Weekly Update: 10-19-13

At this point in my writing career, I assume I'm still relatively annonymous.  For now, I don't mind my obscurity, since I haven't gotten anything published yet and I'm still figuring out how marketing works.  This Monday, however, I learned that certain people were scanning my website.  Namely, the high school students I sub for.

I was half-flattered, half-embarassed.  I could practically feel my cheeks turning pink.  It's not that I put anything bad on my website, but rather, it feels strange when your students start to glimpse your personal life.  In Japan, I'd often run across students at the grocery store and that felt embarassing too.  Should I say hi to them in my bright, chippery "English" voice or should I attempt to engage them in Japanese?  If I was lucky, they'd be wearing uniforms and I could at least guess what schools they were from (I visited 3 schools a week).  Knowing their names was imposssible.  And sometimes they'd look in my basket to see what I was buying, which was usually bread and vegetables and pasta and tofu and meat and cookies.  Again, nothing bad, but boy did it feel weird.  

It's sort of like being a mini celebrity.  And that makes me wonder how it will feel if I become an author and actually have fans.  Will my cheeks turn pink?  Will I have to find an "author" persona to go into at any random time?