/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.11869927]

May I get some advice guys?

I submitted two short stories to a small writing contest in my state. One of them, a humorous story, won first place - not a humblebrag. However, the second story I wrote was also published in the booklet where all the shortlisted stories were published, and which is now on sale online with my name associated with it. It is written in first person and is about a guy who admits he lies and acts different whenever he is around people in order to maintain a facade, and who has no friends, spends his weekends alone in a lonely rented room filled with rage and obsesses over a girl. In retrospect it is not only a poorly written and extremely cringeworthy story, but I am pretty sure anyone reading it will think "Wow, the author is an untrustworthy and sinister person and I don't like him".

I think about the second story almost every day and feel like I've essentially "doxxed" myself for life, in the sense that people will always suspect that my ability to articulate the thought process and lifestyle of the narrator in my story, means I am very much like him. I asked the competition owners not to publish the second story, but they just said "it reads fine!" over email and that it had already been sent to the printers so they couldn't withdraw it.

Any advice? Am I being paranoid?

I know Nabokov wasn't a pedo and still wrote Lolita, but I feel like I have not only sabotaged any kind of reputation I might have developed, but done so with a story that reads like a pretentious, weird, sinister loser (all me) wrote it.

[Anonymous No.11869933]

Sorry anon. I can't take this seriously when Wojak has a birthday hat on.

[Anonymous No.11870376]

>>11869927
You’re only recourse is to publish more stories from a wide variety of perspectives, then if someone questions you just say it was one character and you’ve written lots of stories