As you can plainly see, “Dreams in Tandem” is no more and I’ve migrated my online presence to this here website, which was gorgeously designed by Hafsah Faizal of IceyDesigns. I created my first blog over five years ago, back when I was still in high school and my biggest concern was not being prepared and flunking out of college. Now, I’ve graduated and moved on to a whole new, bigger set of life problems including finding a job, reconnecting with my creative roots in writing and painting, and learning to adult without overloading from all the cynicism such pursuits entail.
(#IHaveNoIdeaWhatImDoingWithMyLifeButImPrettySureImAlreadyAFailure definitely applies.)
As for the domain name: Yes, haha, Fifty Shades of Grey. Picking domain names is hard. I originally wanted to go with “Shades of Blue” for a few different reasons:
1) Blue is my favorite color and I have a huge affinity for water, which is usually (hopefully, if you plan to swim in it) also blue
2) “A Shade of Blue” by Incognito is a really chill song (yes, seriously, this was something that actually factored in, I love that f*!@#$ song)
3) It’s a very subtle way of referring to my default mental state, which affects pretty much everything I think, feel, and do
4) It’s more esoteric than sydneethompson.com, which is bland af
ShadesofBlue.com, however, is currently owned by a Finnish dude whose entire website design is in shades of gray. Oh the irony. “Shades of Sydnee” was my compromise. And then the very next day that I bought it, someone mentioned 50SOG on Twitter and I died a little inside.
So if anything, the silver lining is that I literally do not care enough about that book series to factor it into my creative decisions, and I feel like that’s something worth celebrating. (But if someone comes to this site expecting erotica, hell, who am I to disappoint them… God knows I have enough on my hard drive. To half-naked wimmenz and genitalia!!!1)
I’m hoping that having a space that is 100% my own will make it easier to create and share more. A lot has changed in five years. I’m constantly expanding on the way I interact with the world. I’m now an adult, if only in name, and I’ve started to ID as queer. I’m still extremely disabled by mental illness but slowly but surely, I’m learning how to breathe. And the scariest of all, I’m starting to feel that hunger that made me first put pen to paper over ten years ago, when I had a voice I was struggling to let out.
Shades of Sydnee exists because “book blogger” doesn’t come close to describing me anymore. I still have a shitton of books on my shelves that I’d love to get to reviewing sometime this century, but from the beginning my online presence has been fragmented, both in the sense of types of content and in how much I’m willing to share.
Here’s to a more honest picture.
