On oversharing, transparency, and other things that feel foreign to me

Susan Mernit did a writeup on her panel with Viviane at Arse Electronika and quoted me a bit.

I still say that I agree with Bonnie Ruberg on this one.

I love many of the social networking platforms I use because I get such a huge amount of support from them. Blogging, of late, is not really one of those, but I still love it and probably always will, though think I'm infinitely better at cupcake blogging than the personal kind. And I get that to some extent, yes, I am part of that world, I do write about my personal life, but I also lately am craving a lot more solitude and a break from New York. It may not be this big, bad, beautiful city's fault, I may be the source of the problem(s), but I feel like it's worth mixing things up a little to see what I could be, who I could be, in some other place.

Check out Susan's post for what I, Nick Douglas, Violet Blue, and Melissa Gira have to say. Here's a snippet:

Rachel Kramer Bussel

--Do you feel you're public figure and you need to let everyone what's going on with you, or do you feel you have over shared at times?
I don't think of myself as a public figure so much as I know I have lots of friends and acquaintances as well as readers who I don't know who appreciate knowing what I'm up to. That being said, though, I think I've always written, online and off, as a mechanism first and foremost for me to sort out my thoughts. Sharing them is almost secondary.

Once you get used to sharing in a certain way, whether it's via blog or Twitter, and you do add a level of openness, it's hard to back down from that without people thinking something is wrong. That can start a vicious cycle where you spend inordinate amounts of time posting when you could be doing other more productive things, so I think the key is finding a balance, one I'm pretty sure I haven't yet struck.

The Kinky Virtual Book Tour has begun!

Viviane's Sex Carnival kicks off the Kinky Virtual Book Tour (a day early, even!) with an excerpt from "The Inner Vixen" by Saskia Walker from She's on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission.

Viviane, who knows way more than I do about this stuff, has also posted some relevant Technorati tags she's asking people to include to make it easier to read all the posts on the tour.