Upon the many trails and roads we find ourselves throughout life, some are clearly marked.
Others less so.
Many we travel alone, footpaths rarely visited by others.
Some appear to go nowhere at all.
Light and shadow dapple many of the journeys we face, the signposts declaring joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure.
Yet one thing remains constant: No one can or will travel the same routes we take. We own our journeys as much as we own our actions.
The days of blogging pseudonymously are over, at least for me.
After much contemplation, I believe the time has come to link this blog to my real name. Again.
Why?
Dreamdarkers, End of the Warm Season, Centralia, and my other novels continue development, and I suspect the first will be ready for agent hunting and publisher searching much sooner than you might think—and hopefully much sooner than I think. I’ve always maintained that being published would change my blogging modus operandi. Consider this a preemptive strike.
My initial reasons for moving my blog from my name to xenogere no longer seem important. That is, I once concerned myself with who might find my various ramblings and what they might think. Working for overly conservative businesses meant I had to keep my head low and my life off the radar. Now I don’t give a damn. Such trepidation serves only to elicit further anxiety.
Additionally, it no longer takes a clever person to discover the owner of this domain or any of my other domains/sites. While once upon a time only an internet pro could chase down those details, that data is now aggregated ad nauseam and locatable via the simplest of Google searches. While I could dispose of that data and assign ownership to an anonymous organization, I no longer feel it worth the effort.
This doesn’t mean xenogere is moving. Hardly. I like this domain and have no interest in trying yet another migration back to my name.
Instead, this simply means I’ll not hide who I am anymore, from updating the various about pages to not redacting anything personally identifiable. I’m not talking about a major blogging shift here, only a stop to the cowering in corners when a tidbit might somehow lead to me in the outside world.
It also means I’ll now forward some of my other domains to xenogere. They have languished in obsolescence since the migration away from my name. That seems terribly unnecessary.
I just received an e-mail from Mom saying my paternal grandfather called today to let us know my grandmother is not expected to live much longer. To quote: “They don’t expect her to hang on very long.”
It appears my family’s season of discontent persists, worsens even, and each passing day brings with it yet one more fear, one more trouble, one more anguish dangled before us like a rotten carrot.
I struggle with the worries and truths of life: that all blood must be shed upon the altar of time, that all things end, that the curse of love is to watch familiars die, and that pain cuts as deeply years before and years after as it does at the very moment a life is done.