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❖ Progress reports on my ongoing projects
❖ Announcements of new things I'm writing behind the scenes
❖ Rambling about anything from queer rep to c...
Did you match your username and profile picture on purpose?
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Fun Fact: I've had the exact same username since I joined Wattpad in 2017. Until early August (the month), I had the same profile picture, too, and the original is still the background of my new one, which I recently commissioned. And yes, they're supposed to match.
As for my username, it's from a song!
That song is Woodsmoke and Oranges by Ian Tamblyn. I first learned it in a young-adult choir I was a part of back in high school. It was my favorite song in the repertoire, and I still remember my voice part, many years later. It had more significance than that, though. Ian Tamblyn is a Canadian artist who writes a lot of songs about the landscapes and cultural elements of the Canadian Shield, and this one was no exception. The Canadian Shield is, incidentally, a landscape that played a huge role in inspiring and driving my Shelha series, the first books I ever wrote. I spend many a summer in those forests, walking among trees and rocks and drawing inspiration for a series I spent nine years writing, and that saw me through many tough teen years.
Rewinding to the choral version, though. The cover of the sheet music we sang from had a photograph on it that I absolutely loved: a silhouette of someone canoeing through fog along a lake's edge at sunrise. If the colour / aesthetic look familiar to you, that's not by accident.
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It took me years to find that photo again: I'm pretty sure it wasn't even on the internet anywhere until a couple of years ago. Which was a problem for me, because when I went to make my Wattpad profile, SmokeAndOranges sprang to mind as an appropriate username pretty much immediately. I wanted the photo to match it, so I went looking. Unable to locate it, I used the closest thing I could find, and that one stuck. Now I'm way too attached to both to ditch them anytime soon ✨
There was a bit of strategy involved in the selection, too. I'm the only person on Wattpad with anything like my username, and having a matching profile pic means people only need to remember one to remember the other. I also joined the old Wattpad forums shortly after joining Wattpad, and quickly found that having a bright colour as a profile pic made me easy to spot in a conversation. I didn't want my face on my profile, and I didn't have a pen name yet, either, so it also made things easy for me!
And if they fit my brand of being a bit of a pyromaniac in my books... well. I'm not complaining 😌🔥
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How did you pick your username?
Have you ever changed it? If so, what prompted the change?
What's the story behind your current profile picture?
