The official unveiling!
Hello and welcome! If you’re visiting from my Charley Descoteaux blog you already know Charli Coty is the same person but I wanted to be clear for anyone who wandered in through another door. 🙂
Today is exciting—I’ve officially unveiled this new pen name! I’ve been thinking about it for a long time but the decision to make the leap happened fairly recently. As with any big change, there are several reasons I want to transition to the new pen name—a few of them I’ll even share. 😉
When I submitted my first manuscript under the name Charley Descoteaux I really didn’t think it would be accepted. I’d been writing and submitting for many years and the acceptances came in fairly steadily, but I wasn’t what anyone would call “monetarily successful” as a writer. If I had thought that first manuscript would be accepted, I would have chosen my Romance pen name differently. Descoteaux is a nod to the Romances I read as a teen and young adult, the authors who swept me into a romantic fantasy world and let me escape my harsh reality for a few hours at a time. And it’s French, and I’m French, so it fit for that reason as well.
For a little while I even tried using a separate pen name for YA: Charli Green. But I found that LGBTQIA+ YA can be even more difficult to place with Romance-focused publishers when your main characters are all bisexual.
I’m establishing this new pen name to make things easier—on readers and, to an extent, on myself. However, I’m not completely making things easy on myself. In addition to romantic fiction (<< see what I did there? ;)) I’ll also be going back to my first love, contemporary mainstream fiction. I love genre fiction—Romance, SciFi, Mystery—but am not the best at writing it. My Romances read more like Queer Lit with a love story—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We all have strengths, and good things happen when we play to those strengths. At least I hope so.
The gist of this post is that Charli Coty and Charley Descoteaux are the same person. I will continue to write LGBTQIA+ fiction until I am literally unable to string words together, and I hope you’ll come along with me on the next phase of my writing life.
About Charley Descoteaux
Visit my Charley Descoteaux blog
CeeTwo Publishing
Charli Coty 