When I had my original blog, Simply She Goes, I was Kianwi and I did my best to blog anonymously.  I never had a picture of myself, or even a human avatar, instead using things like flowers or lips to represent me out in the great, big Internet.  It’s hard to explain, but the thought of putting up my photo just made me feel too exposed.  This wasn’t really a problem, though, because lots of other bloggers don’t show themselves, either.

When I decided to start this blog and planned to build an online presence for my romance novel pen name Kinley Dane, I figured a picture of a pink flower wasn’t going to cut it.  An author needed a face, right?  But did I need to show my face?  I mean, it was a pen name, after all.  So I visited some clip art sites and searched for ‘blondes.’  Eventually, after wading through hundreds of cartoons of over-the-top sexy, I finally found a picture I could live with and bought it.  This one:

I thought it was cute and a little sexy, sure, but believe me, it was way tamer than what else was out there and it seemed to represent a romance author well.  So I slapped it on my bio and that was that.

Until I was messaging recently with an online friend.  We talked about my avatar and her sexiness, as well as the idea of having an actual picture up, so people could put a face to the name.  The more I thought about it afterward, it struck me that maybe this image wasn’t really the right fit after all.  For one thing, I started to worry that I was misleading people in a Catfishy kind of way.  I’m way more t-shirt and jeans than little black dress.  And even though Kinley Dane is a fake name, she’s still me.

I recently took a picture of myself to text to another online friend so she could see my blow out, as it looked very different from my normal, curly-because-I’m-too-lazy-to-straighten-it-hair.  I found out that it was the first time she had actually seen a picture of me, which really surprised me, because it had never been my intention to hide myself from her, it was more a side effect of blogging anonymously, I guess.

After much pondering, I’ve decided to suck it up and put a face to the name.  Yeah, it’s still a fake name, but that’s more for romance author purposes than anything else at this point.

So here goes!

I know.  This isn’t the best picture. I am like the anti-Kim Kardashian of selfies. Actually, I’m pretty much the opposite of Kim Kardashian in every way now that I think about it, but the point is, I’m not great at snapping my own picture.  I don’t remember to smile, because I’m concentrating too hard on looking in the right spot on my phone and clicking on the whatsis and when I do manage to smile, it comes out all wonky with a mentally imbalanced kind of vibe.  But since I don’t feel like waiting for another good hair day when someone else is around to take my picture, you get a serious selfie for now.  But hey!  That’s me, guys!

Okay, phew.  Glad that’s out of the way.