All of Me Are at War with Each Other

Looking at the title of this post, you probably think I’ve either screwed up grammatically or I’ve finally lost it. It’s both. This is going to be a long post, but I’ve got a lot to tell you. Maybe you could just keep coming back every couple of days and pick up reading where you left off. The good news is that there are lots of pictures too. Yay! :D

If you’ve read my “ABOUT” page, you know I’m an award-winning, multi-published (more than 30 books) author as well as an artist. Other facts on that page (like the one about me owning a publishing company a few years ago) will probably come as a surprise to you too, so you should totally go read it.

This post is about the writer part of me...us...them...

By using a number of different pseudonyms over the years I’ve managed to thoroughly confuse myself...ourselves... Although I use several different pseudonyms, today I’m just focusing on two of them (well, three if you count Super Earthling).

Unless you use one or more pen names, you probably haven’t thought about how perplexing things can get. Why bother using a pen name? There are lots of reasons, including: writing in different genres; protecting family privacy; avoiding embarrassment (if you write erotic stories, etc.); your real last name is too long or difficult to spell or pronounce. I basically fall into all those categories.

The last couple of years, I’ve been busy getting the rights back to nearly 20 of my Daisy Dexter Dobbs books from my publishers so I can rewrite them as traditional, non-erotic romances. Many of them actually started that way, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. I plan to release them as written by Susan Bodendo, instead of Daisy.

As of last month it finally happened—all rights have reverted to me! (For those of you who are non-writers, this means I am no longer under contractual obligation to any publisher and can now do whatever I want with my own books.) I was thrilled--was being the operative word. Due, in part, to the enormous, unbelievable popularity of 50 Shades of Grey, my Daisy readers were emailing me like crazy, disappointed they could no longer find my sexy romance ebooks, and many of the print books. Where are they? What happened? Why can’t they buy them anymore?

My gleeful explanation that I was rewriting them as non-erotic books went over like a lead balloon.

It’s weird because my erotic romance novels don’t even have anything to do with bondage, BDSM, or masters and submissives, etc. They’re just 50 shades of fun-filled romantic comedies with lots of hot sex. But no matter—my readers made their point and I listened...begrudgingly.

Why take the trouble to update and rewrite? Why not just re-publish as is? Mostly because technology has exploded since I first wrote some of the books nearly a decade ago. Characters used pay phones; there were no cell phones, no texting; they watched VCRs; there was no Twitter, Facebook or Google; it was even a time before everyone used email. Etc., etc.

(I’ll save the story for another time about how Daisy, who started out as a writer of nice contemporary romantic comedy and humorous women’s fiction, eventually became an erotic romance writer. As Mae West was famous for saying, “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”)

Just to give you an idea of how it all went down...

--Super Earthling…roger wilco, over and out

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