On writing stuff and pseudonyms
Hey all.

I've been plugging away at the livelongnmarry stories. About 2500 words are on the page so far for Vel's and Jessie's combined and the plots are starting to coalesce nicely. I need to revisit the source material for the last one, though. I don't want to fudge the details any more than I have to.

I'll have to check with the awesome winning bidders first about posting and crediting issues, but to tease you mercilessly, one of the titles will most likely be: "A Bullet for the Body Electric."

Make of that what you will. Mwa ha ha ha.



Rubbernecking is such a bad habit, but I can't help myself sometimes. The latest fandom kerfuffle involves a big-name-fan getting outed via a public wiki-clone entry that linked her pseudonym to her real name. This wouldn't be quite so terrible, except that it was done by the wiki-clone's owner and maintainer, who then thwarted all attempts to remove the information and couldn't seem to understand what she had done wrong despite almost universal condemnation of her actions.

The argument that she's been throwing around is that the Internet is inherently a public place, so if you do anything on the Internet you're not willing to own up to, it's your own damn fault if your boss/spouse/professors/parents/etc find out about it and react badly. This is very true. But this doesn't justify outing fans or the assumption that the use of a pseudonym is somehow an act of cowardice.

The creation of a pseudonym is an act of disassociation. It's telling the rest of the world that you want to separate out Fandom You from Real Life You, for whatever reason. In some cases, like with me, it's mainly a comfort thing. Most of the people in my real life would be seriously weirded out by the stuff I write, wouldn't understand it, and are not my target audience anyway. Not a huge deal if they did find out, but I'd like to avoid the awkward conversations. For other people, the consequences are less benign - and many simply would not be able to function in fandom without a pseudonym.

One of the central unwritten rules of the fannish community is that you should respect another person's choices about their degree of anonymity, i.e. how much risk they're willing to take with their own privacy. Without that understanding, I can say without a doubt that fandom would not be as massive and vibrant and *alive* today. Because in addition to the expectation of dissociation that pseudonyms create, they also make it so much easier for people to interact, to speak their minds, to be honest, and to take chances. It takes away all the preconceived notions. How old you are. Where you live. The color of your skin. How many X chromosomes you have. All information that you get to control with a pseudonym, that you can't in real life. Even if it's only illusory, it's wonderfully freeing.

Ultimately identities and reputations are big, important, and often crushing things, and we all need a break from them once in a while. Having a separate digital identity isn't a rock of shame. It's a pressure release valve. It's a temporary escape hatch.

It's a fantasy of you.

How on earth could anyone think that taking that away from someone is okay?