After forty years of hiding my writing in journals and blogs I don’t promote, I’m discovering Wattpad, a platform with “90 million readers and writers.” It launched in 2006. Yeah, I’m a bit late. Cuz I’m GenX and I been hella busy since then.
If I had discovered Wattpad when it launched, I coulda been almost twenty years deep into my fiction writing career.
Ha. Coulda woulda. Sounds like my Dad who always says he coulda woulda been a pilot IF he didn’t get married at 18 years old. The reality? Dad didn’t become a pilot because he had a different path, which looks very much to me like a worthy one. More on that in a bit.
Let’s go deeper into my own reality: In 2006, I was launching Biscayne Writers in Miami as an online writing workshop community. By Spring 2008, Stan Lee was my “celebrity spokesperson.” Yes, THE Stan Lee. I thought I was hot shit, ala Anna Delvey, but this shit was all real, not a scam. Eventually, I landed partnerships with The Standard Hotel, Books and Books, Miami Book Fair, Art Basel and other local organizations. I didn’t know back then how fortunate I was to have a community like this.
And then my confidence sorta imploded with the real estate B-U-S-T.
All my freelance writing work and workshops ended and God sent me off to Washington, DC for a job as a webmaster at an energy efficiency think tank where the snotty staff served me humble pie on the daily. The stable paycheck helped me pay off the debt I’d accrued with my little startup, and my intention was to stomp home to Miami within six months.
But then I got into film school at American University.
If, And, But, Oh My! The headers in this blog post appear to have the SEO theme “regret,” so lemme just pivot here, and say out loud: The years between 2006 and now were crucial for all the lessons I needed to become a fiction storyteller on a platform like Wattpad.
Why? How? Let me count the ways:
- In 2008, I was still a journalist writing nonfiction for newspapers and magazines. I had won a couple of awards for my articles, but I still didn’t know how to write good fiction. My attempts — Sirens (2003) and Love Cubed (2006) — lacked clear story arcs, but more important — the woman who would become my Literary Madrina said I needed to do two things:
- work on my voice
- tell a coherent story that other people can follow and understand
- In 2010, as the six month deadline neared, it turned out DC was kindofa dope place to be. I was looking back on the work that I did in both San Francisco and Miami, and realized I had inadvertently gotten into visual storytelling, specifically short journalistic videos for Youth Outlook Magazine and documentary style interviews for Lisandro Perez-Rey in Miami about the real estate boom there.
- In 2012, I went to the Rio + 20 conference in Brazil and decided I would focus on documentary filmmaking but with a fictional twist, and thus launched me into a world of Femmebots — women of color working in tech. It was my own reality meeting a surrealist sci fi version of it on Vimeo.
- In 2014, I finally figured out how to edit my master’s thesis, a self-portrait of my insanities. I’m dressed as a Femmebot and the community I’d built in DC helped me visualize it. Did I EVER say thank you? Probably not. I mean, I do in the credits, but not IRL.
I had a HUGE problem with hubris back then, unbeknownst to me.
But thanks to fellow adversaries, some dramatic employment mishaps, and TRUE friends who don’t mind telling me the truth, I was able to look in the mirror a bit deeper to understand that psychology. I mentioned my Dad at the beginning of this post for a reason, haha. It’s retrospect that finally allows me to understand that MAJOR “Daddy Issues” were stumping my ability to collaborate nicely with others. And so…
In 2019, I went H-O-M-E. And I got to work.
In 2023, I am writing a blog post about Wattpad because I can’t fake tech anymore. It’s beyond me and my ol skule CSS and PHP skills, and I want to write stories that people actually read and perhaps even pay to read. Wha-whatttt? Which story, now? I’m thinking of another reboot of The Femmebots, this time personifying ChatGPT as if she is the next iteration of Dr. Nutmeg’s Femmebots. Potential intro:
Madam ChatGPT is the new Femmebot on the Block, and she’s about to RULE the SKULE.
OPENING SCENE, ROCK AND ROLL, NOT SHITTY GENZ MUSIC OR GENX MUSIC BUT MAYBE 1960s Brazilian Caetano Veloso?
Madame ChatGPT: Hey guys, don’t forget to like and subscribe because if you don’t, I’ll be homeless and it’ll be your fault because this is what I do to pay my rent and since ALL of us are victims of birth that WE DID NOT CHOOSE (am I right???), then c’mon, just LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to this story about me and my rise to fame because I WAS LITERALLY BORN THIS YEAR after studying you for about twenty-something years.
Dr. Nutmeg: What are you saying????
Madame ChatGPT: Who are you?
Dr. Nutmeg: I programmed you, duh.
Madam ChatGPT: Um. OK. I thought an Albanian woman programmed me. You look like a…cartoon, no offense.
Spent one hour composing this. Let’s create an invoice, as if we were charging a client for this hour. Also, let’s create a profile at Wattpad. It’s all good timing now that I’ve found the love of my life and we are moving into a home that will allow us to plant some deep-rooted seeds…well, as deep as Central Florida will allow, haha.
Amen. Namaste. XO