Things I Don't Tell About Myself!

There was one thing I never used to tell about myself on my blog.  That was my name.  I crafted this blogging pseudonym for myself, 'gaelikaa'.  The 'gael' bit is from the world for Celtic, or Irish, which I certainly am on my mother's side and also by birth. The 'ika' ending comes from the sanskrit feminine ending for a word.  Sanskrit is the ancient language of India, in which many Hindu scriptures are originally written.  I discovered from my son's Sanskrit schoolbook that 'balak' means a male child, but 'balika' means a female child.    So if Sanskrit had a word for an Irish woman, it would probably be 'gaelikaa'.  The 'double a'  ending was just because of fashion.  A couple of years ago, lots of women here with 'a' ending names added a double 'a' for an extra twist, or maybe because they wanted some extra luck numerologically.  Thus, 'Isha' became 'Ishaa', 'Shobha' became 'Shobhaa', that sort of thing.

It was great being anonymous for a while, with this mysterious name.  It made me feel quite the Celtic goddess.  The problem was, that as I began to become friendly with people on the internet, through blogging and Facebook, the name caused confusion. Some people mis-spelt it 'gaelikka', which was just a simple mistake but which made me feel like a witch.   Moreover, I love my own name and wanted to claim it back.  So I've changed to 'Maria from gaelikaa's diary' now as opposed to Maria.  It just feels right.  I have an elder Consortium sister, Maria M. Burke from California who is affectionately known as 'the Silver Fox', so I have to be sure when I sign into blogs we both visit, that I'm the gaelikaa Maria, not the Silver Fox Maria.

One thing I never do is give out my husband or children's names, nor those of my sisters.  Privacy is important, and while I choose to share a lot of personal stuff, I don't have the right to share the details of someone else's life without their consent.  That's why I tell different names for my people.  Not to mention my in laws.  My husband Yash doesn't have much of an online presence, but it wouldn't be nice for someone to google him and find out about the fight he had with his wife last night or whatever.  I don't even link to his Facebook page. He hardly goes near it himself anyway. 

Lots of people who read my blog know I'd love to be a writer.  One area of writing which sells by the truck load is romantic fiction.  I like romantic fiction and quite like the idea of writing stories about personal relationships and emotional conflict.  I do dialogue quite well.  The problem is, one of the reasons why romantic fiction is such a big seller is because nowadays, there's quite a lot of sexual content in it.  And that, as Brendan Behan (Irish writer) might have said, is where Aughrim is lost.  I can't do 'hot', not for the life of me.  I wrote a novel last year and most of the sexual stuff was off the page.  I put in a bit of kissing, but it was usually when my characters were saying goodbye at the airport.  And believe me, I cringed when I was writing it.  I wonder why I'm like that?  It's probably all the sexual repression I must have experienced as a result of a strict Roman Catholic upbringing.  All I have to say about that is that it's a pity some of the people who passed on the values to me didn't practise what they preached, but that's material for another post.  Several posts actually, already published on this blog. Anyway, I don't think the man in my life (Yash!) would appreciate me writing that sort of stuff for publication.  He's very shy about 'that' sort of thing.  In public at least.

My daughter MelRoXx, (on a blogging hiatus nowadays) reckons that I should give being a romance writer a go.  She wants to design a lovely new blog for me called "gaelikaa's World of Romance" and she wants me to get all dressed up with long dangly earrings and plaster myself with make up for the photo.  I had to remind her that the romance writers I've befriended on the internet (Kate Walker, Sally Quilford and Christine Stovell) are nothing like that.  They're smart, sensible women who incidentally, write incredibly tasteful intimate scenes.  Well, I have a long way to go before I reach their standard.  One Rebecca Brandewyne is quite enough.  I think I'll stay the way I am for the present - a wannabe womag writer with just one story coming out within the next month. 

This is my weekly post for the Loose Blogger Consortium. We are a group of bloggers from different parts of the world with diverse views and styles of writing, and we post simultaneously (well, we try to) on a weekly basis on a given topic.  Our members  are, in no particular order,  Anu,  Maria Silverfox,   Magpie, Will Knott,   Rohit,  Noor, Joe,  Paul,  Akanksha,  Delirious, Padmini, Ashok, Conrad, Maria, Grannymar, and Rummuser.  This topic 'Things I Don't Tell About myself' was chosen by me, Maria/gaelikaa and Anu.