I came out of the writer's closet a couple of months ago. You see, for a long time I kept my writing secret from everyone outside of my family, and even they weren't allowed to read it. After a couple of years, when I had to explain why I was going to writing conferences, I told a couple of close friends, or more accurately I muttered something vague about writing romantic fanfiction, and they very kindly didn't laugh at me. I didn't even tell people in my real life when I self-published my books. Meantime, thousands of complete strangers I'd met on-line knew all about this important part of my life.

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It’s been a long and not particularly productive couple of weeks, mostly due and birthday season at my house and various illnesses. In my spare moments, I’ve been trying to write a bit each day, and I’ve been thinking about various issues surrounding publication. I think that’ll be another post, though!

I’ve also paid a few visits to one of the JAFF boards, 50 Miles of Good Road, where there have been some interesting discussions about possibilities for different kinds of sites in the JAFF community. I’ve been thinking about this on and off for the last year or two, not coming to any good conclusions but wondering about different options. When AI became independent again, we discussed various ways for AI authors to interact with their readers, and these blogs are the beginnings of that. There’s still exploration to be done in this format, like posting stories in blog form with comments as reply, similar to the way some writers post stories on Facebook. So AI is meandering off in its own direction, but I’ve been intrigued by the discussions.

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The last couple of days have been consumed by AI's server outage. There wasn't anything we could do about it from this end, but we got a backup of the static parts of AI set up at www.austeninterlude.pemberleyvariations.com.

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This post actually isn't about writing, but about JAFF politics and its chilling effect on my muse. So if you're not interested in JAFF politics, skip this post and go to a more interesting one. It's not a fun post, either.

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A couple of days ago I was reading an article on Wikipedia and I wasn't sure what an icon meant, so I went looking for it in the Help section. Naturally, I never found the icon because I got distracted looking at all the other interesting things under Help. See, I'm such a geek that I not only read the encyclopedia, but I read the rules of the encyclopedia!

Anyway, one of the things I found was the Etiquette section, which, given the events of the last couple of months, struck me as being filled with incredible wisdom. It made me so happy I decided to post a condensed version here, not as rules for etiquette in this blog, but to think about how different the world would be if we followed them everywhere.

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