This blog has always been slightly obsessed with meta discussions on blogging, being a blogger, and being unknown to the people in your blogging community. It's not done yet.
All those musings were partly out of curiousity at the process and world I was involved in, and partly due to my growing belief that words should be judged on their own merit, not because of who wrote them (read the written, not the writer).
Keeping my identity private was an effective screening process - it provided me with the luxury of getting to know people (in as much as a blog can let you) and then deciding whether they were the ones I wanted to know better. Plus, it meant I didn't have to be rude by not agreeing to know somebody just because they had read my blog and thought they knew me. Yes, ironical, I know.
I also wanted to avoid cliques. Avoid carrying blog conversations offline, or bringing the latter ones to pages here. I didn't like it when people would have private conversations on public forum, so I decided not to inflict it on others. Whatever was there, was on the blog.
Plus, it's hard enough to keep track of the friends I have - and I mean the chaddi-buddy, yeh-fine-lets-go-take-on-a-mafia-gang type of friends, not Facebook contacts. And it's harder to deal with the sense of loss of not being able to spend more time with them, scattered as we are across the world. So why would I want to get to know more interesting people only to drift away from them as well?
More than anything, though, I kept private because there was the ever-present possibility that I would not keep this up longer, and would one day cut loose and vamoose. I wanted to avoid all the questions, the prodding to maybe come back - all of which I could ignore if I simply didn't know anybody.
And that's how it turned out. It was so easy to just snap ties. Sure, I may have been able to put a few names to some avatars, and I may have exchanged a few emails, but that was it. Time to move, no explanations necessary. It was liberating, and made me feel just a little like young Kimball O'Hara.
Except that it was callous. Small as my readership may be, and transient as a blog-life may be, it was disrespectful to just stop like that without any explanations. I'd log in once in a few months, and check my feeds, and wonder what was happening with the people who had gone silent too. Were they busy writing books? Did they get married? Did they have new jobs? Were they even alive? Even if one person had wondered that about me, then I had been terribly rude.
Which doesn't mean that I'm going public. What I am doing is telling you that if I need to stop writing again, I will tell you and tell you why. And if I cannot do so myself, there's a backup which will do so for me. This much I owe you.
And I do apologise.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Of course, I'm not planning to go away anytime soon again. Especially since I have a better idea of what this blog should be about.
This long absence has given me lots of time to go over these pages, and to clean up the output. Lots of entries are gone, several more have been edited. And a clearer sense of my ... voice ... is now known to me. One which I plan to exercise a lot more, honing and refining till I don't have to go back and edit it anymore.
Some of the categories are unlikely to be revisited. There's going to be less outrage (because it doesn't really help), less commentary, and hopefully, more random weirdness.
I may not necessarily be as prolific as a result, but I hope to be better.
All those musings were partly out of curiousity at the process and world I was involved in, and partly due to my growing belief that words should be judged on their own merit, not because of who wrote them (read the written, not the writer).
Keeping my identity private was an effective screening process - it provided me with the luxury of getting to know people (in as much as a blog can let you) and then deciding whether they were the ones I wanted to know better. Plus, it meant I didn't have to be rude by not agreeing to know somebody just because they had read my blog and thought they knew me. Yes, ironical, I know.
I also wanted to avoid cliques. Avoid carrying blog conversations offline, or bringing the latter ones to pages here. I didn't like it when people would have private conversations on public forum, so I decided not to inflict it on others. Whatever was there, was on the blog.
Plus, it's hard enough to keep track of the friends I have - and I mean the chaddi-buddy, yeh-fine-lets-go-take-on-a-mafia-gang type of friends, not Facebook contacts. And it's harder to deal with the sense of loss of not being able to spend more time with them, scattered as we are across the world. So why would I want to get to know more interesting people only to drift away from them as well?
More than anything, though, I kept private because there was the ever-present possibility that I would not keep this up longer, and would one day cut loose and vamoose. I wanted to avoid all the questions, the prodding to maybe come back - all of which I could ignore if I simply didn't know anybody.
And that's how it turned out. It was so easy to just snap ties. Sure, I may have been able to put a few names to some avatars, and I may have exchanged a few emails, but that was it. Time to move, no explanations necessary. It was liberating, and made me feel just a little like young Kimball O'Hara.
Except that it was callous. Small as my readership may be, and transient as a blog-life may be, it was disrespectful to just stop like that without any explanations. I'd log in once in a few months, and check my feeds, and wonder what was happening with the people who had gone silent too. Were they busy writing books? Did they get married? Did they have new jobs? Were they even alive? Even if one person had wondered that about me, then I had been terribly rude.
Which doesn't mean that I'm going public. What I am doing is telling you that if I need to stop writing again, I will tell you and tell you why. And if I cannot do so myself, there's a backup which will do so for me. This much I owe you.
And I do apologise.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Of course, I'm not planning to go away anytime soon again. Especially since I have a better idea of what this blog should be about.
This long absence has given me lots of time to go over these pages, and to clean up the output. Lots of entries are gone, several more have been edited. And a clearer sense of my ... voice ... is now known to me. One which I plan to exercise a lot more, honing and refining till I don't have to go back and edit it anymore.
Some of the categories are unlikely to be revisited. There's going to be less outrage (because it doesn't really help), less commentary, and hopefully, more random weirdness.
I may not necessarily be as prolific as a result, but I hope to be better.
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