Editor's Note: The usual Monday column, "Ruminations of an Old Goat," was inadvertently delayed when the author was caught up in a dinosaur stampede. "Ruminations" will appear on Tuesday this week and return to its normal time slot next week.
A few weeks back Torainfor was outed as Kersley Fitzgerald, and in all innocence she asked:
OK, I'm still really new at this. What is the deal with being "outed" and is it bad or good? Do famous-stinkin-authors go around, pretending not to be who they are so mere mortals will talk to them? 'Cus everybody and their aunt's cat says that marketing is as important to being an author as writing, so you should tie a streamer to aforementioned cat's tail and tell the world.Not only that, you should then duct-tape sparklers and roman candles to the cat's butt, douse it in charcoal lighter, set it on fire, and turn it loose to run screaming, flaming, exploding, and waving your banner, through the center of Times Square, during rush hour.
Ooh, I'm gonna get hate mail for that crack.
To dispose of the first question with unseemly haste: oh no, as a famous author, or even as a semi-famous, near-famous, almost-famous, or formerly famous author, there is absolutely no problem in getting mere mortals to talk to you. The problem is getting 'em to shut up.
The issue of being "outed" is closely tied-in with another that keeps coming up: whether or not to use a pseudonym. I've always published under my own name. In hindsight, I wish I'd used a pseudonym—or preferably, about six. Part of it is simple branding. People have a tendency to read one piece by you and think they know everything about you, and it throws them when they read something else that defeats their expectations. If I'd been thinking, I'd have used one pseudonym for my funny contemporary computer-related sci-fi, another for my serious far-future military sci-fi, a third for my serious "literary" stuff, a fourth for my mysteries—yes, early in my career, I wrote and published a few straight-up mystery stories—a fifth for my non-fiction and political commentary...
The ones I really wish I'd used a pseudonym for were my biker stories.
This warrants explanation. When I was first starting out, one of the really wide-open magazine markets was the market for biker fiction. You could throw almost anything into a biker-market story, provided the story also depicted a loner male hero (or anti-hero) who rode a Harley-Davidson and was involved in at least one explicit sex scene. Horror, science fiction, military or paramilitary action-adventure, darkest black comedy... Anything, except a hero who rode a Japanese bike. And the market paid well, too; better than some of the first-rank SF magazines, although collecting payment was sometimes problematic.
So I wrote and sold a few stories into that market. In particular, I published in... oh, the name isn't important now. They've had a change of ownership and editorial board and have really cleaned up their act in the years since. (And sadly, quit publishing fiction.) But back in the day they really catered to the outlaw biker stereotype and ran a lot of semi- to fully raunchy "men's fiction," in-between the photos of customized bikes and the suitable-for-taping-on-your-cellblock-wall photos of naked women. In particular, each issue featured a multi-page photo spread of one particularly buxom women draped in variety of remarkably explicit poses over a particularly nice customized Harley-Davidson—and the centerfold was always the motorcycle without the woman.
I have not always been the nice, polite, patient, mild-mannered guy I work at pretending to be now. So I wrote some stories for this market, sold 'em, got paid, cashed the checks, and life went on. Or so I thought.
Flash forward a few years. Three companies, two kids, and a lot more "respectable" publications later, I was working in software development for a company whose VP-Sales & Marketing was a screaming, flaming, outlaw biker wannabe. (Think of that guy in the Village People, if you need a mental image.) It turned out he wasn't just one of your garden-variety yuppie Harley riders; on weekends he put on the black leather and became the kind of poser real bikers alternately laugh at and beat up in the parking lots of bars of seedy bars. But somehow—I can't remember the triggering event—the VP-S&M saw my name, recognized it, put two and two together and came up with something approximating four—quite a remarkable feat, actually, for a VP-Sales & Marketing—and then brought into the office an old biker magazine he'd been saving for years, because he liked it so much, and showed it around to everyone on executive row...
There have been times when I was more mortified, but not many.
That's the crux of the issue with "outing." When you write for publication, you are held responsible for everything you write, no matter how long ago you wrote it, no matter how cranky and peevish you were feeling that day, no matter how your thoughts may have changed or evolved since. Every throwaway quip; every lightning-rod opinion put into the mouth of a character; every out-of-context quote from what you thought was private correspondence; every misquote and paraphrase written by someone else writing about you. In the Internet age it's only gotten worse, as readers have unprecedented access to writers, nothing ever truly goes out of print and vanishes forever any more (except for the December 1999 issue of S!ren, which contains one of the few short stories of mine I would like to see again and don't have a copy of—a hard-disk crash ate the original file and I never got my contributor's copies), and writers mistakenly assume that using an online handle somehow confers everlasting anonymity. From this assumption comes the belief that anonymity gives them license to voice opinions they would never otherwise express out loud. And the truly damnable part of it is, you have no choice in it, as you have no idea beforehand which throwaway line will turn out to be an enormous lightning rod for some profoundly unhinged person. Even the most benign and amusing metaphorical image might set some screwball off.
Such as, say, that of a flaming cat, galloping across Times Square, with sparklers and roman candles duct-taped to its butt...
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