More rumination about blogging

My husband, Bill, has just written a response to a listserv about the use of letters in 18th century periodicals. The discussion is whether some letters to these periodicals were written by the editors or others using a fictional persona. He suggested that he expects blogs will soon be written by people with such a fictional guise. I have noticed that many writers create and sustain a carefully crafted persona. A male poet is a hard-drinking womanizing cad. A novelist is completely self-taught. A female journalist is tough as nails. A female poet is completely a-moral. I seem to have gravitated to the blogs written by sensitive, Christian, home-schooling mothers. I have just read a book by Forrest Church, a Unitarian minister. He presents himself as an Augustinian reformed drunkard. Several of the blogs I have been on suggest that the minister writing the blog has a drinking problem. “I too am human; I reformed, so can you.” People have told me that they would know my writing even if it weren’t signed, but I don’t know how they would. Whatever persona I have is uncrafted, unself-conscious. In this blog I am trying to figure out who I am and how I got that way, become more self-conscious.