Wow. Laura just read the posting about adding photos to her brant and she was shocked to see that without realizing it she switched from third person to first person and then back to third person during the course of that very short posting. As always, Laura chose not to edit out the strange inconsistencies of voice — she believes strongly in keeping her brant entries immediate and wholly honest no matter how psychologically revealing they may be — and she knows this leaves her open and vulnerable to analysis from every dimestore armchair psychologist out there. As always, Laura welcomes any and all comments — as long as people are writing about her and thinking about her and discussing her to her face, she is always interested in what people have to say.

Oh. My. God.
Laura just realized that she unwittingly switched from third person into first person while writing her last brant entry, “Branter’s Elbow.” Laura was completely unconscious about doing this — in fact, she didn’t know she had switched perspectives until she started writing her next brant entry and realized she’d accidentally written “I” instead of “Laura.”
But because Laura believes that branting should remain as spontaneous and honest as possible, she’s not going to go back and correct her last brant, replacing all the “I”s with “Laura”s. That, she feels, would be false. Better her rabid fans witness Laura’s mistakes than believe that she is perfection incarnate.

However, Laura is deeply confused and, if truth be told, shaken by the experience. She’d based a lot of her Web Identity on the third person persona of Laura the Branter — which is a completely different persona than Laura the Person — and now she’s not sure which is which and what is the more authentic persona for her brant. This is hard to explain — both to herself and to her fans — but Laura’s going to follow this journey wherever it takes her. In other words, she’s going to relinquish control. Meaning, she will not revise this sort of “mistake.” That is, when she writes in the third person, she will assume that that is the correct perspective to use at that particular moment in time. Likewise, when she accidentally lapses into first person she will assume that that, too, is the correct perspective to use at that particular moment in time.

Of course, this being the Age of Interaction, Laura welcomes your comments and thoughts about the first-person versus third-person perspective dilemma either right here on the brant or on her Discussion page.

I have to say that after branting so much last night — and not even managing to catch up to where I’m supposed to be brant-updating-wise — I awoke with a bad case of Branter’s Elbow. Actually, it’s not really my elbow that’s sore; it’s more just an overall feeling of mental and physical exhaustion (I didn’t go to bed until well after 1:00 a.m.) and a sense of concern about how I’m supposed to find the time to write another novel when I’m spending so much of my time branting. If anyone has an answer to this question — rhetorical or otherwise — I would really appreciate it. Thank you for your help.