Literary history of a sort: part one: definitions and descriptions mainly

I've made no secret of the fact that my current favorite popcorn reading is volunteer online serial coming of age gay romantic fiction. Because I'm an unreconstructed lumpen intellectual, I can't help thinking seriously about it, but because my academic career was truly spotty and interrupted by building factory nuclei and wrecking my hands and stuff, I don't have all the terms down and I think in a sort of undisciplined way. So you're going to have to make allowances for enthusiasm.

I suppose definitions come first. Or descriptions. I use the word "volunteer" instead of "amateur" because "amateur" has shifted in sense from the person who does something for the love of it and is usually a virtuoso to a person who's not good enough or dedicated enough or consistent enough to be a professional. Which is too bad. The volunteer writers of this sort of fiction take their craft as seriously as professional writers. The conventions of writing this kind of thing are somewhat different from the conventions of print fiction, and also, I think, different from the conventions of the fiction that finds its way into online journals that imitate print magazines, or that imitate the dignity of print magazines. Also, the conventions of this kind of writing are probably still in the rapid evolution stage of an art in its infancy.

I must think of a shorter name right away because "online serial coming of age gay romantic fiction" is too much to type every time and I hate acronyms -- okay, for the purposes of this discussion I think I'm going to call the genre "young man stories" until I think of something better. Not "boy stories" because that implies something else. Not "boy meets boy stories," though that's closer. And most definitely not "yaoi," which is something else entirely. Some of the authors get confused and call their stories "original slash fiction" thinking that the word "original" is enough to distinguish what they're writing from slash fiction per se but the outlook, conventions and sensibility of these stories are quite different from anything that could reasonably be called slash.

Young man stories occur in defined spaces. You can find them in story archives which are primarily intended to be erotic, which is their birthplace: in story archives dedicated to this one genre, hosting several authors: in authors' own websites: in e-groups such as yahoo groups: and as posts in forums and message boards. In story archives that are classified, they are usually found in "high school" and "college" categories.

Young man stories are almost always serial and frequently interactive. By "serial" I mean that they have multiple chapters which appear over a period of time, with the core group of readers reading each chapter as it comes out. By "interactive" I mean that there is a public dialog between the readers and the authors during the period of the writing, with readers potentially altering the trajectory of the story, or its language or other details. It's not unknown for authors to query their audiences about details of setting or technical information. An interesting instance of this is the author who is outside the US asking for details about USian high schools. Other queries are from authors whose first language is not English, asking for help with colloquialisms or other details of English (I believe that it is interesting that English is becoming an almost universal lingua franca at the time when I believe that future historians will point back and say that the English-speaking countries are entering a serious and permanent decline in political and economic influence). These illustrate a major difference between young man stories and yaoi: yaoi, whatever its setting, has at its core a sensibility that is Japanese or faux Japanese, and young man stories have at their core a sensibility that is American or faux American. Of course there are notable exceptions to both, but the exceptions do not alter the general strain of the genres.

Young man stories are usually about first relationships. They are occasionally about first successful relationships, with a back story of a first unsuccessful or traumatic relationship or two. Young man stories, therefore, often include "first time" episodes (more about this later when I get into history). Young man stories are also frequently about coming out or being forced out.

Later I'll get into how young man stories are also distinguished by their treatment of family, friends, and community. The fact that these elements are treated in distinctive ways is, I think, part of the definition and description of the stories.

Next: where these stories came from. I think. (with questions for further study). Discussion of the development of online fiction communities with great big honking holes for fan fiction, heterosexual erotica and romance, and the other stuff.

Third part: the structure of young man stories. Discussion of the difference between serials and novels.

Fourth part: erotica, family and community in young man stories. I think this is where I wind up.

On another front, it's not raining today, and I'm going to go see where my drinking water comes from, and I had asparagus and artichokes for breakfast!!

how the heck will I wash my neck if it ain't going to rain no more?

Today was maybe the last of the water tours and I had too much fun. First stop was the Loch Lomond reservoir which provides 17% of our water. It has an earth dam which is covered in emerald grass and steep wooded banks. You can take a canoe or a kayak out on it and tool around looking for ospreys and herons. You don't have to look for the cormorants because they hang out in this one prominent group of trees right there. We learned some history of the watershed, and logging in the Santa Cruz mountains -- there were at one time more than thirty sawmills in our mountains -- and a bunch of stuff about the habitat and the maintenance of the dam.
The Newell Creek watershed was clearcut about a hundred years ago so for now the habitat management is hands-off except for revegetation on some old logging roads. The forest won't get to where it needs a fire for a long time, especially as there was a pretty severe burn a bit over forty years ago. You do know that many California plant species need fire to reproduce, right? One hillside at the north end of the lake is chapparal, which is good too, but most of the watershed is mixed forest and redwood forest.
The way they keep track of the water in the lake is by altitude. The lake is lower than I thought: 570 feet is a full lake (contrast this with the pass at the summit which is I think just under 2000 feet.
There was lots more about fish and spillways and aeration and sampling and where the water comes from (there are four pipes but the one which is used the most is the second to the lowest one).

But we toddled down the hill to the treatment plant where we saw the water being flashmixed with activated carbon, and mixed more slowly with polymers to get flocculation going, and filtered and filtered and filtered and filtered and charged up with chlorine and phosphate (the phosphate is to resist corrosion in old pipes). The flocculation pools are a beautiful shade of turquoise.

And then we went to the pumping station where 47% of our water is drawn right from the San Lorenzo River and pumped up to the treatment plant. You know what? The river is beautiful. It wasn't in 1970 when I came to town -- it was all gravel and trash and dredged-up goo. We got so much information here about the history of the water system, the politics of water,o gosh everything about water. The guys who met us there were map and chart guys. They brought two big old maps -- the watershed and land use on one, and the district and lines of supply and stuff on the other. I learned about the desalination plant we're most likely going to get, and got my brine question answered (they'll pipe the concentrate to the wastewater treatment plant, where it will join the treated wastewater and be piped out to sea. which might make the effluent better for the ocean environment by lessening the difference between the effluent and the seawater) I looked at a really interesting graph of wet and dry years (four categories: wet, normal, dry, and critically dry). It makes an almost regular pattern which couldn't be used for predicting wet and dry years -- except that, knowing the climate, we know we will have dry years, and we will have runs of critically dry years.

in other news, my stepmother, who's really had enough crap by now, is in the hospital getting her medication adjusted and various tests after her right arm went numb(the one originally damaged in the stroke she had in Africa back in November). This time she's in the Santa Rosa Kaiser, which is because she was on a vacation at the time. She's pretty disappointed to be in a hospital again.

literary history of a sort: part two

yeah, I'm posting a lot. It'll stop probably after a while.

So this is the part that's actually history. There are parts of this I am not sure of. But the general trend of things is about right.

So young man stories don't come out of any print genre. They come out of online textfiles stories. You can still find these archives that I believe popped up soon after the internet happened. These textfiles came in a lot of varieties, but the short erotic story was a pretty common type. I think these first appeared in bulletin boards and early newsgroups (there are a lot of dead story-oriented newsgroups out there). These stories were generally fairly short and simple. Most of them were simply stroke stories. When I say this I am not derogating them for being what they were. Some of them were very good at what they were.

There were multipart stories either at or near the beginning of this. But the multipart stories couldn't really be called serials or novels, I think, because of the trajectory of the stories. These stories -- which still are being written, and are often called "series" -- remind me of myths and folktales of the Bobo or the Hercules sort. I mean that the stories are connected by a general sensibility, not by a story arc. The changes from part to part are not character development or plot: they're additions of new sexy bits. Often the stories start with two guys meeting and having sex. In the next part they meet again and have more sex. In the third part they have some kind of breakthrough sex -- though it's hard, since these stories tend to claim that the sex is the best in the world to begin with. Sometimes what is added is more sexual partners, so that at some point what you get is an orgy. It would be stupid to complain that these stories are not literarily rich or complex enough: that would be like complaining that a haiku has no chorus.

One of the largest and oldest archives is The Nifty Archive (which used to be called the Nifty Library of Erotic Stories, and which has or had some kind of relationship with a subscription site called Gay Cafe to which I can't provide a link because googling provides a whole raft of gay cafes none of which seem to be the site I'm thinking of). It has been around since 1992, but its stories go back further because many of the early stories were posted from earlier BBS and newsgroup sources. It has the stories categorized by orientation, gender, age group, situation, and some fetishes. In some ways this can be unfortunate because some fine stories have been written that belong to disturbing categories. I mean they are stories which if you read them without the category label you think, "That was disturbing. But what a nice story, and what interesting characters!" But with the category label you're kind of scared to even go there. I mean, they can photograph your computer screen through your window blinds from a mile away. They can capture the image of where you've been online after you've wiped your drive six ways from Sunday. And dang, just what are you going to find in those categories, anyway? Will you want to run your brain through the sani-wash cycle of the dishwasher to get rid of what you read?

There was a time when I read everything, everything at all. The whole situation of reading fiction online was so novel, and the naughtiness of reading batshit crazy weirdness was sort of exciting in a whee-I'm-on-the-Wild-Mouse-ride kind of way. So when I say things about the more problematic categories, well, I've seen some of it, and I'm not embarrassed by the fact of seeing it, but I am embarrassed by much of what I saw.

Anyway. If I knew more about picaresque literature and the early novel, I would be able to compare and contrast the way the young many story developed out of the stroke story with all that. The series stroke story spawned series romance, and that spawned the young man story, which is a fully developed serial literature of its own.

Clearly, there are other interesting genres developing out of the online fiction sharing tradition, but this is the one I know and love and have something to say about.

I know I said there'd be history here, and that implies much more information than I have to give. Next part will be better. Oh, and soon I will be giving links to the stories I'm talking about.