Adventures in Writing: Why you Need to Separate Professional & Personal

Separating your professional writing life from your personal life is a good idea, even if you don’t write super spicy stories full of sexcapades. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to all writers, so don’t whine at me.

yes, my feisty pants are on today.

Writing Life vs Personal Life

If you’re using a pen name (or several pen names) for writing purposes, you definitely want to separate them from your personal life. The first step is adding privacy to your domain names. Anyone can check WhoIs to find out not only who you are in the real world, but where you live as well.

Cue strangers who are fanatic about your stories, regardless if they’re fiction or non-fiction, whether they love or hate you, appearing in your day to day life or on your doorstep.

Ever see that episode of Mike and Molly where Molly shows up on the front stoop of her favorite author? That could be you, but could also turn into a real life Misery remake.

Personally, I already have one stalker I know of and some days I feel like there are others purposely putting themselves in my path regularly. It just makes me want to delete everything and ignore the internet for the rest of eternity.

Friends and Family Matters

Look, I have been writing sexy content since I was a teenage dirtbag and don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. The last thing I wanted when I started out were people in my real life finding out.

Mostly because reading romance, regardless of steam or spice or heat level (why so many names?) is one thing, but writing it is frowned upon. I already considered myself an embarrassment and I didn’t want to make it that much worse.

I write spicy content and while there are a handful of people with my real name in the area I live, I didn’t need school teachers of my daughter, or her friend’s parents, or the children themselves, finding my content. The last thing I needed was an angry person banging on my door because they caught their partner or kid on my website.

Ways to Separate

I learned a few tricks from no other than Kayla Lords (Loving BDSM) on separating all the things. Browsers are a great way to create separation. Sure, you can import from one to another when it comes to bookmarks and such, but you’re going to avoid that. How? Easy.

Use one browser for all your writing-related accounts. Use a different browser for all your personal life stuff. The main website I can think of that would be both, is The Zon. You can only have one account for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) therefore, that account will be for both.

Secondary Option

Another way to separate is to create separate logins on your laptop. You create one for all of your personal stuff, and another for all of your writing stuff. Now, this might be difficult if you have a shared computer with the family and they don’t know you write, which is where I’d refer you to creating a separate Google Account for your writing persona. And make sure you logout of it every single time.

Yes, you can have more than one Google Account. I don’t mean Gmail email, either. That will be what you use to create the Google Account, though.

Final Thoughts

Seriously though, it’s a good idea to keep these separate. Everyone has an opinion. Mine are mostly related to creating adult content. Luckily, I haven’t had any issues about people appearing with torches and pitchforks, however that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. It’s enough that I have to continually remind people that my fiction is fiction.

Keep yourself safe out there, the world is crazy.