Secret Demons

By Sacchi Green

You want to know about my secret life? But if I tell you, it won’t be secret anymore. I don’t mean that I’d have to kill you, it’s not that big a deal, but still.

All right. My secret life is the mundane, everyday, ordinary one. My non-secret life, the public, online, writing life, which sometimes feels like the main one, doesn’t exactly try to conceal the other life—I do occasionally mention being a grandmother, and once in a while post photos of my Christmas cookies and flowers and vegetables from my garden, and share my muggle name from time to time because I have used that one on a few of my stories and anthologies.

I use a real photo of myself on Facebook and elsewhere, one that’s well over five years old at this point, granted, but not that much has changed. Out in public places like the science fiction/fantasy convention I participated in last weekend, doing two panels on writing and one erotica reading, both of my names are on my badge, and I’d probably answer sooner to the Sacchi one than to Connie. I do also appear in the quite lived-in flesh for readings with whichever of my anthology contributors can be got together in a reading venue, and I tell myself that the shock value of the contrast between what I write and how I look is a plus, and also tell myself that if I channel my fictional characters well enough I’ll get by. Being the editor of the anthologies also lets me feel on the dominant side, so that helps. Having my photogenic contributors with me helps most of all. Here's a shot of our reading at Womencrafts in Provincetown last October. See what I mean? I'm just the short, sort of vague one on the far right:

Okay, none of this really seems to apply to a theme of secret lives. Most of my immediate family and close friends know in general what I write, and a few of them even read it. A distant nephew (I can’t remember the complicated cousins/second cousins technicalities) discovered my Sacchi Facebook page because I posted now and then on another relative’s page and I guess he was curious and recognized my photo, so now he’s shared the news with some of the other young cousins and they claim to think it’s cool. Certainly cooler than the mundane self they’d known me as.

So, still no actual secret life. But here’s the thing. When I was an awkward kid I was a voracious reader, and felt at times that the lives of the characters were my own secret lives, certainly more interesting than my own.  Now, when I’m writing a story that I get deeply into, my characters are acting out my secret lives. My many secret lives, ones I didn’t know were in me until I focused on the writing.

In my early days of writing erotica I saw the bio of a fellow contributor to several anthologies and saw that she lived in more or less my territory. She saw that about me, too, and eventually we met at a reading and were friends for several years. She noted, of course, the disconnect between my writing and my real-life persona, and theorized that I must have some terrific demons in my mind. I loved the idea. Demons through which (or through whom?) I could live a secret life. Many secret lives, in fact. Almost enough to makeup for having a fairly prosaic and rather stressful life otherwise.

That doesn’t mean I have no secrets at all, secrets that depend on who I’m keeping them from. I’ll sometimes share personal things here that I won’t on Facebook, which doesn’t make much sense, but there you are. There are some secrets about my life, though, that I won’t share even here. Secrets of an almost I’d-have-to-kill-you nature. No, don’t worry, I’m not lying about being female. Lisabet has met me, fairly recently, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to deceive her if there’d been any deceiving to do.