I Changed My Name [Sort of]

Things might look a little different around these parts—and here's why.

Happy Friday!

It’s been exactly 14 days since I sent my last newsletter. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but when I started writing, I committed to sending my newsletter every week. I’ve missed a few days here and there.

Here are four reasons why.

Newsletter Lapse Reason #1: I lost my biggest fan.

My Grandma Faye passed away on May 2 after years of battling with pulmonary fibrosis. She went peacefully in her sleep, which was what we all wanted for her.

She was my biggest fan. She read every short story, every poem, and every novel I wrote, no matter how bad they were.

I even found an old folder of letters I had written to her when I was little. She had saved all of them, along with the newsletters I wrote for Turn On To Teens (or TOTT), a program she founded that helped incarcerated juveniles hone their writing and computer skills.

Only in the last year did I learn that she too wanted to be a writer when she grew up. For Christmas 2022, I gifted her a Storyworth subscription so she could write her own life story and share it with us.

In the copy she gave to me, she left me this wonderful note:

To Stina,

Thank you, thank you for your gift of Storyworth and the inspiration to gather a few memories on paper!

I have truly enjoyed the journey!

I love you!

Grandma Faye

P.S. Never stop dreaming! Write that novel! Do the screenplay! You can do it! I am proud of you!

This message gave me the courage to start writing again.

Now the trick is learning how to carry on without her in our lives.

Newsletter Lapse Reason #2: I changed my email marketing platform.

This newsletter might look different than it did before. That’s because I switched from MailerLite to Substack.

If this doesn’t interest you, I totally get it. Feel free to skip to Reason #3.

But if you are interested, I switched over because Substack was simply a lot more accessible.

MailerLite is very similar to the marketing platform I use at work, so I liked it when I started my own newsletter.

But I had a lot of issues integrating it with my website, so I needed something more seamless and direct.

Plus, I’ve heard from a lot of other writers and marketers that Substack is the place to be if you’re a writer. It’s user-friendly, it easily integrates with my website, and I can go full-frills or no-frills as I please.

I myself prefer the simple, text-based newsletter to the picture-loaded newsletter that I often see. It just feels so much more friendly and personal.

(What do you think?)

Newsletter Lapse Reason #3: I got into a row with someone on Medium.

Not really.

But I did experience…an incident.

Basically, I wrote a heartfelt essay titled “My Grandma’s Estate Sale Could Turn Me into a Hoarder,” and a large publication on Medium accepted it.

By chance, I stumbled across a similarly-titled essay in my feed a few days later. My first thought was, Someone else is going through the same thing I am!

But when I read the essay, I found the author had cherry-picked exact phrases and sentences out of my essay, took them out of context, and used them to create her own narrative.

She also shared her opinions on whether or not I actually cared about or loved my grandma, since I chose not to claim many of her things in the wake of her passing (yes, a complete stranger apparently had enough insight based on one essay to share those conjectures).

In the end, she said my essay made her sad, because she feared her own kids wouldn’t care about her precious possessions when she died.

She missed the entire point of my essay.

I took it all really hard. After about two weeks and some support from my wonderful writing group, I finally let it go. I’m not going to pretend I have thick skin, even though we writers are supposed to have thick skin (or at least, put on a show that we do).

The judgments from this stranger set me on edge, but I accepted this is simply a part of sharing your work on the internet—and what she wrote said more about her than it did me.

For this reason (and others that had surfaced before this whole shebang), I had already started pulling away from Medium. I was ready to find a new platform, and Substack was there to catch me with open arms.

Newsletter Lapse Reason #4: I decided to give up my pen name.

When I self-published The Dragonlord’s Heir back in 2014, I wrote under the pen name Christina Kenway (after the pirate Assassin, Edward Kenway—if you know, you know) because I didn’t want people to know my real identity if my book totally tanked.

I decided to do the same thing this time around, so if my future books also tanked, no one would know the real me.

So I started going by Christina Dewitt (after Booker Dewitt from Bioshock: Infinite, another video game fave).

But finally I thought, Screw it. I’m going to really own my work.

Some people might love what I write. Some people might hate it. Hiding behind a fake name won’t change that.

So now I’m back, writing under my real legal name: Christina M. Airola.

(And that’s pronounced Air-oh-luh for the people in the back.)

---

So there you have it.

I’m back on track. I’ll be writing to you every week, even when I don’t have much to say—and I hope you’ll find it entertaining, amusing, heartfelt, touching, or stirring in some way.

In the meantime, I’m working on editing two books that I hope to publish soon. I’m also writing a new book titled Reggie and the Rainbow Bridge.

Stay tuned! More info to come. :)

— Christina A.