Identity

A guesthouse near Brussels, by The Style Files

When I spring-cleaned my website I searched through a hundred different WordPress Themes for one I could live with. It was difficult. I wanted something to grab me and say “This is so you!” but nothing did. I worried that this was not because of the WordPress themes but because of boring, lacking identity me. I looked at other authors’ sites – when I got to Simmone Howell‘s I thought: ‘Why can’t I just be her?’ but then I remembered that I’ve just finished reading Swapped By A Kiss, by Luisa Plaja, which argues very entertainingly that becoming someone else is a pretty lame idea overall.

This theme was the closest. I was thinking about fresh starts and wide open futures and keeping things simple. But I felt nervous putting it up – it might say those things to me, but what else could it mean, what would readers conclude about me based on the look of my site?

I thought: they will think I’m really into berries. Maybe they will think they’ve stumbled on Emily Gale: horticulturalist. (Mind you, I did once produce THIS.) But the bookish themes didn’t work for me either. They showed pictures of someone else’s books – that was worse than berries. (Also, one of my most faithful readers breaks out in hives when he sees stock images.)

Bath made of books by Vanessa Mancini

So the berries are going, and I’ve been looking for inspiration for what image I can create myself. Looking at Book Shelf Porn has been an enjoyable process in a kind of masochistic way, and I briefly toyed with making something like this…

…until I remembered how badly it always goes when I try to do something artistic. The Drawers of Doom spring to mind. One idea I had seems feasible and I’m going to try it out tomorrow. Therefore, when you return you will either see a really cool new image, or the same damn berries with a blog post entitled WHY DO I EVER THINK I CAN DO THESE THINGS WHY WHY WHY?? I’ll try to make that as entertaining as possible.

In the meantime, these thoughts of identity are very timely considering the debates I’ve been sticking my beak in recently. It started with Meg Rosoff, who argued that the Queen of Teen competition website is characterised by patronising language (eg. it asks of its shortlistees: Bags or shoes?); it continued with Keren David, who reasoned that the answer to that bag or shoes question could be rather more enlightening than the question itself; and it finished with Lili Wilkinson, who said that it’s what’s on the inside of these pink books that counts and that she’s more worried about the slew of black or red books, with their “abusive vampire boyfriends”.

Mostly the debate was interesting and thought-provoking, but a couple of times it was offensive and ignorant. The offensive comments touched a nerve, one author declaring that “pink books” are all a load of tripe, written by “[insert smart-arse description of people like me]” (I’m not going to quote him again because a little pink fairy dies painfully every time someone does.) It’s daft to be offended by a half-baked but impressive-sounding quip, but I don’t want to be judged on a marketing decision any more than I want to be judged on a WordPress theme. It’s just the wrapping.