EEUW. I hate slash fan fic. (if you see me at a con, ask me about Lucy Synk the artist and her Artist GoH experience at a slash convention/ a kind of fandom that she was truly NOT aware of. It was not good for her.)

BUT I can see fantasizing about doing something with Hawkeye, he's the kind of man I'm actually married to (yes, Jim. And I'm a very devoted spouse. he makes me laugh, he makes me happy). Funny, scarcastic, pointy in many ways, intelligent and well-read. And who can sometimes go right to the meat of the matter at hand with no prior indiction or intent, to solve something that's going wrong.

I wish I had an insightful comment, but mostly this reminds me of my Mulder/Krycek days and makes me want to go back and read it all again.

That, and I'm reminded of how impressed I was when I discovered how professional much of the slash-writing community is. I don't mean talent, I mean beta-reading, rewriting, editing, rating systems, and the mostly well-written and clean copy that resulted from the system. Unfortunately, I don't think those standards have carried over to the teenage girls posting Harry/Draco fic on fanfiction.net, but at least the X-Files fandom tended to produce high-quality writing.

I'm reading the story she links to, and having a bit of trouble with the premise. Hawkeye and Trapper going whoring with Frank Burns? I just don't see it.

One of the interesting things about fanfic is that I definitely have different expectations of it than I do of professional fiction. If a piece of fanfic has a really interesting story, or the occasional lovely image, that's good enough, and I enjoy it. When I read a supposedly professional story, I am upset by things I'll pass right over in fanfic -- flaccid writing, making explicit too much of what should be shown in the characters' reactions, different characters sounding too much like each other, and the like.

To invoke Delany, I have different reading protocols when reading fanfic and profic. That doesn't mean I have no standards for each -- just different standards. And I don't enjoy most fanfic enough to seek it out, even so.

I am torn up about fanfic in general. I don't want to discourage people from expressing their creativity. However, I have my own original characters - some published, others in the works - and I don't want other people ever usurping my toys. Granted that's not an issue for me right now, but I logically thus have to support other writers who are likewise displeased.

My books already have heterosexual and homosexual relationships. I don't want anyone else turning one into the other. It has nothing to do with being offended by the change of sexuality and everything to do with my thoroughly-defined character concepts.

I've decided that amateur fanfic between friends is perfectly fine and well within the bounds of fairness. But pseudo-publishing it by putting it publicly online gets to me.

I'm not sure how to balance my desire to promote creativity with my desire to keep other people's hands off of my characters.

So how do publishers deal with this stuff?

I think she's right when she suggests that pro fiction writers need to write the scenes they usually skip and fade to black. In those scenes lie the truth.

But she's incorrect when she posits that shame no longer will inform the writing process, unless it's shame for bad grammar. I think the struggle through the shame helps. In her exemplar, I was struck that the mirror Hawkeye was shamed. He never did consummate the relationship with the slave Mulcahy. So even in the context of the slash story, she never did get down to business (so to speak).

I've struggled over sex scenes that were integral to my plots. And because my characters are, hopefully, recognizable human beings, they feel the emotional and physical consequences after the scenes. I'm not trying to write porno, and at least in my plots so far, sex happens; it is a part of my characters' world. Indeed, some of the scenes I've written, and still have planned, are quite brutal. These scenes are not the point of the stories, however.

The slash fiction writers may turn to other genres, and they may carry a sort of dispassion in their toolbox, but if this is all they write, they will discover the necessity for more tools to write coherent, three dimensional and interesting stories.

I would say cross that bridge when you get there.

I know that there's a lot of fanfic for most things, but the majority of published works never have any fanfic written about them. Of those that do inspire someone to go 'what if' and write something down about them and then go on to trying to share it out there in the ether, few get a fandom whereby several other people say 'ooh, what a good idea' and start discussing the book and sharing their own stories about it.
In order to have fanfic, a story needs to do two things: engage the reader's interest and imagination and second, leave enough holes for the imagination to wander about. Not all stories can or should do that. In order to have a fandom, a story needs to be widely distributed enough to attract enough people who might be interested in interacting, so anything that doesn't make it to a second printing, is picked up by a small publisher and the like doesn't have a hope. It wouldn't be top of my list of things to worry about if I were out to get published.

Fanfic isn't written for the creator's perusal (indeed reading fanfic of something you've written is a bad idea) and it isn't about telling you how you *should* have written things.
Fanfic is about how a person has seen and speculated about a work; it is writing about things that could happen, might have happened under different circumstances and sometimes fanfic events exist because they could never happen. In seeking like-minded people to share with, fandoms can become networks of friends, to the extent that the thing that brought people together in the first place becomes secondary.

I think most authors ignore it. Some even see it as a good thing, given that fanfic writers are of necessity rabid fans of the book and can be guaranteed to buy everything they put out and issue free publicity. However, given that 'fair use' is in the eyes of the creator, if it all really, really bugs you, there's always the cease-and-desist letter.

Just my two cents.

Pookel - A lot of the process you describe is done by teenage girls, though. I know I made use of betas and rating systems for years, and I've only just passed out of my teen years. I've never written Harry/Draco and posted it on the Pit of Voles, though...

Full disclosure: I've been writing fanfiction since I was about thirteen. But I've always felt it was more in the vein of a writing exercise than my own work with my own characters. And it can be helpful. Two of my friends and I were talking about fanfic at lunch the other day, and one of them said that writing fanfic meant she got all of the cliches out of her system years ago. As opposed to all the novice writers in her fiction workshop, who are all writing terrible cliched work right now - but that's another issue.

I feel like cease-and-desist letters only hurt the image of the author, in the end. It will provoke a strong reaction from fans that the author hates them for enjoying the work so much and wanting to play around with it.

Naa-Dei, I think you've hit the nail on the head - fandom grows beyond the central work, after a certain point. I met three of my best friends through Harry Potter fanfic and roleplaying; our friendships are no longer about the books, but instead about each other.

Sorry for rambling, I've been up for about fifteen minutes.

So the takeaway I get from this is the inverse of King's dictum ("I skip all the boring parts") -- Don't skip the interesting parts.

With the corollary that to be imperceptive or squeamish about knowing what's interesting is a greater sin, in audience eyes at least, than not knowing what's boring.

Hmmmm.

Conspire with your readers, even when it's heavy breathing.

I'm personally fascinated by fanfiction. I see it as an extension of the genre conversation or the folk process--I've also collected more versions of "House of the Rising Sun" than I can comfortably recall.

And I think she's very apt in her advice to write down the bones, and get down in the blood and emotion. I'm not sure writers pull back because of shame; when I pull back from an intense scene, it's from personal discomfort, not worry what anybody will think. In other words, because it *hurts* to write, not because I'm ashamed of it.

(And, hopefully, I go back and make myself write it honestly anyway.)

The difference between that frankness and ellipsis and (I won't say implication, because implication can be painfully effective) euphemism is the difference between Allen Ginsberg and Rod McKuen.

Cease-and-desist letters also won't work unless the letter alone successfully intimidates the writer. The question of fanfic as fair use has never been tested in court; it's hard to imagine someone lawyering up to pursue someone who has cost them nothing, potentially discouraging and offending a part of the hard-core fanbase for their work in the process.

My sentiments remain that fanfic is a valid form of reader response, and is and should be entirely beyond the author's control. Once you've written the text, what the reader gets out of it is out of your hands -- and will inevitably be filtered through the lens of the reader's past experience and desires. That goes for fanfic as much as for other kinds of fannish discussion.

Personally, I'd be enthusiastic to see fanfic written about my soon-to-be-published pro work. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Star Trek both has extreme longevity and success, and was the first inspiration of fanfic and slash. As Naa-Dei says, a work that inspires fanfic is a work that's getting hold of the reader's gut in some way.

And this comes back to the Id Vortex idea that Ellen is talking about. I think that fanfic and slash fanfic in particular do often hit the lizard brain, so to speak, because the shared source that they are starting from has already tapped into the id on some level, and the fanfic is following that tap down (sometimes to the completely illogical conclusion).

Elizabeth, I might be wrong, but my interpretation is that the shame Ellen is referring to is not shame at putting the writing out there necessarily, but shame at *feeling* the underlying visceral pull of kink, so it may be the same discomfort that you're describing.

Thanks for the links to Sarah Donati's essays. I read them with interest. I have been fighting my way through writing my first sex scene for over a month. It's about incest and power and I can't write more than a bit at a time because it's wrong in a way that makes me feel that it is right.

Ah, that's where that analysis of _Welcome to Temptation_ was! I found it a while ago, thought it was great, and promptly lost the link. Thanks.

Random thought about the actual topic of this post:

Hurt/comfort is a part of the Id Vortex that pro writers *do* get close to, and part of the appeal of Mercedes Lackey's (early) stuff, Dorothy Dunnett, etc., depending in part on the age of the reader.

Cease-and-desist letters are a necessary precursor to lawsuits. (Also, cheaper.)

Conspire with your readers, even when it's heavy breathing.

Or, especially when it's heavy breathing!

Once again, Thank You Teresa! I've been looking for some how-to on writing sex scenes that were closer to the Id. My novel-in-prgress will be much improved for this.

Naomi clarified, Elizabeth, I might be wrong, but my interpretation is that the shame Ellen is referring to is not shame at putting the writing out there necessarily, but shame at *feeling* the underlying visceral pull of kink, so it may be the same discomfort that you're describing.

That is what I meant, though I don't think I expressed it very clearly-- I only expected that post to be read by the people who usually read my lj. But, yes, it's that fanfic tends to be more successful than profic at engaging the sorts of kinks we (as writers or as readers) are most embarassed at *having* in the first place, and more successful at transmuting a kink-support framework into an effective story-- sometimes, into a story that appeals to readers who don't share the kink. (I'm using kink to cover all emotional hot-buttons, not just the sexual ones, btw.)

Teresa-- you've got an asterisk on 'fandom' up there-- is there a footnote on its way?

Hm. I just wanna point out that we're not always better off getting the explicit scene. And not just sex either -- sometimes we're better off without the as-you-know-Bob techno-exposition, or the detailed description of whale flensing, or Princess Noreena's five hundred hats. Sometimes these things don't actually help the story (advance the plot, shed useful light on character, whatever).

I was thinking back on Larry Niven's Ringworld as an example. There are a couple of bits where Louis Wu has sex with Teela Brown, and Niven skips over the details, and I thought including the details wouldn't make the reader's lives any better (even if Niven had been good enough to pull them off).

But then I thought about later on, when Louis is having sex with Halrloprillalar, and Nessus is using the tasp to stimulate her pleasure centers remotely. That could maybe have benefitted from an explicit description, and we'd have needed the earlier scenes with Teela for contrast.

There's a lot of stuff out there in the blogosphere about fanfic and whether or not it's a good thing. Really, though, that's a moot question. Write a good story with strong characters who bring in a big enough audience, and fanfic will happen. It's a compliment of the highest order, though I absolutely agree with the commenter who said that an author shouldn't read fanfic about his or her own characters.

And, thanks for the links.

Ellen must've been fascinated by the same bit. She did a followup post on "what tools do you use to keep those stories from collapsing?"

I always get a kick out of seeing Making Light talk about fanfiction, like the old "who put chocolate in my peanut butter?" commercials.

The danger for me as a fanfic writer is that I'll be sucked into the Id Vortex. Tired as I get of coyness, I've also read stories that go to the other extreme.

It's like the characters are living on an emotional diet of twinkies and whiskey. Everything is so het up with Lust and Love and Loss and Pain that they would sob for a lost t-shirt. Half of what the slash world perennially debates as over-feminization of male characters seems to me a matter of feelings junkies needing bigger hits.

Learning to walk that line is not easy, especially when jumping merrily over it garners as much or more positive response. Hungry for product and open channels of feedback = good, but it can be tricky to figure out, when the feedback is "yum", whether we've actually cooked a balanced meal or just served cake for breakfast.

Silly me. I guess I always thought the lust-potion was a horror device in that story. It certainly didn't HELP anything, just led to a lot of sword-down-the-bed loneliness, suspicion, and eventually death.

Romance? Um. Not so much. At least not for me.

New ways of telling stories develop most readily when you have a population that’s hungry for the product, the creators have little or no dignity at stake, and there are open channels for feedback and discussion.

Teresa,

Welcome to the wonderful world of Open Source. This is exactly the sort of thing that is behind the Linux operating system. People wanted somethign other than the commercial operating systems available, and the internet allowed poeple to post their code for little cost, to a lot of people, and get free feedback via email.

I agree with Avram that the explicit scene isn't always desirable. Sometimes the challenge should be, I think, to put that passion into other contexts. I would rather see a fade than a scene done poorly, and sometimes sex scenes are generic because they are in fact not very good vessels for insights into the passions that drive the characters.

Law & Order, particularly in its first, hmm, half dozen or so seasons, is the counter-example here. We knew essentially nothing about the characters' personal lives, and never saw them except in the context of work. Yet it's a show filled with a lot of personal passion, tangled histories, and all the human complexity that makes life fun to watch, just anchored in the sphere of work. I'd like to see other stories infuse other aspects of life with the same passion.

I've been very interested to see what kind of publishing model emerges form the Internet, both for fiction and for other forms of media. We haven't seen anything particularly NEW just yet. You can buy individual works electronically, as if they were published on paper or CD. Or you can look at things that are supported by advertising, just like magazines, newspapers, TV and radio are.

It seems likely that a new publishing model will emerge around the Internet. We're still in the early stages of the Internet, the equivalent of pre-1920 for radio, well before Fibber McGee and Molly and Jack Benny and those guys, when there were just a handful of radio stations in the whole United States. We're still fumbling around, with no idea how artists and publishers will actually be able to make money off of this thing.

(Although journalists ARE making money---through ads.)

That's one of the exciting things about blogging. I do think blogging is overhyped, and I think it's by no means certain that it's going to be the Next Big Thing, any more than pets.com was the Next Big Thing. But, still, it's the first really NEW publishing model to emerge from the Internet. And it's in its early days yet; the blogs of 2014 will look very little like the blogs of today.

And the business model for blogging, in the form of blogads, is something legitimately new, different from anything in other media.

Although I'm not aware of anybody actually making a living off of blogads.

When the new publishing model for the Internet emerges, I expect it'll be what Clay Shirky calls "publish, and then filter." That's the opposite of how things work in TV, radio, books and periodicals.

In old media, you have an editor, like our Blog Hosts, who decides what is worthy of publishing. The editor helps the creator polish the work, and then sets the machinery to work marketing and distributing it. Filter, then publish.

On the Internet, anyone can publish, and have his work, theoretically, read by anyone in the world. So if you're a blogger in, say, Taiwan, you can post text to the web and have it read by Americans.

But how will the Americans see it? We're not in Taiwan, we don't know what the hell is going on there.

The answer is that somebody has to CALL ATTENTION TO THAT WORK. It has to cross the path of someone like InstaPundit or Josh Marshall or the gang at Boing Boing, who links to it from their blogs. Thousands of Americans read those blogs every day. Some of those Americans work for the mainstream news media.

I suspect, from what I'm reading here, that we're seeing the emergence of the same sort of publish-then-filter publishing mechanism in fanfic. An important question is: how will people make money off it?

The sf writer and all-around smart guy John Barnes touches on the subject of the evolution of fanfic in an article I wrote for SFWA Bulletin. The article is here (it's a PDF---sorry). The sidebar covers the Barnes interview. The subject of the article is e-books. Barnes describes some of the ways that commercial prose fiction might change in the coming century.

One of the things he describes is, basically, open source. He doesn't call it that---I don't know if he's even familiar with the details of how the open source process works. But that's what he's talking about. He describes shared fictional universes, with histories and technologies that anyone can write in. They're like the "Star Trek" or "Star Wars" universe, except in those universes, being fanfic-friendly is incidental, whereas in these future, shared universes, they'd be designed for other writers and creators to work in from the very beginning. And then you'd have a committee of people whose job it would be to sift through all the work that's been published in those universes and decide what's worthy of being accepted into the Canon.

Ellen, the asterisk is a footnote. Rest your text pointer on top of it and the note will pop up. I put it in because some of the readers here come out of the mimeograph-cranking ancestral fannish rootstock, and they'd momentarily stumble over that use of "fandom."

Funny. My new exemplar for sexually charged and emotionally intense is the excellent Graham Greene novel I just finished, The End of the Affair. Even my writing has changed; I lost some shame when Greene put everything on the table.

I say funny because the devices he uses to create intensity are so implicit, rather than explicit. Sex scenes: 0.

Now, I am curious what else slash (never read any) has to offer from the other end of the spectrum.

Teresa, that hover-over-the-asterisks thing doesn't work with the browser I'm using right now (Firefox on Windows).

Mitch: I do think blogging is overhyped, and I think it's by no means certain that it's going to be the Next Big Thing, any more than pets.com was the Next Big Thing.

But when the blogging bubble bursts, will the Glenn Reynolds sock puppet sell for more than the net worth of Tech Central Station? (If you're a first-generation blogger, make that "Dave Winer" and "Userland".)

Elizabeth Bear:

"The difference between that frankness and ellipsis and (I won't say implication, because implication can be painfully effective) euphemism is the difference between Allen Ginsberg and Rod McKuen."

Cleverly observed! Hmmm.... How about some academic fanfic where Ginsberg seduces Rod McKuen, who becomes converted to Politically Active Socialist Tibetan Buddhist Judaism, and finds true love... suddenly blossoming as an artist and winning a Pulitzer Prize for poetry? And then writes a new song for the Charlie Brown Hanukah Special that goes #1 on the charts? Then writes the songs for the Pixar feature animation of "Kaddish and Moloch?"

Um, as it happens, I heard a story on the radio yesterday about Sophie Calle (artist, french), and it really got me going on the whole subject of Stories. I wrote something about it last night, a post in which I discover I am a storiopath. Maybe the post is somewhat tangential to the topic of needing particular stories to be written, but maybe not so much.

it's in its early days yet; the blogs of 2014 will look very little like the blogs of today.

Mitch: wanna bet? I think 2014 blogs will look exactly like today's in all important particulars: same mix of A- through Z-listers, same mix of motivations (get famous, try out ideas, have somewhere to dump all these thoughts, etc), same sorts of posts from the same sorts of people: lefty outrage, rightwing whining, academics doing their thing (I think this will become more common), everyday folks just staying in touch with geographically scattered friends, geeks geeking out over the latest tech, etc etc.

I base my prediction on the observation that people change much less, and much less rapidly, than technology changes their environment. How different is blogging from pamphleteering or zine writing, other than speed and scope of distribution? It may be a simple failure of imagination on my part, but I don't think there's all that much more you can do in the way of putting words (pictures, sounds, movies, whatever as technology allows) together and distributing them.

On the subject of filtering, here's another prediction, just for the hell of it: filtering is the Next Big Thing; or if not the very Next, then soon after. We are already like to drown in data and using some combination of trusted agents (portals, blogs) and algorithms (Google, pet methods of finding cool stuff via del.icio.us or whatever) to stay afloat. As the waters get deeper, the flotation devices will have to get better -- so although I lack the technical know-how to make specific predictions as to how this will happen, I think that new and better filtering methods/agents are not very far off. Also, I think they will begin to advertise as filtering methods, explicitly saying "we can help you find the signals you want in all that noise".

I like good sex scenes. I like good combat scenes. I like good scenes in general. I think fans write this sort of stuff because authors can't always pull it off.

The other bit is that if a fan starts to identify with a character, the fan may start getting frustrated if the character avoids feeling some emotions.

We live vicariously through the characters we read in books and watch on TV and movies. It isn't quite so vicarious if the characters are feeling the same emotions we feel every day. We want to feel passion and rage and sorrow and anything else that defines the whole human spectrum. We know what the day-to-day emotion feels like, so we want something more.

We know the lust is inside the characters we read about because we identify with those characters and the lust is inside us. So we want to ride along with them as they experience it. And if the author won't give it to us, then readers are going to start writing the kind of stuff they want to read.

Mitch: And then you'd have a committee of people whose job it would be to sift through all the work that's been published in those universes and decide what's worthy of being accepted into the Canon.

It's my understanding that this is what is happening with the japanese equivelent of fan fiction, and has been happening for quite some time. Doujinshi is very popular, and is considered the equal in status to small press published work. (Some doujinshi artists do get paid for their fan published works) Rarely, some of the twists proposed in a popular doujinshi are adopted as canon. It's a very interesting concept, and does reflect a model for the process that you're talking about

Sennoma---You make excellent points as to the motivations, hierarchies and content of blogs.

When I said blogging of 2014 won't look like the blogging of today, I was being very literal for the word "look like."

We're looking at a difference of 10 years. Ten years ago, the web didn't have frames, and tables . You could have your choice of any background color you wanted so long as it was gray.

We're still in the pioneering days of the web, and I expect 10 years from now the changes will be almost as drastic. Not quite, but almost.

And I expect that as we learn more about web design, layout and usability, the traditional blog layout---center column of entries in reverse chronological order, meta-information in one or two columns on the left, right or both sides---will give way to something else.

And, as Clay Shirky noted, the word "blog" itself will likely be eclipsed, the same way the same way the word "portal" isn't something you read much anymore.

Colleen Philippi---Another point Barnes makes is that we're already halfway toward this shared-source model of sf and fantasy, and have been for some time, in the way that the worlds for a lot of high fantasy novels look very similar. Likewise for space opera.

I see the similarities in high fantasy novels, not so much in space opera. I mean, "Star Wars" and "Star Trek" look FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT to me. To me, the universes have very little in common. Whereas one magic kingdom looks pretty much like another to me.

This is not a criticism of high fantasy, or a criticism of myself, either. It's just an observation.

Fan fic? Canon?

One word: Sherlock Holmes.

The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes 150th Anniversary: The Short Stories
by Leslie S. Klinger, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Lecarre

"This monumental edition promises to be the most important new contribution to Sherlock Holmes literature since William Baring-Gould's 1967 classic work. In this boxed set, Leslie Klinger, a leading world authority, reassembles Arthur Conan Doyle's 56 classic short stories in the order in which they appeared in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century book editions. Inside, readers will find a cornucopia of insights: beginners will benefit from Klinger's insightful biographies of Holmes, Watson, and Conan Doyle; history lovers will revel in the wealth of Victorian literary and cultural details; Sherlockian fanatics will puzzle over tantalizing new theories; art lovers will thrill to the 700-plus illustrations, which make this the most lavishly illustrated edition of the Holmes tales ever produced. The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes illuminates the timeless genius of Arthur Conan Doyle for an entirely new generation of readers. 700+ illustrations."

Dan: My new exemplar for sexually charged and emotionally intense is the excellent Graham Greene novel I just finished, The End of the Affair. Even my writing has changed; I lost some shame when Greene put everything on the table.

I actually declined to do a paper on that book in a Theology and Literature course because I didn't want to have to think about it in that level of detail. A testament to the power of sexually and emotionally intense scenes to affect a person and their views of a book or characters.

Greg London:

We live vicariously through the characters we read in books and watch on TV and movies. It isn't quite so vicarious if the characters are feeling the same emotions we feel every day. We want to feel passion and rage and sorrow and anything else that defines the whole human spectrum. We know what the day-to-day emotion feels like, so we want something more.

Interesting.

David Gerrold observed that a major flaw of "Star Trek" is the way that the characters had their lives in jeopardy in just about every single episode.

In reality, only people actually in combat live that way. And they pay heavy emotional penalties. Even cops and firemen are rarely in jeopardy. Certainly, the 19th Century exploration ships that Trek was modelled on didn't live on that level of high alert all the time.

What you seem to be saying is that this level of high jeopardy isn't a flaw in Trek (and other TV adventure shows). It's exactly what the fans want. FWIW, I think you're right here and Gerrold is dead wrong.

By the way, I've been writing some fiction lately.

I recently reached a conscious decision to stay away from sex and graphic violence. With the exception of language, my fiction is entirely PG-rated.

(With the exception of language. My characters all swear like they're from Long Island or New Jersey or something.)

I decided to stay away from graphic sex for two reasons. One of them is ... not exactly shame, but embarassment. I'm increasingly uncomfortable presenting myself publicly as a sexual being. I'm fat, fannish and 40. I wear glasses, chinos and suspenders. I have thinning hair. I feel like if people see me as a sexual being, they'll think eeeeewwww. Or they'll view me like I was hitting on the 22-year-old interns. What a sad bastard.

I don't think it's a self-esteem issue. I'm brimful of self-esteem. But I'm also like the James Garner character in "Murphy's Romance." He's a cranky curmudgeon. He expresses surprise that anyone could love him has much as his late wife did. He's asked, "Why, didn't you like yourself?" He responds, "I like myself just fine, I just don't think it's contagious."

I'm quite comfortable with my own sexuality. I just don't think other people (with one exception) are particularly comfortable with it.

Also, I'm kind of a workaholic. I used to be more of a raunchy goat, but in today's workplace environment, I think it's wiser for a man to behave as if he'd been a eunuch since he was 13 years old. A huge amount of my interaction with other people is work-related, and even much of the non-work-related stuff---like this post, right here---could come to reflect on my work. I try to be careful.

Clearly, I might want to think about getting over this if I'm going to be serious about writing fiction.

The other reason I've stayed away from writing sex is the adage "write what you know." My sex life has been pretty vanilla, not very interesting except for the direct participants, of which there have not been very many.

Mitch: are you thinking of writing things that don't include sex and violence by the nature of the story (plot, narrator, setting)? I'd think that's different.

(And, y'know, sometimes vanilla, or off-screen, is what the story calls for.)

I'm someone who habitually finds sex scenes uncomfortable to read and write, both for the same reason: I don't really need to know the details of how someone goes about making love, unless I'm personally involved with them.

I don't mind knowing the characters had sex. Sometimes, in fact, I actually want to know that (or that they didn't). I don't mind knowing that it was gentle, or rough, or in a disused men's room in a partly abandoned office building, or on someone's couch. What I don't really have any desire to know is who put whose hand where and who moaned G-d's name and who kissed whose stomach and worked their way down, for seven or ten paragraphs' worth of travelogue. And too many sex scenes read that way to me.

Sex is intensely private in a way that very little else is to me. I wouldn't want a lover to describe in detail what I did with him, and I won't do that to my characters, either.

That having been said, there's a sex scene in my second book which goes into virtually no detail but I hope gets the emotion across. I suppose I'll find out when it goes to my beta-readers.

Mitch: I get your point now. I agree about the changes in tech -- they leave me floundering every six months or so.

(Guesses: lots more use of mobile devices (a la phonecam-->flickr-->blog, which is already in pretty wide use), lots more pictures (as storage and bandwidth issues become less pressing and digital photos improve), more use of includes/streams from organising centers like del.icio.us and flickr. Anyone else care to venture some predictions?)

Naomi: Would it make any difference if you knew that by writing fanfic you'd make the original author unable to write (or at least publish) any more?

Would it make any difference if the cease-and-desist letter contained threats from the characters who had been diminished in the fanfic?

To answer a comment upthread, Mitch -- I'm pretty sure Josh Marshall, Kos, and Atrios have all been making most or all of their income from blogads.com in the last few months.

As a blogads user myself, I get to look at their rates and I can count the number of ads they've got on their sites, and let me tell you, I find it entirely plausible that they could be living off of that income.

(As for the idea that blogads will fade after the election, what I can report is we've been getting more ad customers post-election, rather than fewer. Dunno if this is true for others.)

Kate Nepveu:

Mitch: are you thinking of writing things that don't include sex and violence by the nature of the story (plot, narrator, setting)? I'd think that's different.

(And, y'know, sometimes vanilla, or off-screen, is what the story calls for.)

Those are essential questions, aren't they? In some works, the graphic descriptions of sex and violence are best left out. In other works, they should be included.

I read a story recently in which a middle-aged woman gets an unexpected, and, at first, unwanted visit from her good-for-nothing boyfriend. They end up having sex, against her better judgment. One important detail that seemed to be missing from the story: how was it? It made a difference to me. If he was a great lover, that said something about her character. If he was a lousy lover, that said something else. The character, as described, certainly had no other redeeming virtues, he was a selfish mooch.

So was this woman in a relationship with a guy with no redeeming virtues, or was she in a relationship with a guy who had no redeeming virtues except for being a great lover? I didn't need to see graphic descriptions of the sex, but I still wanted to know how it was.

sennoma:

Mitch: I get your point now. I agree about the changes in tech -- they leave me floundering every six months or so.

(Guesses: lots more use of mobile devices (a la phonecam-->flickr-->blog, which is already in pretty wide use), lots more pictures (as storage and bandwidth issues become less pressing and digital photos improve), more use of includes/streams from organising centers like del.icio.us and flickr. Anyone else care to venture some predictions?)

I think that better quality devices are going to blur the distinction between old media and new. I'm very enthusiastic about electronic ink and smart paper.

Patrick:

To answer a comment upthread, Mitch -- I'm pretty sure Josh Marshall, Kos, and Atrios have all been making most or all of their income from blogads.com in the last few months.

That's extremely interesting. Thank you.

It's like the characters are living on an emotional diet of twinkies and whiskey. Everything is so het up with Lust and Love and Loss and Pain that they would sob for a lost t-shirt. Half of what the slash world perennially debates as over-feminization of male characters seems to me a matter of feelings junkies needing bigger hits.

This rings very true to my own experience. It took me a long, long time to realize that I was subsisting on hits of emotional twinkies and whiskey--it took me until I ran out of slash to read that pushed my buttons, and had to start writing it for myself.

And then I got more and more embarrassed with myself, and pulled away more and more from the Id Vortex (the rejection letters helped), so now I'm starting to doubt that fan writers will bring that particular toolbox with them when they turn pro. Something that is not something to be ashamed of when you're DarkAngel42 on a web site is something to be ashamed of when you're a Real Live Author in the company of your idols.

Speed of interaction has been one of the most important ways of changing society over time. The existence of the automobile and airplane have resulted in more changes than I'd shake a stick at.

To say that _all the internet offers is a change in the speed of communication_ is to ignore just how important changes in speed of communication have been. I'd go so far as to say that the major difference between now and 100 years ago is the speed and ease of communication. And we're at a point where incremental differences can cause major shifts.

Jo, has that first thing happened, or is it a thing you think might happen?

If I wrote fanfic, and I got a cease-and-desist letter from the characters involved, I think I'd drop what I was doing and engage in a public correspondance with the characters trying to explain why I thought I wasn't harming them.

But I'd have to be writing fanfic first.

Since my alma mater, home town, and mentor are the same as Susie Bright's, I went through a period of trying to write what she calls "erotica." (personally, I use "erotica" to mean writing that has sex as a theme or something, and "pornography" to mean writing that is itself an accessory to sex: just so I can talk about them, not to condemn the one and praise the other, or vice versa) It didn't work. Now, I think it's because I was trying to write short stories, and I can hardly ever do that. The way I thought about it then was that when it came to the clinch my first impulse was to say "well, no, they didn't do that --" because, I think now, it takes longer than that for me to get them into bed.

In the context of a novel, though, sex became easier to write when I realised it was exactly like writing dinner sequences. How much detail you include depends on how much the detail can do for the story. And then I made my "two things" rule which serves me well in talking about writing: everything in a story has to do at least two things for the story -- any two things, as long as they're the right two things.

And back to the actual subject of the thread: when fanfic works, it's because it does that. It doesn't just throw two characters at each other and have them intersect body parts. It touches on the Id Vortex (Ellen, thank you, that's a wonderful term) in at least two places, which means that things are flying in several directions, and you have complex e,otional physics, interference patterns, elaborate fields, that sort of thing.

Though I have to say I have recently found out that my weirdness rule ("all other things being equal, a story is better when it is stranger") has limits, which are defined by the Southern Gothic genre. Which I suppose you could apply here by asking yourself: "If I stuck in some magnolias and kudzu, and gave everybody quaint nicknames or surnames for first names or both, and tweaked the relationships so that at least two people are closer than second cousins, could I market this as a Southern Gothic?" If the answer is yes, you've probably fallen into the Id vortex, and you should probably climb out somehow.

Emily: ...so now I'm starting to doubt that fan writers will bring that particular toolbox with them when they turn pro.

I wouldn't go that far. Pushing sexual boundaries is just another useful tool in the writer's toolkit. (It has been for some time, and yes, the pro writers already know about it.) The problem is when that's all you use from the toolkit.

I'm thinking about the times when I've felt that the description of sex has moved the story forward, and the examples I'm thinking of are bad sex. Or no sex at all.

It's Garp, going to pick up his son at a sleepaway at a friend's house. The boys mother is drunk, and slutty, and lying naked on the bed. She demands that Garp pull down his jogging shorts to reveal his erection. He does, and then she dismisses him.

Or, in "Nobody's Fool," the philandering Carl Roebuck is driving while receiving fellatio from his latest girlfriend. He pulls up next to the protagonist, who's walking down the road, and tells the protagonist to look inside the car. The girlfriend has fallen asleep---or passed out---while giving head. His penis, now flaccid, is still in her mouth.

(I'm thinking, as I read this: foolhardy guy. People do have tendency to bite down when they sleep. Some people even grind their teeth. But that's part of Carl Roebuck's character, he's foolish, impulsive and self-destructive.)

The comment about Doujinshi (though the pro/doujin line is even fuzzier than it indicates -- Miyuki-chan in X (or, by some lights, X itself, or XXXHolic) is an intra-studio doujinshi) is interesting.

But we already have a medium here that works in the way suggested. Unsurprisingly, it's the same medium. Except for the very first crop, the people in immediate creative control of comics have been the fans of those very comics (now evolved into creators.) Of course, this means that the nastiest fan debates get played out on the canon playground, which often isn't pretty at all (see the current run on Green Lantern, or post-Morrison X-Men).

Emily:

And then I got more and more embarrassed with myself, and pulled away more and more from the Id Vortex (the rejection letters helped), so now I'm starting to doubt that fan writers will bring that particular toolbox with them when they turn pro. Something that is not something to be ashamed of when you're DarkAngel42 on a web site is something to be ashamed of when you're a Real Live Author in the company of your idols.

Why should you be ashamed of it?

I tried to draw a distinction earlier between shame and embarassment. I'm ashamed of the things that I did wrong in my life, especially as they hurt other people. I'm not ashamed of the things that I did that were merely foolish, I'm just embarassed by them.

Last week, I went to groups.google.com and read about a half-dozen of my very first posts to Usenet. I was embarassed by them---I was nowhere near as smart as I thought I was---but I wasn't particularly ashamed of them. They were harmless.

Ellen, Naomi--

Nope, I'm talking about the visceral discomfort of not wanting to *live* through the experience with the character. An empathetic dislike, for example, of writing a rape scene because I don't want to have to live it with the character the way I will have to to make it visceral enough.

If I put a sex scene--or something else squicky--into a book, I am shameless about it. Because even if it's kinky, I'm not writing it because of the kink; I'm writing it because the kink *has to be there for the sake of the story,* so maybe that's the difference.

I'll cheerfully fade to black if all that happens is the characters get laid. If the sexual experience serves as a sea-change of sorts, however, then I'll detail it as lovingly as necessary.

Jo Walton:

Naomi: Would it make any difference if you knew that by writing fanfic you'd make the original author unable to write (or at least publish) any more?

Can you describe any specific examples of that happening?

Would it make any difference if the cease-and-desist letter contained threats from the characters who had been diminished in the fanfic?

Threats from the characters? I'd tend to dismiss that as crank mail.

(I'm reminded of the story Wil Wheaton tells about being in contract negotiations with the studio when he was working on "Star Trek: The Next Generation." The studio said they couldn't give him more money---but they'd promote his character from ensign to lieutenant. Wheaton was insulted.)

I tend to think that, ideally, people should be able to write stories about the worlds and characters other people have created. Star Trek fanfic should be legal, and writers should be able to sell it.

I accept that current law makes that impossible. But the law should be changed.

Disclaimer: I don't write fanfic, or read it. Not because I think it's unworthy. I just don't.

In the context of a novel, though, sex became easier to write when I realised it was exactly like writing dinner sequences. How much detail you include depends on how much the detail can do for the story.
Any tips on writing dinner sequences -- or food in general, in fantasy? I know there are a lot of novels where I enjoy reading details about the food, and others where I skip over them; but I haven't figured out why, really.

Mitch: I'm thinking about the times when I've felt that the description of sex has moved the story forward, and the examples I'm thinking of are bad sex. Or no sex at all.

The first thing that comes to mind is Jennifer Crusie's _Charlie All Night_ (which IMO is a terrible title that refers to the title character's job as a DJ). Which I see from the author's page has been reprinted. As she says there, "So I wrote a proposal in which the hero and heroine sleep together the first night they meet and begin a casual affair only to become platonic friends and then fall in love, so I could write the difference between great sex without love and great sex with love."

Also, the discussion of _Possession_ in the series TNH linked to.

Other effective story-advancing sex scenes, from movies and TV:

- The scene in "Jerry Maguire," Jerry with his first fiance, played by Kelly Preston. They're sitting, she's on top and jumping up and down while shouting, "Never stop fucking me! Never stop fucking me!" It's supposed to illustrate how carnivorous she is.

You could argue there's a madonna/whore thing going on there. Viewed in a vacuum what, exactly, is wrong with her behavior? A different movie might view her behavior quite approvingly; she's an enthusiastic lover. But I don't think that movie would've been mainstream Hollywood Academy-award-winning fare.

- In "Deadwood," Al Swearingen screwing his girlfriend/prostitute. He seems to love her, in his own way. He's got great staying power. But he's mechanical. He approaches sex like everything else; he's working toward a goal and he doesn't particularly care about other people, except as means to the end.

- A lot of the interaction between Frank Furillo and Joyce on "Hill Street Blues." In their daily lives, they're both rigid, wooden and cold, their sex scenes show that they are capable of warm human feeling. No sex actually shown, though; we're talking about network TV in the 1980s.

Mitch: And, as Clay Shirky noted, the word "blog" itself will likely be eclipsed, the same way the same way the word "portal" isn't something you read much anymore.

Hm. "Weblog" was coined in Dec 1997 by Jorn Barger, so it's been around for seven years. "Blog" was coined by Pater Merholz in the Spring of 1999, five years.

I don't know when "portal" was coined in this context, but my impression is that it never really took off in common use. (It does still show up occasionally.) I don't recall the word gaining traction in the general culture. I never heard it used as the punchline of a joke on a popular comedy show.

Off topic, but: I'm inclined to award egoboo to anyone lacking a background knowledge of Anglo-Saxon who nevertheless figures out the meaning of Cenelice to ganganne hwaer gegan hafde naenig man aer.

"Boldly going where no man has gone before?"

Wild guess from "ganganne" and "man," and a rough equivalence in number of words.

TNH:

Off topic, but: I'm inclined to award egoboo to anyone lacking a background knowledge of Anglo-Saxon who nevertheless figures out the meaning of Cenelice to ganganne hwaer gegan hafde naenig man aer.

"My hovercraft is full of eels."

Mitch: this level of high jeopardy isn't a flaw in Trek

I never liked Star Trek until "The Wrath of Khan".

See, the way I see it is fiction is sort of like a roller-coaster. You got to start from a point where readers/viewers can actually get on the ride, which is someplace emotionally familiar to them. If you're always in the loop-de-loop, readers can't identify and they can't get on for the ride.

Once they identify with the characters is when you can let the characters swing out because the readers will swing out with them. Wake the character up cold, tired, and hungry. busy them with the minutia of finding their boots, helmet, and rifle, and then oh-my-god-I-think-Im-gonna-die them. At that point, the reader is on board and will get whipped around with the character.

That's my model anyway. I'm sure there are others.

Star Trek didn't work for me because it was too plot driven, too much about the cool new world, too much about the hapless inhabitants who need saving from their overlord or themselves. There wasn't a whole lot of "wanting" on the show.

Kirk wanted to save the hapless inhabitants.
Spock supressed his wants to be logical.
Bones wanted no one to die.
Scotty wanted the ship to stay together.
Once you established that, you pretty much knew the emotional spectrum of every show.

It wasn't until "Wrath of Khan" that I saw some new emotions going on, starting out with mourning for Kirk's dead son, to fear of Khan and those ear-digging worms, to rage against him, to sorrow for Spock's death. It picks you up from a familiar place and then whips you all over the friggen map.

I didn't like Star Trek on TV, I didn't like most of the Star Trek movies, but Wrath of Khan is one of my all time favorite movies.

Mitch Wagner wrote:
(I'm thinking, as I read this: foolhardy guy. People do have tendency to bite down when they sleep. Some people even grind their teeth. But that's part of Carl Roebuck's character, he's foolish, impulsive and self-destructive.)

And you think you're too vanilla to write a good sex scene, Mitch? I think you're mistaken.

Steve Eley---Then I am a pervert after all? I'm so relieved!

Seriously, John Irving covered that ground already—also in Garp.

In that novel, sex scenes read violently, while scenes of wrestling are—if not erotic—then at least sensuous and pleasurable.

sennoma:

I think 2014 blogs will look exactly like today's in all important particulars: same mix of A- through Z-listers, same mix of motivations (get famous, try out ideas, have somewhere to dump all these thoughts, etc), same sorts of posts from the same sorts of people: lefty outrage, rightwing whining, academics doing their thing (I think this will become more common), everyday folks just staying in touch with geographically scattered friends, geeks geeking out over the latest tech, etc etc.

I base my prediction on the observation that people change much less, and much less rapidly, than technology changes their environment. How different is blogging from pamphleteering or zine writing, other than speed and scope of distribution?

Tom Whitmore:

Speed of interaction has been one of the most important ways of changing society over time. The existence of the automobile and airplane have resulted in more changes than I'd shake a stick at.

To say that _all the internet offers is a change in the speed of communication_ is to ignore just how important changes in speed of communication have been. I'd go so far as to say that the major difference between now and 100 years ago is the speed and ease of communication. And we're at a point where incremental differences can cause major shifts.

Actually, I'd say what's significant about the Internet---or, more particularly, the web---isn't the speed of distribution.

Broadcast radio hit absolute zero for speed of distribution of local communications 100 years ago. You can't get any faster than the speed of light. Satellite television completed the process in the 1960s---now, you could communicate with a bulk audience anywhere in the world, at the speed of light.

The Web's revolutionary feature is its cost. There is no significant incremental cost difference between an e-mail sent to one person, and a web site readable by all the billions of people in the world with Internet access. That cost difference makes it fundamentally easier for, say, some Iraqi guy to reach a global audience just prior to the 2003 Iraq War, with no other qualifications other than being articulate, Westernized—so that what he writes will be accessible to middle-class American readers—and living in Baghdad.

Anyone can attempt to reach a global audience, without first having to convince someone with control over a publishing infrastructure worth tens of millions of dollars. This is exactly what gets some mainstream journalists in a tizzy, because they think the financial barrier to entry in old publishing somehow guarantees better quality of what's published. Why, these "bloggers" parade around openly, as though there were some kind of law giving them the right to "free speech," or something like that!

You still need the gatekeepers. That Iraqi guy doesn't find his audience unless influential American bloggers point to him. But even the gatekeepers face the same low barriers to entry as the original authors do.

The net result: publishing becomes widely distributed and decentralized. You don't have a few major corporations controlling the news and opinion anymore, anybody can contribute their $0.02.

It remains to be seen whether this state of distribution and decentralization will continue. There certainly seems to be a force in free markets that tends toward centralization. In the early days of the web, there were a gazillion portals and search engines, now there are three significant ones (MSN, Yahoo, Google).

Mitch: Have you read Linked? I'd love to see a thread about it on Making Light (subtle hint to our gracious hostess, eh).

Christopher Davis---No, I have not read Linked. Good stuff?

Lucy Kemnitzer: If I wrote fanfic, and I got a cease-and-desist letter from the characters involved, I think I'd drop what I was doing and engage in a public correspondance with the characters trying to explain why I thought I wasn't harming them.

I have learned that a really nifty-keen way to have a dispute escalate into a conflict is, when one someone tells you that something you are doing is hurting them, to explain to them why what you are doing doesn't really hurt them.

Here is an example of a situation very similar to fanfic appropriation, in which the harm done is separate from the intellectual-property issues. Malcom Gladwell wrote an article, published in the New Yorker about psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis. A playwright, Byrony Lavery, wrote a play (Frozen) that drew heavily upon Gladwell's article. The result is that Lewis is feeling traumatized, that her life has somehow been stolen from her. She is in the odd position, though, that the person whose intellectual property traduced, if anyone, was Malcom Gladwell:

Dorothy Lewis, for her part, was understandably upset. She was considering a lawsuit. And, to increase her odds of success, she asked me to assign her the copyright to my article. I agreed, but then I changed my mind. Lewis had told me that she “wanted her life back.” Yet in order to get her life back, it appeared, she first had to acquire it from me. That seemed a little strange.

Lewis is upset, among other reasons, because the character in the play modeled on her has had an affair with her collaborator -- Lavery has, in some sense, written a slash of a living person.

Who has what it would take to say that the hurt Lewis has experienced isn't real hurt?

My own favorite author for useful sex scenes is Michael Kube-McDowell. There's a devastating scene in Alternities, between a couple whose marriage is failing. We see the scene from the man's point of view, and then later from the woman's. The particular kind of disaster it is matters very much to both of them and to the rest of the story.

Mitch: Oh, it's great stuff. It basically recapitulates the development of network theory, then goes into all sorts of applications of the theory as developed; the particular section that your comment reminded me of was the discussion of how the power law distribution of Web links develops from the interaction of first-mover advantage and "fitness".

I found it incredibly interesting because it ranges through topics like computer networking (which I have been doing for years), social networking (also an interest of mine), and biological/genomic/proteomic networks (a professional side-interest as I work as a sysadmin in a genome research center). It's the sort of book that the intellectually voracious folks here at Making Light should have a lot of fun with.

Alan, I'll say that the woman's hurt is the sort that can't readily be fixed by litigation. The available facts of our lives are part of the raw material of creativity, and it's possible both to say "that hurts" and "I shouldn't try to stop that". I say this as someone who received deeply manipulative psychological abuse in my early BBSing days and had the exchanges logged by the instigator, who posted them online, complete with ironic comments about my descriptions of them to him (since I didn't know he was the one doing it) and how much it hurt. Less public than a major play, perhaps, but no less painful.

Mitch:
Steve Eley---Then I am a pervert after all? I'm so relieved!
Seriously, John Irving covered that ground already—also in Garp.

And seriously, I disagree entirely with your self-effacement.

From your earlier post, you seem to think that not being sexy yourself (a proposition I can neither agree nor disagree with, although I suspect you're selling yourself short as most people do) makes it embarrassing to write about other people having sex in fiction. There's no logical connection there. It's an easy fix: if you don't turn yourself on, write about people who do.

Then you brought in that old "write what you know" chestnut, which I think is some of the dumbest fiction writing advice in existence. I got sick of that when I edited my high school literary magazine. Write what you can plausibly imagine. You don't have to be Caligula to possess and apply a vivid imagination.

Of course, if the stories that interest you don't involve sex, then that's totally understandable. But that's not what you said. You said you'd made a conscious decision not to write about sex because of your own body and history. Obviously you can do what you want, for any reason you want; but in my opinion, those are not the most sensible reasons to tread away from a subject in fiction.

Alan Bostick wrote:
I have learned that a really nifty-keen way to have a dispute escalate into a conflict is, when one someone tells you that something you are doing is hurting them, to explain to them why what you are doing doesn't really hurt them.

And a nifty-keen way to confuse almost any issue is to equate fictional characters with real people.

(Following the fallacy in the context of this thread, by the way, from Jo Walton's strange question down to your literal example, is head-bending to an almost beautiful degree.)

"It's like the characters are living on an emotional diet of twinkies and whiskey."

Is that the Red States' version of this Dead lyric?

"Hey, what in the world ever became of sweet Jane?

She lost her sparkle, you know she isn't the same

Living on reds, vitamin C and cocaine

All a friend can say is 'Ain't it a shame.'"

-- Truckin'

(J. Garcia, B. Weir, P. Lesh, R. Hunter)

I'm pondering the emotional similarities between Slash and Opera (the musical form, not the OS). I've produced operas, and seen some similarities between fanfic stars and literal prima donnas. Amateur opera can sometimes beat the professional variety, too. Audiences who thrive on backstory and backstage gossip. High drama on low budget.

Mitch: Actually, I'd say what's significant about the Internet---or, more particularly, the web---isn't the speed of distribution. Broadcast radio hit absolute zero for speed of distribution of local communications 100 years ago. You can't get any faster than the speed of light. Satellite television completed the process in the 1960s

Heh, I think we're doing the same dance we did over "what blogs will look like". When I say "speed of distribution", I'm thinking of time from brainfart to blogpost, not just the speed at which said post travels to screens across the world (which, as you rightly point out, is the same as the speed at which older media like radio and TV travel). So my term was ill-chosen, because my point was about the basic convenience and low cost of the interface -- the speed with which one can communicate via web, as compared with the time taken to, say, convince an editor to run your article, print it, and send it out.

Tom: when I asked, How different is blogging from pamphleteering or zine writing, other than speed and scope of distribution?, I didn't mean to downplay the differences among those methods of publishing. Rather, I think the enormous differences come down to the intertwined common factors I listed: speed (in the sense above) and scope of distribution.

Christopher: I just added Linked to my wishlist. My budget does not thank you, but I do.

In Mozilla, I have to hold the text input cursor over the * for a few seconds. The asterisk turns blue and the comment pops up.

sennoma:

Einstein's Special Theory of Blogitivity established that the gravitas of a blog approaches zero as the speed approaches infinity, and it becomes the most aetherial fluff, less and less able to interact with real world matters.

Einstein's General Theory of Blogitivity, on the other hand, showed that as the speed exceeds the speed of Light Verse, it becomes possible to read a blog you posted before you ever thought of it.

This is also called "breaking the Deja Vu Barrier."

Einstein, increasingly distracted by lawsuits over P2P distribution of his violin jams, was never able to complete his General Database Field Theory.

Stephen Hawking, who of course is Stephen King rotated through the 5th Dimension, published his blogs in hardcover, and approached infinite circulation as coffeetable books where the average reader understood only an infinitesimal amount.

-- Extracts from "Theophysics, Theomathematics, and Theopoetics: Infected Membranes, and Bitstring Theory", by Pink, E. & T.H.E. Brane, Encyclopedia Galactica.

Steve Eley—You've certainly given me a lot to think about with regards to sex and my own fiction.

I think what I need to realize is that the me who writes the stories is not the same me who interacts with people in any other way.

I learned a similar lesson years ago, when I started having social contact with professional fiction writers—some of my favorite people who write sf write fiction that I don't really care for. Likewise, I like some fiction by people I dislike. I stopped wondering at the apparent paradox years ago.

Alan Bostick:

I have learned that a really nifty-keen way to have a dispute escalate into a conflict is, when one someone tells you that something you are doing is hurting them, to explain to them why what you are doing doesn't really hurt them.

Steve Eley:

And a nifty-keen way to confuse almost any issue is to equate fictional characters with real people.

(Following the fallacy in the context of this thread, by the way, from Jo Walton's strange question down to your literal example, is head-bending to an almost beautiful degree.)

Still, I think that the issue Alan raises is a valid one, and related to the question of the legality and ethics of fanfic.

It all comes down to a question of who owns the events described in a big chunk of prose—article, short story, novel or other book.

There's a libel case being fought right now, filed by a New York lawyer who says he was defamed by an episode of "Law & Order"; he says the character of a sleazy lawyer was based on him, and recognizably so.

One of them is ... not exactly shame, but embarassment. I'm increasingly uncomfortable presenting myself publicly as a sexual being. I'm fat, fannish and 40. I wear glasses, chinos and suspenders. I have thinning hair. I feel like if people see me as a sexual being, they'll think eeeeewwww. Or they'll view me like I was hitting on the 22-year-old interns. What a sad bastard.

Mitch, I think this is a hazard of fandom, thinking too much of writers as specific individual people. Most readers don't think that hard about the person behind the book. Even with writers I know, I keep in mind that what characters like and do is not at all necessarily what authors like and do. So if you were writing about a character named Match Wigner having sex with his hot friend Liza, your hot friend Lisa might have reason to squirm, but unless it gets that blatant, I don't think you should worry too much. Write what the characters need to have written.

This may be easier to say as a 26-year-old female, since I'm demographically a lot closer to your hypothetical interns than to you. But think about it: if I wrote some really hot sex scene in a published novel and people assumed that it meant I wanted to do everything in that scene -- possibly even with them! -- I don't think you'd have any trouble as classifying them as creeps, or at the very least as wrong. There shouldn't be a double standard because you're "fat, fannish, and 40" and I'm just fannish.

Now not aimed at Mitch specifically: it seems that once again some people are classifying "stuff [they] want to read" as "daring and edgy" and assuming that the reason other people aren't writing or publishing it is that it's too emotional, too hard, they don't dare. I don't think that explains things with slash vs. profic any more than it does with highly experimental prose vs. more standard prose forms. I mostly write in the past tense because it seems to fit most of my stories best, not because I'm scared of other tenses, and I don't write Spock/Harry Potter slash because it bores me, not because it scares me.

I'm with Bear: some sex scenes are extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable to write, but because they're emotionally difficult to have even as an indirect experience, not because they're shameful. I think Ellen Fremedon is probably a lot more right about what's going on in the minds of slash writers than about what is or isn't going on in the minds of profic writers.

And one more question for the group at large: if it has nothing to do with the personalities in question, why is it more appealing to have them be those personalities? Why not just have two random people? I don't want to read about Radar O'Reilly having sex, but I really, really, REALLY don't want to read about someone having sex who looks like Radar O'Reilly but otherwise has nothing in common with him. I mean, why? Why would that be more interesting to a M*A*S*H fan than someone who looked nothing like Radar O'Reilly having sex?