Thursday Think Tank: Pen Names and other Affectations

Good Afternoon, gentle readers.

Er, or whatever time it is when you finally see this post.
I have a few things to say today that may piss some of you off. That's the warning. I do try to keep things light here, because...well, this is entertainment. Not therapy. Except today it's a fairly irritated rant.

In light of that, and some other supposed "scandals" going on I just need to get some stuff off my chest.


First of all, my readers are welcome and even encouraged to get off on my CHARACTERS. Hell yes, get stroke happy with Christie and Robert, Neil, Kevin and Tony, or any of the others I write about. 


But do not confuse authors with their characters. Leave them the fuck out of it, unless you know them personally. By that I mean you've actually met in RL and have a close personal relationship. 

Just sayin. 
And heh, I know it's shocking, but just for a moment imagine that authors want to make a living. Is there something wrong with that? I'm pretty sure that all of us have a need to eat, have shelter, etc. So we need to have a way to make money to buy those things....and some of us have Evil Day Jobs, and some of us don't, and some of those day jobs are ones that would be DESTROYED if our real life names got linked to our pen names. It's not a new thing for authors to use pen names. 

I know for a fact that some authors practice law, or work as education specialists...and they could lose their jobs if they went public with their professions. Should we dig into their lives to prove or disprove he/she/they have an authentic knowledge of law were he/she/they to write a series about lawyers? Cause him/her/them to lose their job because the rabid and misguided chose to expose him/her/them for some imagined duplicity?

I don't know. Do you want the entirety of your life held up to a microscope? Am I, as a woman writing M/M romance about soldiers (as a former soldier) somehow less authentic than a gay man (never been a soldier) writing about the same trope? I don't think so. If we both do good research and write well, that's all that matters, cause seriously people, this stuff is FICTION.

Frankly?

I don't think I owe my fans a damn thing except a ripping good read. They don't get automatic rights to my personal life and whom I do or do not fuck, nor which body part I use to do so. I'm not writing a autobiography. I'm writing fiction, and my family and friends? Are unequivocally off limits. 
I'm pretty open about who I am. But should one of my readers or business associates from the writing world cross the line and start tap dancing into forbidden territory? Attempting to impose their ideals of what I should or should not do in my private life, up to and including the measures I may take to keep said life private? I fight dirty. And I will come after them. 
Hemmingway didn't know shit about being female. Nobody says don't buy his books because he wrote female characters. They may say he doesn't write women well, and that's valid. If I get the sex wrong, feel free to say I screwed the pooch *figure of speech there* as an author...But do not say something can't happen just cause it never happened to you. If I wrote it I researched it first, either through first hand experience or by asking *1st person interviews*...it happened that way for somebody. 
If you don't like my writing, don't buy it. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy. 
If you like it, buy it.

Remember, before you go prying into authors personal lives, that you are culpable for the fruits of that prying. There are people who may lose their jobs, the jobs that have nothing to do with writing because of your "need" to have them live under a microscope. There are authors out there who live in countries where they can be put into prison for writing erotica at all, let alone M/M erotica/romance. There are authors who have Real Life issues crashing down on them to the point that they become depressed, even suicidal. And if you chose to dig into their lives, poke around with the sticks of your belief that you have some sort of right to be privy to their personal life? You are culpable in what happens.

Yeah, I said it.

So...

If you don't like the economy, bitch about that. 

But don't say I as a writer am not allowed to make a decent living because the economy has made money tight for you as a reader. Shit, my grocery bill went up too. 
Yeah, random ranting now. 
But maybe some stuff to think about.