Well, that's not good...

[przed]

I just got an email from someone about one of my Wild Wild West stories. And not in a good way.

The main reason I love writing Wild Wild West is that I get to indulge my love of historical research. I usually find something interesting that happened somewhere between 1860 and 1875, research it to death, throw Jim, Artie and sex into the mix and watch what happens.

Problem is, someone just found my WWW Civil War story when they were Googling the real event it's based on. I'm sure James West and Artemus Gordon having sex wasn't quite what they were expecting.

So now I'm not sure what to do. Search and replace the names of historical figures in all my WWW stories? Add pop-up disclaimers to all stories? Say fuck it and let the chips fall where they may? (I'm tired enough at the moment that the last alternative is looking the most attractive, but I'll problem look to come up with some way of covering my ass sometime in the future.)

Comments

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

I'm of a different take than most here -- I really believe you owe no one anything in this respect. There's nothing to make them read your story, and once they see that this is a work of fiction rather than research info they were looking for, it's their discretion to be outraged and keep reading. I find people like this to be utterly without merit, and I completely ignore them. I get a lot of hits from people looking for things that appear in my stories, and I write a lot in historical fandoms, and also drop a lot of pop culture names in my modern stuff. If someone stumbles on some pr0n and keeps reading, too bad for them. i refuse to make extra work for myself because there are idiots out there who will click on any link, even after looking at what the google cache line is, and then be upset about it.

I've had some interesting discussions with good people who've stumbled on stuff, including an elderly man who was looking for an old tV show info that showed up as words in one of my Mag 7 stories. He read all the stories and even told me that he thought I handled the romantic attractions believably. He was a total gentleman, and very good natured about it. That's why I think it's important for people to take responsibility for what they read -- some people can, so there's no excuse when morons can't.

[przed.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I think I'm mostly with you on this. I'm bridling at having to label stuff just to prevent someone from finding the wrong kinda stuff. And you're perfectly right that someone should really be able to tell that the stories aren't historical research materials, if that's what they were looking for.

Still, I did go through and add the meta tags to the stories in question, for the limited good that will do. And I may put notes of explanation on some of the more historically based stories. (And hey, that would give me an opportunity to show off the research, right?)

But in the end, people do need to take responsibility for their own actions, on the Internet or anywhere. Find something you don't like? Don't read it.