A B O U T
“There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real.” —James Salter
Juni Shimata is a fictional figure, the protagonist of a series of five novels (genre: Künstlerroman) I have been working on since 2009. She is a musician with a dissociative identity disorder.
“Write about what you know,” is an adage often heard (nice commentary on that here). Hmm… I am also a musician with a dissociative identity disorder ;-)
In my blog I’ve written of my reasons for using and—now—abandoning the pseudonym ‘Vanessa Araya’. Yet I wasn’t really ready to abandon Vanessa completely….This year [2016] I finally earned some money with a story. Perhaps, in my journey from ‘becoming’ to ‘being’, I am catching up in deed to what the income tax service granted me as theoretical status several years ago: a writer.
I was born and raised in California. I came to Europe in 1980 and stayed. I studied, worked in the music industry, taught music, and am now retired. I intensified my writing as part of my attempts to come to terms with my own dissociative disorder. Now, I continue…because I have become a writer.
Update 2024: See my blogpost on website merger.
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