How many times do I reinvent myself? I try this and that and fail and succeed, then hack away at it again. Anyone who has been following my Twitter feed may have noticed my struggles with striking the right balance for City of Glass, creating a beautiful online journal and blog aimed more at my readers than my fellow writers, and deciding how to earn an income from my fiction when I simply do not finish novels at the pace of those chunking up the change in independent publishing.
The truth is, I have been afraid, so very afraid, that I have been doing the wrong thing, even while moving forward on projects unrelated to Liana Mir and that I cannot discuss here. But these things take time and understanding.
The goal of this post is to sort through some of the things I have been struggling with, experiencing, and what they mean. In particular, this is where I come to grips with what this blog is about, what I want to be, and embracing the new.
The Road to Creation
I began Liana Mir, a pen name that genuinely suits me, with a post and a realization. The post was called "The Road." The realization is as follows:
There’s this moment when you got to realize that who you are and what you do are not the same.
At that time, I divorced myself from what I did and took it apart and scattered all the pieces of myself throughout this blog. I simply started and did not look back. Stumbling was and is a part of the process, but I came to understand that I was not really reinventing myself, but rather reinventing what I was doing. Creators sometimes forget to bring self and action into alignment. You cannot really reinvent yourself, for you were never fully invented in the first place.
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
— George Bernard Shaw
This creation of my work and my world is a continual process, moving in spurts and fizzles, lunges and leaps, but ever, always forward.
The Blog as Creation
A while back, somebody set me back on my boot heels and confronted me with the idea that a blog is a social media platform, not a form of writing. After much thought, well-delineated there, I rejected that idea. I am here to create, not merely connect. I am here to offer whatever might possibly bless those who wander over the Barrier into my world.
A blog has a personality, its own flavor and themes. When you think of a blog, it is just like thinking of a book. A blog without any personality or cohesiveness generally has very few followers and has not yet found its own identity. It is still just a collection of posts waiting to become.
It is time for this journal to become.
Finding Your Theme
An effective blog has a purpose; a beautiful blog has a theme. Ongoing connected works of words are stamped with the same voice or pattern. For a long time, I could never find that pattern for myself. Yesterday, I looked up at the header of my website and read:
Worlds and words from the other side of the Barrier...
This is not merely a play off of the Vardin storyworld. This is me. This is my theme. I knew I was appealing to creators, charting my own creative path, but here is the reality of what I want this blog to offer—worlds you must cross a barrier to reach, the depths inside your own mind and heart, the potential beyond your comfort zone, and words, words, words.
Journaling Forward
Looking back is rarely productive. Instead, we should journal forward, simply moving in the direction of what we want to become and continuing toward that goal. Forthcoming material will include:
Shapeless, a novel of a world I have not yet shared. It is a story of my heart, fraught with what moves me and without a schedule. I will write in it whether or not I post and post when a share and/or donations cap is met.
The Creative Life has become part of the core theme of this blog, and it will move more front and center with a regularized schedule. Forthcoming installment, "Unsafe Creativity," epitomizes much of where I've been mentally and emotionally in recent days and addresses the fear of success. "Reaching Out to Inspiration" will cover that, somedays, insurmountable gap between what we want and where we are—and share ways the gap can be crossed.
The website will undergo one more redesign. I have been learning so much from working on a Wordpress website to pitch to a business with little in the way of a internet presence, and I want to really showcase my theme and what I have to offer. A social media blog is about me. This blog is about you.
Have you ever blogged beyond your comfort zone, reinvented yourself, or embraced something new? How did it work for you?
Thank you for sharing your thought processes. They help me as I, too, struggle with defining my often-fluid blogging identity.
You're more than welcome. It helps me—to vocalize what I'm looking at. And I admit to hoping it would help someone else.