I’ve been at this blogging lark for a couple of months now, and so far I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the trip. I’ve always gained pleasure from writing, even fairly mundane work-based stuff, but for the last few years it feels like the only written work I have produced has been endless variations on lists – shopping lists, to-do lists, packing lists, Christmas present lists…see, I can’t help myself, I’m even making a list of lists!

It’s been great to write in full sentences and stretch my brain a little – writing blog posts, even quite humble ones, is an exercise not only in getting the words out, but in making them (hopefully) engaging enough that others will want to read them too. I’ve enjoyed crafting and editing my posts to try and achieve ‘readability’ – and I’ve been really chuffed to get some positive feedback from folk who’ve been unlucky enough to stumble across LearnerMother while googling for something entirely different, and probably much more fun.

So – blogging – pretty much all good from my end. Except for one thing that didn’t even really occur to me when I started out – that by being an ‘out’ blogger, there is a lot of stuff I can’t really write about. And I mean an awful lot, really. Out of respect for the Husband, I don’t feel that I can rant about his million and one shortcomings (THAT WAS A JOKE, HUSBAND); obviously talking about my job in anything other than the most general terms is a no go; if I had a grumble – or even just something I wanted to work through – about something that happens in my kids’ school, then I have to be aware that as an ‘out’ blogger in a close local community, there is a chance that school staff and/or parents will read what I have written. And that’s before we even get on to wider family – like every family in the world there is blogging GOLD in our history and our interactions with each other…the vast majority of which remains off limits.

I don’t know how I feel about this really. It’s not that I am teeming with negative thoughts that I’m desperate to throw out there, and to be honest I think a blog full of ranty thoughts could get quite boring quite quickly. (Unless you do it brilliantly, like The Kraken Wakes – now there’s a lady that does ranting with style!)  It’s just that if I was blogging anonymously, there would be a lot more stuff I could work through by writing about it. And yes, I know that I could write posts that I don’t publish but a)I’m such a muppet that I’d probably hit publish by accident and b)call me vain, but writing isn’t as much fun if you know nobody’s going to read it!

I’d really like to hear from other bloggers who are in this situation. Do you just ‘publish and be damned’? Or are you anonymous and constantly worrying that you’ll be outed? Has blogging caused you any problems through people you know reading? Any advice? I’m all ears!!

ps  Being ‘out’ is not all bad. Having a large and twitter-savvy family has probably tripled my reader numbers to at least double figures.

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