Coming out

No, this isn’t a post about me coming out of the closet, I am not gay, but I am making something of a reveal about myself.

As those of you who have been paying attention will know, I write under the pen name of Alex R Carver, because I want to keep my writing and personal lives separate. Part of my efforts to keep the two aspects of my life independent of one another I have been using a picture of my mum’s Yorkshire Terrier as my author picture.

Molly is a cute dog, and an effective way of not revealing myself, but it seems as though that is not going to be possible moving forward. I was invited to write an article for a new project recently – details are top secret right now so that’s all I can say on the subject – and as part of that I was required to provide an author picture that was actually of me.

This was something of a challenge as I wanted to take part in this opportunity, but I didn’t want to be recognisable. Fortunately, there are many ways to play with an image, and using black and white as well as a touch of soft focus or some such thing (I don’t actually know what was done to the photo I took) I was able to have a picture of me where I don’t believe you could recognise me, at least not easily.

If you look below you’ll see the before and after.