what happened to the blogger formerly known as biyuti?
2015-01-22
biyuti is me. lol.
nothing happened to biyuti… i just changed my tumblr url (and my blog url) as ppl do…
of course, there was a reason for this. and a good one!
knowing that there are still some people who followed the old tumblr, but didn’t migrate with me to the new tumblr and so don’t know that i’m still around…
here is some explanations for ‘why’
first. biyuti publishing. i started bp as a vanity press to publish and try to make money from all the content i produce on the web (for free). i have zero interest in mainstream publishing for a lot of reasons that i won’t get into.
but. as soon as I started bp, something amazing happened…. a bunch of twoc i know contacted me and wanted to publish their work. and it has sort of snowballed from there.
out of a desire to be pretentious (yes, this really was my intention when i did it bc i find myself funny like that), i decided that my official pen name would be ‘b. binaohan’. the ‘b’ = biyuti. that is what the initial is for.
this turned out to be a smart and good thing when i realized that if bp was going be something OTHER THAN a vanity press, the ‘brand’ needed to be less about me as a person. now. there were really only two ways to move forward: change the name of the press or change my own name/brand.1 i opted for option two, since my own pen name already ellided the ‘biyut’ and it’d be easy enough for me to change my own social media URLs to ‘b. binaohan’ (or some variation). which is what i did…
i did this bc i want ppl to see ‘biyuti publishing’ as a distinct entity from me. so that the other people who publish there aren’t tainted by association with me (insofar as this is a thing). while i’m def. not the most ‘hated’ blogger out there, i do have my share of haters. but hate is transitive and i didn’t want this harming the other ppl who publish at bp.
but why didn’t i just change my tumblr url instead of deleting the tumblr and making another?
well… in part bc i got called out for anti-Blackness and i felt that one way to be accountable was to walk away from the ‘platform’ i’d built for myself, in large part bc of my relationship to many Black ppl. i did this not bc anyone asked me to, but bc i felt it was important for me to remain committed to the notion that people are more important than platforms. if my blogging is quality, then ppl will find and follow me again. or not.
but also bc i had ‘biyuti’ as my main account and really want to make it a secondary account to put some distance between me and the notifications, something i can get obsessive and anxious about. it was becoming really unhealthy for me.
so yeah.