Smashwords - Censored.

But the problem is how it's done. No, wait, the problem is that it is done.

Publishing is a lot of things. You can call it the part where a manuscript is sent through the traditional houses. You can call it the part where a writer uses a service to put their words in a form for others to read, be it through Smashwords or CreateSpace or through their own site. You can call it the form where we write words on a wall.

At least on my wall nobody will censor what I say. And it isn't even about my opinion of the words - it's that I want the right to say what I think ought to be said. I'm afraid once they say no to one thing it will be a slippery slope until we can't say much at all.

I know it's always up to the particular site about what can and cannot be expressed. I definitely want it all labeled properly so the unwary won't stumble across things accidentally. Whether it is erotica or slash fiction or even complete nonsense - we should all have the option to say what we want. Free speech, right?

Then again, no one gives backlash to sites who do not wish to cater to certain kinds of messages. The problem here is that someone else is saying what can and can't be done at another site. [A little like SOPA, except here it isn't the government involved but the bank.]

If PayPal is going to try to throw its weight around this way, is the next step to stop allowing purchases through its services for sites that put questionable (by their standards) up for free? I saw a follow-up that says that content might be allowed but not as the main theme because of all the uproar on Twitter.

Twitter is powerful. Do not mess with the Twitter machine.

I'm still waiting to see the next step. It bothers me as an erotica writer that I cannot publish everything I write because of moral objections, whether it be to telling stories through sex that some religious types object to completely or the specific niche not being allowed through censorship.

What do you think?

The Way Things Work

Every mind works differently, and everyone must choose where their personal limits are. This doesn't apply only to sex, but also to violence or religion or any other topic imaginable.

Often this is treated with an almost instinctual identification. "I like this, therefore this is okay." There are exceptions, things that fall so far outside society's norm that the majority speaks out on the freakiness of the very thought that drives it.

Hard Vore is an example of this. I wrote a story about it, from a somewhat unique perspective. The story itself is written well, but I didn't admit to creating it while I let it process in my head that my brain had gone there. I know it's a crazy subject for a story. I know the audience is very small. As it happens so often with ideas, it banged around my skull until I put it down in words.

Three months later, I'm up to admitting it. I wanted to post it somewhere, to share it as I do others, but the site I chose (after a week open for public viewing and nearly 3000 hits) rejected it for not completely understood reasons. It feels horribly like censorship. I understand that even though a site is dedicated to erotica it might not post everything a writer could dream up that pertains to erotica, but I would expect it to have been rejected sooner.

They have a webmaster look over each story before it goes up, and there's a waiting period associated with it. I expected it to be tossed back then, if it was going to be a problem. I did read their submission guidelines and I also checked out their writer's resources; nothing I found told me the story didn't meet their ideals.

But since I put it out there, now I wonder if I could market it elsewhere. I would not have lived to be this age if curiosity killed anything.