A while ago, Dusk Petersen noted to me that a problem with my website was that none of my stories had blurbs: I acknowledged that I write lousy blurbs and prefer "none" to "lousy".

One of the questions in SurveyFail (Q54) was "If you write m/m slash, how do you study male anatomy and physiology in order to write more convincing stories?"

and as both the question and all of the multiple-choice answers contained too many false assumptions to be answerable, in comments to a post discussing that and other poorly-worded questions, I listed the topics I researched for Sins & Virtues.

Six people in the next six days asked me for a link to the story. To give perspective, I think the total number of people who ever read Sins & Virtues prior to 1st September this year is something like 15. (I sent out a dozen hard copies: not all of those got read...)

Okay. I really do need to write blurbs. Even crappy blurbs which consist entirely of a list of research topics.

I read this.

And it made me think two things:

1. I do get the point of having "If you want to read it, there's a warning associated with this story". Except I also agree much more strongly with this (from livejournal, three years ago) and this from fanfic symposium: warnings are not obligatory.

2. But given that, as she outlined very clearly, a trigger may be something as unexpected as calculus - ought we all then to warn for every event in the story, since any event may be triggering?

I don't want to cause anyone unwanted distress.

But if you read my stories, you should know that I want to harrow up your emotions like a fork in butter frosting: to make you cry, make you laugh, turn you on, startle you like a thin knife that pierces your heart before you know your skin is broken, suck you in as if I were a black hole and you were my light, make you shake, make you shiver, melt your brain, make you keep coming back -

...if you want me to do that to you.

If you don't, you shouldn't read my stories.

Over at the Six Apart place, vescoiya writes:

All of the current discussion of race in fanfiction and the whole issue of pay attention to what you write has made me think about another minority. The disabled minority. ..... Now oddly enough it is not that disability doesn't come up in fanfiction. It does. It is the way that it does most frequently. Normally what happens is that it is used as a plot device. X is horribly injured so now Y can help him and he realises his true feelings. Or it is used as an excuse for rather a lot of angst. In a lot of ways temporary disability or even permanent disability is the corner stone of h/c fiction.
.....
Now fanfiction doesn't exactly do this with most of the other minorities. You do get homophobia in slash, but only in a small percentage of it. I've yet to see explicit racism portrayed if one ignores for the minute the general lack of ethnicities portrayed in fanfic. Yet, give someone a disability, and it is suddenly a plot point. Possibly because you are adding in something that was not there to begin with. You do get dsylexia casually referenced but that is about it.
.....
I guess i'm asking where are the what if X was always blind fic? How about what if W was deaf? I mean we do get mental disabilities but only due to the extreme angst involved. I guess I'm asking why it isn't more commonly just a part of characterisation as opposed to if it is there then it ellipses everything else.

( Cut for Goodbye, Farewell, Amen spoilers )