This blog is available for your use

To those seeing this post on other groups: the group of which I am speaking in this post is New York Stories. If you're not a member of New York Stories then, no, the blog for the group is not available for your use, but this post is available for your inspection. Whether I'm threatening the reader or reassuring him could be seen as being a matter of one's point of view. I see this post as doing neither, setting out merely to help the prospective member to make an informed choice, as he decides whether or not to join my little group.

Which, by the way, is not an all ages group.




DeviantArt doesn't give discussion sections to its groups, and that forces a founder to make a choice. He can have a blog of his own, speaking from it as if from a pulpit, and writers will take to a group run that way, oh so very well. The other choice - the sensible one, I think - is to open up the blog to the entire membership, and say that you can all post here, and that this blog will serve as a replacement for that missing discussion section.

You can post stories to the blog, if you'd like. I have no objection to that. You can also post them to the group as deviations, and I have no objection to that, either. The entirety of the content, barring flooding of the group or some kind of breakdown, will be announced on Twitter and, if possible, Delicious. Maybe Facebook, as well - I'm giving that one some thought.

To put your minds at ease - very little text will travel, and all that will be seen of the images in the group will be thumbnails linking back to the deviation that the tweets offer previews of. My only interest in setting this up is in increasing the side of your readership, or audience in the case of the photos.

Please be courteous to each other, but please also strain to be open minded. In other groups, groups that aren't writing groups, perhaps the membership will be asked to walk on eggshells, just to avoid even the slightest chance of causing offense to the most irritable reader. I can't and won't set such a policy here, because such a standard is the beginning of horrible writing. If you want to express your outrage with the subtext of a story that has been told, don't throw a tantrum in the comments section, write a better story with what you would regard as being a more fitting subtext, and let the reader be the judge.

In other words, let's act like grown ups. "Even if we're teenagers?", somebody will ask. Yes. Even if you're teenagers. The teen years used to be seen as practice for adulthood, not as an excuse for retreating to a more risqué version of infancy. Let's return to that earlier expectation. If you're a teen and you're reading this, then I would ask you to accept that if you're posting to this group, I'll expect a little more of you, because you should be expecting a little more of yourself and because you should expect no less out of me or any other adult.

Please do not post anything that violates DeviantArt's terms of service or the law. How a piece of fiction could break the law, I have no idea, but I bring this up just to be safe. As for DeviantArt's TOS, which are a little less permissive than the law, understand that if I don't enforce the site's policies, even the silly ones, that the group can be deleted over this. "What was that you were saying about not censoring yourself, because it leads to bad writing?", somebody will ask. "Where is it written that all of your writing has to be posted to DeviantArt?", I'll respond, answering a question with a question. Pick and choose what you post to this group, and if some of your writing takes a turn that DA is too bluenosed (in its own strange way) to accept, then let's talk about alternative locations to which you might post.

Tribe.net comes to mind as a secondary location. It's shaky, and could fold without warning, so you'd better backup you post on disk, but that network is very open minded about what it will accept, so perhaps we might talk.

That having been said ... we've seen movies before, yes? If I say "adult material", that's a vague concept. What I will say is that while I have no objection to the posting of R rated material, as long as DeviantArt doesn't - and you need to read that TOS if you're planning to post such material - that I would greatly object to the posting of X rated material. If you want to post a figure study, with permissions set appropriately, I have no objections. If you want to post a zoom in on somebody's private happy fun zone, especially if shot while in use as somebody did in the forums recently, I don't need to see that. I don't care if that's the latest trend, it turns my stomach. If somebody wants to post that kind of content, there are groups where he can do so, but he'd better not do so, in this one. If you want to say that your characters came to know each other biblically, that's not a problem. If, however, you start giving us the full details as to what each drop of heavenly nectar was splashing off of as they gained that knowledge, we're going to be parting company.

I recognize and support your right to write such literature. I just don't recognize your right to have me read it, and if I let you stay here, unlike the rest of the membership, I have to read what you post - all of it - in order to do my job as an administrator. With special responsibilities come a few small, special privileges, inevitably and rightly, and I exercise them without apology. I will go out of my way to be a good host, here in my virtual home, as any honest and reasonable person will tell you that I always have, but in return, I ask that those present make a good faith effort to be good guests, and show some respect for my quirks and sensibilities.

I hope that explains everything as well as it needs to be explained.



Listening to:  Cyclos (from the Album of the same name) by Dilate on Drone Zone on Somafm.

Mood: Tired, and a little detached.