought about how I never learned the names of the enslaved people who ran the houses, what their lives were like, or anything about them aside from a quick anecdote to address the question almost inevitably posed by some tourist, “Were the homeowners good to their slaves?” In fact, the only slave whose name I remember hearing on any plantation tour was that of a woman accused of accidentally killing two little white girls in an effort to be promoted from fieldwork to the big house. She was only worth mentioning to vilify. Let that fucking sink in.

(It’s also unlikely she ever actually existed, but two dead white girls make for a good story, especially when they were killed in service of a slave’s desire to be elevated in the eyes of her white master.)

I fell out of love with Natchez. I fell out of love with the experience that had been so integral in establishing my relationship with my mother. I started saying no when she inquired about future vacation dates. I didn’t want to be involved; I was ashamed that it had taken me as long as it had to realize just how fucking racist this hobby of mine was. Ashamed that I’d clung to it even after Aaron, the best goddamn person I know, pointed out what was obvious. Ashamed that I had been more insulted by being tied to racist behavior than examining just why that implied accusation had hurt so much. A part of me had to have known it was true; otherwise, I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did, more concerned with protecting my feelings and defending my hobby than hearing the truth.

Still, disassociating myself from this hobby was difficult. My mother owns the company I work for. And as we have established, I have a thing about not wanting to upset the authority figures in my family, especially those who sign my paychecks. In 2022, when my mother asked if I’d go with her, I said I would if she couldn’t find anyone else (thinking mostly for her safety, as she is now over 60). On the trip down, I was asked point-blank why I stopped loving Natchez. I strive to be truthful in all endeavors, and a point-blank question isn’t easy to BS. So I took a chance and answered honestly.

There was no falIout, thankfully, except that I haven’t been asked to go again. I doubt I ever will. And I couldn’t be happier about that.

Time to kill Rosalie

As of this writing, I haven’t published anything original in nearly five years. Part of that was because of my resentment for the name…but not all of it. In 2019, after completing my paranormal romance series, I found I was burned out on romance. Burned out on publishing altogether, actually. I’d lost sight of why I enjoyed writing in the first place, too consumed in release dates and production schedules for something that yielded little more than a vague, fleeting sense of accomplishment. Throw in a name that I had been told I would be crazy to ditch and, well, the drive to produce anything new fizzled and died. Why bother when the name attached to it represented a part of myself that I found repugnant?

In stepping back from publishing, though, I rediscovered a truth about myself that I had always touted as accurate without truly embracing, and that is that I write out of the love of writing. The pressure to prove I was a REAL GODDAMNED WRITER by monetizing my hobby had sapped the joy I’d experienced in creating stories while in college. I used to write like I would suffocate if I didn’t; once I started publishing, I went months, even more than a year, without writing anything I could be proud of. And a not-writing Holly is a fucking miserable Holly. It’s no coincidence that the 2010s were spent wrestling with depression and anxiety, even before I had a tangible reason (the sickness and eventual death of my father) to point to as a cause.

Also? I missed fandom. I missed my ship. Most of my published work has been not-so-subtley Spuffy-coded because part of me was always there anyway. Even years after I stopped writing actual Spuffy, I’d wake up from dreams I’d had about them, always with a bittersweet pang of I miss that. So, after my father’s death, and the conclusion of my paranormal series (which remains my proudest original achievement), I thought…why am I spending time and energy pursuing something that doesn’t make me happy? For money? For the pressure of a release schedule? For the pleasure of treating my stories like a commodity rather than a creation, all in service of being a REAL GODDAMNED WRITER? My books didn’t make enough to justify doing this to myself and I was fucking exhausted giving a shit about that. Stories are stories are stories, and it doesn’t matter if you get paid to tell them or not. What matters is the people you touch through your work and your own sense of self. The identity you piece and present through the things you create. I’ve been told by more than one person that reading my fic has helped them get through something terrible, has spoken to them when they were on the verge of breaking, has been their companion through the dark stuff life threw at them without warning. There’s not a dollar amount you can put on that feeling and I was done pretending there was.

So, in late 2019, I returned to my roots. I had abandoned a Spuffy fic in 2008 that I’d never fully considered abandoned because some of me thought I might be back. I found my original outline, revised it to reflect the person I had become in the time since creating it, and finished that fic just as the pandemic had taken hold of the globe, shortly after the publication of my final (to date) original work. At the time, I told Aaron I was taking a year off publishing to write as much fic as I wanted. The best part? I didn’t have to be Rosalie anymore. All of my Spuffy work was already under the name Holly and had been for years—Holly or HollyDB (for my middle and maiden name) for those archives where the username Holly was taken. Either way, it was me. The writer I’d been before I decided I wasn’t a real writer until I’d done the publishing thing.

This isn’t to say I regret the decision to publish (I don’t at all) or never intend to write anything original again (I very much do). I do regret the belief that I had going into publishing, though. The past few years have been very formative where that is concerned, helping me realize that being a REAL GODDAMNED WRITER doesn’t mean one or the other, just writing what I want to write and fuck the rest. Being my authentic self rather than a salesperson with a PR smile. I’ve always known this intellectually, but emotional knowledge and intellectual knowledge are two different schools of knowledge. I finally achieved the emotional knowledge. The only hurdle remaining was…god, that fucking name. That awful fucking name.

But it was 2023 now, almost 2024. Nearly five years had passed since I first flirted with killing Rosalie Stanton. The name equity might still be there just because the internet is forever, but my sales have been abysmal since selling hasn’t been a focus. So, the question became, just what the hell did I have to lose in terms of my personal writing goals in killing her? Especially if I am not writing for money. What did equity matter at all with my new view of myself, and what makes me happy?

Fucking nothing.

So that’s it. Ding dong, the bitch is dead, and she died so the real me could live. Incidentally, the timing of her death couldn’t be better. It’s likely going to be at least a couple more years before I start thinking about returning to writing and publishing original work, if not longer. Now is when it makes sense to rebrand my work under my new-old-original name with new covers (mostly; Sinners & Saints covers, I can never quit you), new editions, and a new outlook. If I sell some books as a result of all this, that’s swell. If I don’t, well, I have a pretty website. Even better—I can answer to my own name at book conventions and sign my own name in the books I do sell. That’s worth everything to me.

This truly was the perfect murder.

My name is Holly. It has been since a cold December night in 1984 when I disappointed my late grandfather (the first time) by being born 50 minutes after midnight, almost an hour too late to officially be his birthday present. It’s the only name I will ever answer to again.

And if I’m wrong and there is an afterlife, I’ll just have to trust he is at peace with who I am now that he’s on that side of it.