could be written about the representation of self and the contribution of purchasable elements to help with that representation. I have explored some ideas about that in my blog--most recently a somewhat clumsy blog about the male gaze. (I write my blogs the day before--literally. I don’t give myself a lot of time to rewrite so the blog is not always as articulate as I would like.) I would like to come back to that subject again. S.S.: Well since you’ve brought it up, let’s get a little into your blog. Tell me about how you got your start in the blogosphere, what made you decide to start in the first place, and more importantly, what do you credit to the success of your blog? H.B.: A couple years before a friend had encouraged me to start a blog so I could start writing again--I was considering reapplying to grad school to finish a PhD I had started years earlier but my writing was rusty. I started my opinion blog, “Harper’s Bizarre,” which had some success, but that sort of writing (and the drama inherent in expressing an opinion about SL) was too hard to sustain on a daily basis for me. Then Callie Cline asked me to be one of the officers for the fashion bloggers group in SL. I started contributing to the group, suggesting what was necessary for a fashion blog even though I didn’t have one myself. I decided I had no business telling anyone else what needed to be done or helping lead a group of fashion bloggers without experiencing the business of blogging up close and personal. One day I asked a couple members how to set up Wordpress, and I started out. I set for myself the goal of doing one blog a day, which I have done for the most part.
In doing so, I experienced a lot of the same concerns the members of the group had--the difficult politics of getting on feeds, the ethics of reviewing items in an honest manner without compromising a relationship with a designer or the audience, the expense in time and money of doing it day after day (yeah, all that stuff is NOT free to me), the business of keeping the blog going when RL things become important. That was a year and a half ago, and it’s worked well for me. Every day I am forced to write something-anything--about a subject I often find hard to write about--virtual fashion. Some days it’s like pulling teeth and some days it appears on the screen like a gift. It’s been personally very rewarding and a testament to myself of what I can do. My readership has grown steadily and my checks on alexa.com show me that I have become more widely read that many popular SL fashion blogs, which is certainly a nice thing to see. My own blog’s success comes from plugging away at the darn thing for over a year, pushing to get new readers, following a specific set of guidelines day after day so my readers know what they will be getting, and representing the work I show with a positive but critical eye. I am truly grateful to the people who put their time and skills into making content for SL. It’s a wonderfully rich world because of their visions. S.S.: Now that is definitely blogging success. And speaking of success, you’ve had quite a successful photography career as well, and you’ve got quite an impressive vita. Tell me a bit about that; how did you start in the world of photography, and will you be continuing