After setting up a blog, the WordPress Website recommends that you:
Bug your real-life friends – encourage friends and family to read your blog: send them reminder emails when you update and talk to them about it when you meet in person. Often having a really small audience of people you care about is better than having a million visitors and not knowing any of them.
But having done as suggested and casually invited all my family and friends (non-Italian, of course) to “check out my blog. Yeah, that’s right. I’ve got a blog. Me! On the Internet. With followers and everything”, I’m beginning to see a major downside of not writing my blog anonymously. Namely that I feel I can’t write anything even vaguely negative about the folks I know. No moaning, no telling tales, no gossiping sharing my opinion of other people’s life choices.
It’s not that I want to reveal their darkest, juiciest secrets* or bad mouth any of my friends. It’s more that I’d like to write freely about situations and events without being concerned that I might upset/annoy/libel one of them. At least if I had a million readers that I didn’t know, I wouldn’t have to censor myself so much.
So how to proceed? Should I simply change names and hope the relevant person doesn’t guess they’re the subject of a post? Ask for permission before blogging? 
Or just write whatever I want without worrying about offending anyone else? If I think about it too much, I’ll be reduced to writing only about innocuous subjects such as cheese, cats and dust.
* I am in possession of some really good secrets. Seriously good. But I never divulge my information: I’d make a great spy. Mind you, I don’t actually want to put this to the test or anything; under extreme interrogation, I will crack.
BARBED WORDS 
The danger of being friends/family with a writer is that you end up in their work. I say change the names and maybe some of the details, but keep the core the truth….
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Excellent advice, thank you!
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Welcome to blogging. Where you have soooo much to say but cannot possibly say it. I live in this space permanently. Like writing about how your child finds your vibrator knowing full well that the kids’ headmaster reads your blog. Do you write it or do you not? Or do you write it and then have the head master tapping you on the shoulder after the school speech day saying: ‘ Thanks for the blogs. One in particular. We enjoyed that so much we printed it out and stuck it on the staff room wall for a week.’
I feel your pain.
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Ha ha, hope they didn’t ‘rabbit’ on about it too much!
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Maybe you should consider setting up a second, totally anonymous, blog, where you can complain, moan and gossip to your heart’s content!
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I just might do that – it could be fun to have an outlet to get it all off my chest!
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I think you should go ahead and write all the gossip about your friends, change the names then all your friendly followers can have great delight in trying to guess if it is them or not. What a laugh that would be – unless you are writing about me of course!
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Good idea, I do have a few juicy secrets about you tucked away…
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I feel your pain… I say change the names and go with it. At least that way you’ll be able to find out which of your friends actually read the blog properly rather than just scanning it! It’s a good test…
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Yes, several friends have looked at me blankly when I mention my latest blog topic so it will be an excellent test!
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This is exactly why i didn’t tell anyone about my blog for years. i’m still not really sure what the answer is.
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It is a drawback… but not in all instances. I’ve written about two horrendous flatmate experiences, one hilarious (and doomed from the start) first date, and my first time having sex in Spanish, because the people involved are no longer in my life.
And I’m also praying every day that my mother doesn’t find/understand the latter post.
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I’m intrigued to know if the sex was in Spanish or you wrote about it in Spanish?? Either way, I agree that parents don’t need to know about such activities!
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No, it was in Spanish, I wrote about it in English 😉
Parents know NOTHING about such things at all. Full stop.
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My mother doesnt read English and THANK GOD for that. But my dad ‘follows’ and then comments (no longer PMs) on things that I have misspelled IN COMMENTS. My fam is pretty open-minded so he is fine with reading posts with sex and booze references, but there’s a strict DONT TELL MOM policy (mostly re: booze. She’s the Beer Police).
And I try not to badmouth any RL people I am still in touch with who might also read my blog.
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My Dad hasn’t yet worked out how to use a computer so no worries about him reading anything inappropriate. I’ll be more worried if my children start reading my blog – fortunately at the moment, they just think it’s really lame!!
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