Enough with the posing!

Folks, I had a whole other post planned for today, and was even running through the second round of edits. But then I read this article revealing the full extent of the lies being told by a white male writer to convince people that they were really a gay girl from Damascus.

Now I'd just finished a spirited debate with @KeyboardHussy, AKA Evelyn LaFont about our differences on the matters of requesting reader participation and ethical marketing, but I'd no sooner finished when here comes an example of REALLY unethical marketing.

And folks, I want to be brief for once. (You're welcome.) I'm a writer of fiction, and I bill myself as such. Every story I send out is a lie, and I will never try to convince you, "No, this really is based on true events." I will never take on a new identity with the objective of tricking you into thinking my next book really happened just to bump up sales. That is shitty behavior and if I ever did that, I would understand people developing humongous hate boners for me real fast.

Now I know I've got my own flaws and problems, and god knows my promotional approach could use a lot of work. (Not to mention my market targeting could use a lot of practice at the marketing rifle ranges…or something) But I promise you, there are limits to what I will do to get you to buy my book. And this is way, WAY out past my limits. No way would I try to claim that I was really a Hispanic woman just to sell you a book about a migrant farmer's recovery from a rape. If I wrote a book about a woman like that, I'd just sell you the book  as fiction. Done. And no ethical conflicts arise for appropriating someone else's struggle because I'm not claiming it as my own fight. I'm acting as an advocate, and, if my portrayal of the woman is sincere and has the "ring of truth," I believe that will make it even more effective as fiction. But I have nothing to gain by lying and claiming that the events in my story really happened.

If this dude had wrote the book as fiction and either published it or self-published it, that would be one thing. But what he's done is nothing short of an act of fraud, and it's only by the grace of…someone, that he isn't already in court facing some kind of charges. And, because of people like this, I feel I need to take a moment to say that there is nothing I've told you about myself that isn't true. I don't really need to "juice up" my life story, and in fact most people prefer if I try and reduce the impact with a little cotton padding. (Not the same thing as candy coating, which is almost impossible for me.) Yes, I had a rotten life, but, it got MUCH better. Then it got sucky again cause my health went kaput. Meh, that's life, and nobody gets a true "happily ever after" unless they die mid-orgasm during their honeymoon sex. (And then it's not so happily ever after for the survivor, yo.)

I could probably sit down and write a tell-all non-fiction book, but I'd really rather not. I'd really much rather let the past go and focus on a future of making up lies, creatively. Then I put those lies in little cheaply-priced packages online, and all over the outside, I use labels like "fiction" and "fantasy" to make it clear: "none of this is real."

What I'm saying is, I'm always going to lie to you in my books. But I'm never going to lie to you about me. And writers, if you have a great story idea about an oppressed minority, sell it as fiction. Do not, under any circumstances, try to pass your work off as genuine truth. Because you WILL get caught, and you will be humiliated as a liar. And I personally feel no pity for you when you mess up and get caught.