Writing as Joar

I've written under this name for seventeen years, and people still ask me now and then why I don't just put my real name on it. The easy answer is that Joar is a pen name and the whole point of a pen name is privacy. The honest answer is more complicated than that, because if I'm being straight with you, the wall I supposedly built around this thing has more holes in it than I'd like to admit, and most of them I punched myself.

Start with where the name comes from, since that part's simple. Joar is a character. He's my undead warlock, the guy I've been playing since Burning Crusade, and when I started the blog seventeen years ago it never occurred to me to sign it anything else. You write about WoW, you write as your WoW self. It stuck, and by the time I'd have thought twice about it there were already a couple hundred posts under it. The name grew roots.

The idea, at least in my head, was that Joar would stay sealed off from the rest of my life. A hobby identity, walled away from the buttoned-up professional world where "I run a World of Warcraft blog" would have landed like a confession. That was the theory. In practice, I blew the first hole in that wall myself, early, and on purpose.

Some of my most popular posts in the early years were breakdowns of Blizzard's earnings calls and quarterly financials. I could not help myself. Here was a company I loved, publishing exactly the kind of numbers I stare at for a living, and I was going to read those filings whether I wrote about them or not. So I wrote about them. And anybody paying attention learned pretty quickly that the guy behind Joar does something with financial statements for a living, because you don't casually dissect a 10-Q for fun unless that's your world. The professional wall came down almost immediately, and I knocked it over myself because the material was too good to leave alone.

The personal stuff crept in slower, and mostly as I got closer to retirement. Somewhere in the last several years the separation just started mattering less to me. I've written about my son's swimming, the meets, the way that took over our calendar. I've written about becoming a grandfather. Bits of real life that a stricter, younger Joar would have kept firmly on the other side of the wall. If you really wanted to sit down and assemble it, I suspect you could sketch a decent picture of who I actually am from what's already sitting on this blog. I've left more fingerprints than the pen name implies.

So why keep the name at all, if the secrecy's this leaky? Honestly, because it stopped being about secrecy a while ago and became about identity. Joar isn't a disguise anymore. He's a mode. He's who I am when I'm writing about this specific hobby, seventeen years deep, and the name carries all of that history with it. Retiring it now would feel like renaming an old friend. The wall came down in pieces, but the name stayed, because the name was never really the wall. It was just mine.

There's still a little separation left, and I'll keep that little bit. This is the corner of my writing life that's purely for love, no professional angle, no personal-brand strategy, and the name helps me remember that when I sit down here I'm not performing for anyone. But it's a low fence now, not a fortress, and I've made my peace with that. Seventeen years in, the honest version is that I let people in gradually, one earnings-call post and one swim meet at a time, and the world didn't end.

Still Joar. Just a more transparent one than I set out to be.