So a Cross Dresser walks into a blog …

There is an age, dear friends, for radical experimentation with ones outward appearance. I will happily confess to having passed my “best before” date for such experiments. I am fairly well settled on what looks work well with me, in drab and en femme, and I do not color too wildly outside the lines. With that said, I have always felt that it is healthy for all of us, CD, TG, GG and the whole happy rainbow of human experience, to tinker with the recipe now and then.

I enjoy stabbing a pitch fork into my personal compost pile, turning it over and airing things out a bit. And do you know, you really cannot lose when you do. Either you prove your instincts correct, or you get a happy new finding. Perhaps it is sound practice to apply the same thinking to ones blog. At the very least, not having made any substantial changes to the layout of or editorial approach to Voyages en Rose in well over a year, it feels like it might be time to start stirring it up a bit.

I will be tinkering with layout, tools, gadgets and interactive media gew-gaws in general in the spare moments presented over the next couple of weeks, and hope to wind up not entirely breaking things. At the same time, I am going to plunder my brain, or any other willing source for themes and content for a blog post or two. I think that is the stuff that you actually come here for.

A new tool that is live on the blog as of today (ta-da!) may serve both happy purposes. Over to your right you will notice a little “Ask Me Anything” widget. This smart little code stub from Formspring allows blog visitors to, well ... ask me anything. My hopes are that you will. You can anonymously stick your own pitchfork into my compost heap, and turn it over to your hearts content. Alternatively, you can easily create your own Formspring account, and operate in the open. If your question fits under the rubric of anything, I want to hear it.

I hope that your questions will help me dredge up a memory or an observation worthy of a post or two here. If the come in sufficient volume, then I might be able to quilt up a weekly Letters to the Editor format post. At the very least, I am interested in hearing what you want to hear. It will save me all the bother of borrowing ideas from other blogs. So there we are. Ask me anything. Subject matter is wide open, and in your capable, well moisturized hands.

Responses to these questions will also post pronto-like to my tiny Twitter-sphere (@petrab_cd). Twitter. Hmmm. I am not yet convinced of the merits of Twitter. 140 characters is either too few to express a thought well, or too many for a good theatrical drama, unless 130 of them are members of a massive Greek chorus. That said, perhaps this sort of rapid fire Q&A is exactly the sort of thing that Twitter does well. Lets give it the old college try shall we?

One other slightly more than cosmetic change to announce today. Treacle, noted wordsmith, blogger extraordinaire and by my reckoning, the reigning Queen of the Underwearworld, saw fit today to bequeath a Certified Lingerie Addict award on Voyages en Rose today. I have become friendly with Treacle in a nice HTTP way over the last couple of months, and have a lot of respect for the hard work and general savvy she applies to her always lovely blog. Additionally, I take it as a big win for Cross Dressers and other members of the Transgendered collective when any one of us gets a little easy acceptance from a member of more mainstream community. Treacle’s more mainstream community is the 51% privileged at birth to be members of the fairer (and far more interesting) sex.

If you do not know her blog, Confessions of a Lingerie Addict, and have a fondness for the pretty things beneath the surface, you have lost time to make up for. Now would be a great time to start. Thanks Treacle! A cotton gloved salute and a big air kiss your way.