Larvatus prodeo

Welcome to my new blog.... Caitlyn's Musings.

Technically, this is an extention of my capping blog; Caitlyn's Masks.  That blog primarily deals with my capping, and with me.  This blog will deal primarily with my writing... my story writing.

You see, I'm advancing.  I'm going to try my hand at writing longer stories.   I don't know where exactly where this is going to lead, as it's new for me.  I may become an author of TG/TF/CD/Sissy stories.  I may write more stories than I make caps... I may write an occasional story or two when the mood strikes me... I may write a single story a year, or fewer.  And of course I may completely fail at this endeavor.

But for the moment I'm willing to simply try.  That first tentantive step is the hardest for me... I don't like doing something and not doing it well, and the only way to know if I can write well is to try.  So not only is this new for me, it's also rather uncomfortable.

Now, if you know my capping work, you might be asking why I'm starting a new blog for this.  Afterall, I already have a successful blog.  It has a built in audience, it has just a hair under 300 'followers', and it's not as though I ONLY post caps there.  Well... I have several reasons.

First, I don't want to take the focus of that blog away from capping.  Yes, yes, yes... I DO post questions and other 'non cap' posts to that blog, but those all revolve around capping and me.  I don't post all that often to Caitlyn's Masks... only when I have a cap to show, a question that was asked of me, or something special (like my musings on the test I took in the summer of 2012, or the Haven Quarterly).  I want this blog to be singularly focused on writing.  It's new to me, and I can imagine posting fairly often on my progress and roadblocks.

Second, I can't promise that this blog, the posts here, or my writing in general will be of any interest to anybody.  I don't want to flood my current blog with posts about writing and end up driving away people that already enjoy it.  And I do intend to post quite a bit more often.  My plan is to post daily, as I intend to try and write daily.  And if I did that on Caitlyn's Masks, I would quickly flood the blog with things that people aren't currently looking for.

Lastly.... and yes I realize that this is kind of a sad reason... I may just dump this whole thing later on.   If I fall flat on my face while trying to write out my first story, I'm not sure I want to remember it.  It would be a pain to delete a bunch of posts on Caitlyn's Masks, but it will be incredibly easy to delete the entire "Caitlyn's Musings" blog.

With all that in mind, I wanted to have something different than Caitlyn's Masks so that people will realize it's not the same blog, but at the same time similar enough to know that it's from me.  So the first thing I did was mute out the colors.  The background is muted down to almost black and white, and the header image (or images if I make more), are completely black and white.

Obviously I had to have a new name.  At first I just figured that I would use "Caitlyn Masked's Writings" or something along those lines.... but the designer in me thought of how that would look on a header image and just shivered in disgust.  Obviously I needed something similar to "Caitlyn's Masks".  I thought about just using a synonym of 'Masks'... Caitlyn's Cloak, Caitlyn's Disguise, Caitlyn's Facade, Caitlyn's Masquerade, and Caitlyn's Veil all appealed to me in one way or the other.  But at the same time that all felt.... to close.  To similar.  This writing project isn't the same, nor is this blog the same... so the name shouldn't be that close.  So I tried something to do with writing... Caitlyn's Writings, Caitlyn's Calligraphy,  But the more I thought about that, the more I realized that this blog isn't specifically about what I'm writing... it's HOW I'm writing it.  It will more than likely be more about my thoughts on writing (prepare yourself for plenty of posts going "DAMN IT this is harder than I thought") than the writing itself.

Our of frustration I decided that I just needed a word that was either like 'writing' or 'masks' that started with an M.  I went to a site that can list words not only by starting letter, but also by length (as Masquerade was just to damned long)  and my eye almost immediately fell on 'Musing'.  Hmm.... that would work.  I'd be sharing my musings about writing, and it sounded similar to "Caitlyn's Masks".

So that won out.  I went into Photoshop and started on the header.  I picked out a quick photo of a masked woman and dropped her into my current header style.  I changed all the colors to varying shades of gray and changed 'Masks' to 'Musings'.  I changed 'Captions by Caitlyn Masked' to 'Stories by Caitlyn Masked', and then was left with my tag line of "We all Wear Masks".  I like that tag line.... but I figured it should change as I no longer directly refer to masks.  At the same time... I wanted to slyly refer to masks.   I couldn't find any quotes that involved both writing and masks but in looking for that I came across Descartes' quote of "Masked, I advance".... and that just hit the spot.  Yes... with my Caitlyn mask firmly in place, I now advance into something new.

It didn't look good in the header, but thankfully there was even a latin version...  "Larvatus prodeo"  and that looked just fine.  I was happy and ready to start the blog....

DAMN IT!

It seems that caitlynsmusings.blogspot.com is already taken.  It's from a woman named Caitlyn that wanted to share her thoughts.  It has one post from 2009 welcoming people to her blog... and nothing else.  Not even the promised post from 'tomorrow'.  So that's how I ended up with the URL http://caitlynsmaskedmusings.blogspot.com/

Not that the URL is going to make a big difference.  Just like "Caitlyn's Masks" I don't plan on pushing this blog at all.  I'll mention it on Caitlyn's Masks, but that should be the only outward sign that it's even out here.

So... I have my new blog.  It's named, has a header, and is laid out how I like.  The next thing to do is write. I will either make up a post later today about what I'll be writing, or make that post in the morning.   Either way, thanks for stopping by and going along this trip with me!