Monthly Archives: June 2021

Say His Name

Me Too, , ,

This past Sunday, Kat O’Brien, a former journalist and baseball writer for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Newsday, broke her silence about a major league baseball player who raped her eighteen years ago, when she was 22 years old.

Kat’s words cut through me, and it was a tough essay to read.

I wanted to reach out to her, but I wasn’t sure how, so this blog post is the best I can do. I hope Kat reads it one day.

What I found most heartbreaking about her trauma was that she didn’t name the player because she felt it “would only open me up to the possibility of having dirt thrown on my reputation.”

Eighteen years later, she’s still afraid to say his name. For good reason.

And so, eighteen years later, this unnamed despicable rapist still has her under his powerful thumb.

I get it.

I’ve been afraid to say his name for 54 years.

After this MLB player raped Kat, she went back to her apartment and drank a bottle of red wine in a desperate attempt to numb her sadness and rage.

I can’t even begin to count the number of bottles of wine I drank to numb myself. I’m still numbing myself.

As I read Kat’s heartbreaking essay, I wondered if she had ever said his name to anyone close to her. I hope she did because it does help somewhat.

I only know that because I’ve said my abuser’s name to a select group of people over the past 54 years. “Select,” being the operative word.  And what I discovered is “select” doesn’t mean I always chose the right people to tell.

When Kat was finally able to talk about “it,” she was asked, “But you really couldn’t get away?”

More than twenty years ago, when I finally mustered up the courage to elaborate on the unspeakable gory details to someone I thought was the closest to me, she  asked: “Are you still talking about that?”

My heart throbbed out of my chest as I read Kat’s words. It was beating so hard that my shirt was moving. I warily looked around at my family gathered together by the pool for fear that one of them would notice.

The rape followed Kat for the rest of her life. She didn’t trust intimacy. She felt unsafe. And she quietly and courageously dealt with the small daily assaults that came and went.

Since Mid-January, Kat’s been having nightmares. She’s been crying on and off every day. She hyperventilates, and her chest pounds in fight or flight.

I feel like I know Kat.

I get her, and I feel her pain.

Because she’s me. She’s a lot of us. Too damn many of us.

She also wrote that her fear of losing her job in sports journalism is long gone and that she’s found her voice.

But in my opinion, Kat’s voice is infinitesimal compared to what it could be—because she still can’t say his name.

And I disagree with Kat that being a rape survivor is only a tiny part of her story. I don’t see how that can be true, given everything she has had to endure.

At the end of her essay, Kat writes that she has finally found the sunlight. I sure hope that she has. She deserves some light, some respite.

Since reading Kat’s essay on Sunday, I can’t stop thinking about her.

And I’m thinking about her rapist too, because maybe—just maybe, he’s afraid.

Because maybe—just maybe, Kat’s the one with all the power.

And if she ever reads this blog post, I only have one thing to say to Kat:

SAY HIS NAME.

A Novel on a Blog

Marketing & Publishing, , , , , , ,

I had all but given up on my unfinished novel titled My Stolen Diaries, which I began writing in 1992.

In early 2015, my book had 168 pages and 117,653 words, and I wasn’t even close to finishing it, so I decided to put my novel on hold and instead concentrated on creating a blog.

In March 2015, I launched my blog, The Teri Tome.

In April 2015, I only had 328 visits to the blog, but by March of 2019, The Teri Tome had over 27,000 monthly visits.

With that kind of monthly traffic, it seemed like a no-brainer to revisit My Stolen Diaries and analyze whether or not it made sense to add chapters from my book onto my blog.

In July 2019, I wrote an article about the pros and cons, and shockingly, the post has to date been viewed over 10,000 times. [You can read To Blog or Not to Blog My Novel here.]

Writing the blog post was incredibly useful in that it helped me figure out a format for excerpting from my decades-old unfinished book. And the many thousands of page views I received from my post solidified my decision to add chapters of my novel to my blog.

After much thought, I decided my novel-on-a-blog should be called a Novelog. In January 2020, I posted a Disclaimer and the first six chapters of my novel.

I was reasonably sure the chapters would bomb, so the thousands of hits the posts garnered made my heart happy.

My blog traffic immediately increased by almost 50%, primarily due to the My Stolen Diaries chapters.

Of my 32 total posts in 2020, seven of them were chapters pulled from the novel.

And shocking to me was that when I calculated the traffic numbers for my top five blog posts in 2020, four of them were from my ancient rough draft novel!

It turned out my most popular blog posts were less of a post-mortem on what Teri was writing in 2020 and more about what Teri was writing in the 90s.

The Teri Tome generated over 300,000 page views in 2020, a whopping 47% increase from 2019, primarily due to the page views for my novel My Stolen Diaries.

The thousands of people who have been reading chapter after chapter has given me new resolve to pull out my book and take a fresh look at it.

Maybe, just maybe, my languishing novel has legs.

And 2021 might even be the year I finish it. In the meantime, keep a lookout for more chapters coming to The Teri Tome soon!