Love in Dark Settings

Jessewave has cut off the comments for this thread, as I discovered *after* I composed a reply. Since this is on a topic where I feel I have something to contribute, I'm posting my reply here (as an open letter to the m/m fiction community; I don't expect Wave to go bouncing around to various people's blogs, reading their posts on this subject).

( Reply to 'Faking It' )

(Why I'm posting this on October 20.)

I've been wondering whether I should make my own contribution (in an unofficial, textual way) to the It Gets Better Project. I'd been thinking I shouldn't. My own coming out as a bisexual teen was amazingly painless; I didn't think I had much to offer teens who are undergoing agony because of their sexual feelings.

(And lest we forget, this includes same-sex-attracted youths who, for reason of personal conscience, prefer not to act on their feelings. We mustn't overlook their stories.)

Then I realized that my coming out does have an important lesson. So here's the chronology.

( What it was like for me when I was an adolescent )

Old and new maps are here. On the new map, Dreamwidth is just east of LiveJournal (which has unaccountably turned into an island). Fanfiction.net is just west, and if you go a little south you'll find the Fandom Blogs island. Don't miss the passing references to LJ down in the blogs closeup and just south of Twitter.

Hurrah to Randall Munroe. Someone buy the man a drink.

An article of mine on BDSM fiction by original slash writers and m/m writers appears in this month's issue of The Leather Times, published by the Leather Archives & Museum. The article summarizes the rise of slash and m/m, and it gives brief introductions to the writings of three authors: Maculategiraffe, Manna Francis, and Syd McGinley. (I was under space constraints; otherwise, the list would have been much longer.) There's also a brief quote from Nigel Puerasch.

I wrote and submitted this article last year, before the current kerfuffle over the genders of writers in the m/m community. Being of a nonstandard gender myself, I've naturally been interested in the gender issues that arise in the original slash and m/m communities. However, I'd like to think that my approach in this article to the subject of m/m writers' genders is a tad bit more sophisticated than some of the recent journalistic approaches.

HTML version of the article at my Website.

PDF version of the article within The Leather Times.
The Leather Times index.
Leather Archives & Museum warning page.

(The last page of the issue contains small pictures of hunks from the waist up; otherwise, all artwork in the issue is worksafe. As opposed to the text, which ain't.)

The remaining contents of this issue of The Leather Times are interesting: an article on queer BDSM in Ancient Greece, as well as an article on the controversy over a gay leather column in The Advocate in 1969. If you're not familiar with The Leather Times, it's worth a peruse if you're interested in BDSM history, especially gay BDSM history; every issue contains articles on that topic.

Archive Of Our Own is currently considering whether or not to let writers in the fan fiction community post their original fiction at the archive. (At the moment, that isn't permitted.) If you have any opinions for or against this, you might want to drop them a line, since they've asked for feedback.

I'm in favor of fan-written originalfic being permitted at the archive. I've been in fandom since 2002, and during that time, virtually every multifandom list and community that I've encountered has permitted the posting of originalfic. In particular, the darkfic/powerfic community has been almost completely integrated between fanfic and originalfic writers. Out of the dozens of darkfic/powerfic comms in fandom, I know of only one that does not permit the posting of originalfic.

I don't know of any case where a multifandom comm or list that permits originalfic has been overrun by originalfic writers. Archive Of Our Own clearly presents itself as an archive that's centered upon fan fiction; I think that's what it will continue to attract, no matter what its policy on original fiction.

That's what Nicholas Carr asks. Among other things: "If writers cater to a society that is chronically distracted, they will inevitably eschew writing complex arguments that require sustained attention and instead write in pithy, bite-sized bits of information, Carr predicts."

I know there are a lot of online writers here. (Well, yeah, since I write online fiction.) Do you feel that you write differently online than you do offline?

My answer: Yes, I do, thank goodness. Back in the 1990s, when I was writing fiction for print publication, my stories used to have very leisurely beginnings. At least one chapter would pass before anything dramatic happened. When I started writing online fiction, it was in the form of serialized e-mails, and I realized that, if I didn't hook the reader within the first paragraph, the reader would probably hit the delete button. My stories improved a lot after that.

"Let me tell you a depressing little truth. Back in my starving-editor days in the late 1960s, I edited a trio of men's magazines. And it was company policy to fire any first reader who couldn't reject a story every two minutes, because that's how fast they arrived. That means he had to open the envelope, pull out the story, read that opening page, attach a rejection slip, stuff and seal the envelope, and put it in the outgoing mail tray, all in 120 seconds. If you [i.e. the author] hadn't captured him by paragraph 2, he never got to all those gems that you had up ahead on pages 8 and 19 and 22."

--Mike Resnick, "Slush," Jim Baen's Universe.

Internet surfing does make concentrated reading very difficult for me. But Internet reading is a different matter; it can be rushed or slow, distracted or nondistracted, just like print reading. (Mr. Carr has clearly never smuggled a book onto his lap and tried to finish reading it during sixth-grade math, before the teacher caught him. If he had, he'd have less to say about how "books shielded our brains from distraction, focusing our minds on one topic at a time.")

What about you? Do you read differently online than offline?

Parental guidance is recommended for this post; NWS links ahead.

I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about this m/m fiction versus gay fiction debate going on. (See the posts linked from mm_fiction_news and metafandom.)

( Some not-work-safe links and some *very* work-safe links )

So I'm a bit uncomfortable with this drawing of battle lines between genres and between genders and between sexual orientations, as though all of us belonged on one side or the other. I don't want to have to stop being this, just in order to be able to be part of this.

"If you really don't want to post actual warnings, a generic 'I don't warn' statement is better than nothing. Though, please always warn for mpreg and watersports. That way I can find stories I want to read. I mean avoid. Umm, yeah."

--Not giving credit on this one, for obvious reasons.

Below, a slightly edited version of my response to Jane Carnall's post about the warnings issue. Only likely to be of interest to folks in the fan fiction community.

( Read more... )

This is long enough that it deserves its own post. I visited a couple of D.C. bookstores on April 22 and compiled a list of all the m/m books with contributions by authors whom I recognized as being from the slash, yaoi, or genre romance communities. (I use the term "m/m" here as a convenient short-hand to refer to books from those communities. Of course there are many authors of gay love stories who don't belong to those communities, but I didn't list their books.) I thought you guys might be interested in seeing how far writers from those communities have made it onto the shelves of bookstores.

( Lambda Rising )

( Borders )

( My conclusions )