The online world...
It's this whole amazing place where you can be whoever you want, where you can create a persona for yourself from scratch if you so desire--choose a new name, a new identity, a new voice that is completely different from the one you use in the everyday real world. And in turn we on the other end conjure up a face to go with the persona, a build, a bodytype, a smile, a voice.
Of all the members of my writers' groups, I've seen pictures of a whole 3 of them (of course, I think they're actual pictures, but who's to say that everyone out there isn't splicing in and doctoring up the details?) How weird is it when you see that picture for the first time? When you can finally put a face with a name that has been talking to you for the last however-many years?
I didn't want to put my picture on my website AT ALL. I like my online anonymity. Once your face is out there, it's out there, in all its flawed reality, and you can't pretend you have perfect skin or a perfect figure or long flowing dark hair that looks perfect everyday.
What do you think? Do you like being able to put a face with a name? Does it change your perception of the person, the author, you thought you knew? How close are you in matching the real face with the one you created for that person in your head?
1 comment:
I hated putting up a picture... I hadn't realized that WRP would want one, or I would have had it done professionally. Oh well, that can wait until my first print book!
I love having a face to go with the person, though it's interesting to see whether my vision is the same as the reality -- frequently it isn't. I wonder what that says about what we project about ourselves...
Oh well. We've bitten the bullet and done it. Yuck.
Yours looks better than mine. I'm jealous ;-)
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