Audience

You see, it's all about audience. When I write to this blog, I'm writing almost subconsciously with an audience in mind. It affects the way I write, and what I write about. When I first started blogging my mental audience was, basically, my close friends. Then over time I started to modify that audience. I realised I'd got a sizeable non-UK readership, so I try when I remember not to use too many British colloquialisms. Meeting Jane had another effect, with her in the audience I'm less happy blogging about my personal feelings. Not because I don't want her to know them, just that I think she deserves to hear them first. Strangely, I've become more private now I have someone to share my private life with.

But, usually I write as if I'm talking to friends. My mental audience for my website is made up of:

• people I know


• people I don't know but are cool with the tranny thing


• and people I don't know who aren't cool with the tranny thing, which is fine because I don't care what they think.

The other day I was told by my boss that he'd been told by his boss that my site had been discovered within my organisation. I wasn't in trouble, per-se, my boss just wanted to warn me off from blogging too explicitly about my workplace.

I'm very grateful for that warning, and it's forced me to re-think things a bit. For one thing it made me decide to tell a close work colleague about all this (the post from a couple of days ago). For another I realise now that I was being very blasé about what I blogged about.

It was inevitable that this site got found by one or more people within my organisation at some time. Back when I started this site, nearly 4 years ago, I was surprised if I got 3 hits from Google a day. Now I'm getting 3 Google hits a minute. One of them was eventually bound to be someone who knew me.

So now there's a new section of the audience that I have in my mind: people I know, but that might not cool with the tranny thing. I don't know how big that section is, depending on the gossip mill at my organisation it could be anything from 4 to 400 people. They might all be cool with it, I dunno. Hope they are.

I'm going to try to stop it affecting the way I blog and the things I blog about (apart from avoiding blogging about my organisation in explicit terms). At the moment, though, it's hard. Even this blog entry was difficult to put together.

I know, I'll do what public speakers do when intimidated by their audience...

I'm now imagining you all naked.