The Great British Blog Festival- Thursday

What a week it’s been so far! Tales of Blogging or Not Blogging, Twitter Appreciation, Advice about Writing Reviews and Travelling with Computers!  I’m stuffed!  But there’s more…two days left!  What a great course in blogging we’re having!  Have you been to Littlemummy, Littlemumpreneur, English Mum and Me, The Man and The Baby?  They also have some amazing posts on their sites to support The Great British Blog Festival.

So on to today’s glorious blogger!  Well, sort of…she’s a bit of a mystery this lovely lady.  Well, I think she’s a lady!  She sure has some lovely hats…

I’m a married mum of three daughters.

L is just 3 and S and A are identical (monochorionic for those in the know) twins aged 1. Their father is the very supportive and generally wonderful B.

Once upon a time I was a lawyer, trying to juggle a busy working life with three very demanding girls (and their father, who occasionally likes me to actually talk to him, rather than just grunting in his general direction).

I started this blog in October 2009, just as I was going back to work after my second lot of maternity leave. I called the blog “Is there a Plan B?” because it felt as though my life was getting away from me, and that despite all my efforts I was never going to be able to catch up with it. I needed an alternative option.

Welcome Plan B/Harriet:

If you could start again, who would you be?

Who are you? Who am I? Who are any of us really?

Let’s start with me. Until about two weeks ago, I was “Plan B”, now I’m “Harriet”, give me another six months and you’ll probably know my full name, date of birth and internet banking password*.

It’s very easy to be anonymous online isn’t it? The papers are full of scary tales of “internet-stalkers”, people who are not who they say they are, and the impression given is that such people are weirdos. Oddballs with something to hide. Probably single, desperate, and still living with their parents on a diet of out-of-date packet mince.

So what about those of us who are blogging (quasi) anonymously. Is it because we’ve got something to hide? Should we come out and show our faces?

Anonymity gives you freedom. The power to write about whoever and whatever you like. I recently self-censored a post which was mildly insulting about some people I had met recently. They don’t know I blog. I’m unlikely to tell them I blog. But the fear that they might know someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows I blog was too great. I’m just not brave enough to risk my new neighbours knowing that they put me in mind of a bunch of 70s wife-swappers…

And then there’s the whatever. Some of the best and funniest posts I’ve read have been about, well, you know, ahem, sex. And I can’t go there. I have a marriage to protect and I’m not sure it would survive my putting my sex life out there for comment. Nor can I post about my job, or my family (although I’ve come pretty close to the line on that), or the niggles that occur in any marriage. And sometimes it’d be an enormous release to do so.

But then, if it’s so great, why have I semi-outed myself? You won’t find any pictures of me out there, and I still haven’t confessed to my full name. If you send me an email, I’m still hiding behind a pseudonym. So why tell you what I’m really called?

When I started my blog I wanted to be read. Don’t we all? I mean, if you don’t want people to read what you write, why put it on the internet? And the easiest way of getting people to read it is to tell them about it. And puff there goes your anonymity in a cloud of smoke. Because once you’ve told one person, you might as well have told everyone. And once one person knows who you are, pretending that you aren’t gets silly and circular. So being out and proud allows you to self-market, to whatever extent you want to.

Because if you want to be anonymous, I think you need to be anonymous and that means everyone. Don’t tell your husband, your mum, your best friend. There are bloggers out there whose husbands and partners don’t know they blog. (How they keep that secret I will never know. Do they blog in the loo, claiming severe constipation?) With hindsight, I wish I’d only told strangers, or relied on the blogging world to find me, but my best beloved (who knew, of course he knew) got over-excited and mentioned it to a few people and now I don’t know (worst case scenario) who does know about it and who doesn’t.

And then there’s the social aspect. I’ve read, today alone, three posts by different bloggers about meeting up with fellow bloggy-types. I’ve never done that (although I’m hoping to soon), but if you’re not who you say you are, or you don’t want people to know who you really are, it’s difficult to pop round for a cup of tea isn’t it? And how else do you turn the fabulous bloggy friends I think we all make into real friends. Similarly, now that British Mummy Blogging is becoming more mainstream, how do you go to CyberMummy? I don’t think balaclavas are in this year, and it’s not very practical in July.

Plus, and here’s where I sound really pathetic, I just felt a bit lame. If I’d really been thinking about it when I started the blog, I’d have given myself a pseudonym. Maybe my porn name*: Pipkin Schofield, and you could all have known me as “Pip”. But emailing people, and knowing some very personal things about them, while still calling myself “Plan B” (because I didn’t know that was how it worked when I set up the blog and all I knew was that I didn’t want to use my real name), felt stupid, and in some cases downright rude.

So what’s the answer? Is there an answer? Clearly I don’t have one, lurking, as I do, in the no-man’s-land of my rapidly disappearing quasi-anonymity. The thing is, I actually suspect that the bloggers out there who are really anonymous, to the extent that even their partners don’t know about it, are relatively few and far between. I’d imagine that those at the other extreme; the ones who link every post back to facebook or twitter and have a business card with their blog URL printed on it are probably more numerous, but I suspect that the vast majority of us are like me. Dithering between the two stools, wanting the best of both, and fearing the worst.

And which makes the best blog? Why the best writers of course.

*First pet and grandmother’s maiden name.

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This is such an interesting topic that Harriet/Plan B brings up.  I never once considered being anonymous when I started blogging but in recent months I sometimes wish that I was anonymous.  Sometimes you just want to have a good old whinge or complain but you know certain people will read it and you don’t want to upset or disappoint.

So you carry on but perhaps end up censoring yourself a bit??  I can’t totally relate to Plan B’s opinion as my life is pretty much an open book on my blog but I do ALWAYS protect my daughter’s name and I never blog about my husband in a way that I wouldn’t want him to read.  My Dad reminded me of that once and he’s right.  If you can’t say something to someone’s face then you probably shouldn’t be writing about it for the whole world to see!

Thank you Harriet for adding so much to the topic and to today’s Great British Blog Festival.  You’re welcome at Cafe Bebe any time!

For the FINAL day of The Great British Blog Festival tomorrow we will have another beautiful blogger joining us.  This former journalist and PR is now one of the many, the proud, the SAHM’s!  She has 3 boys and will bring us a very personal and important blog post that you won’t want to miss…come back tomorrow for some beautiful writing.