In which we try not to admit that Stephen King’s Misery scarred us for life

Some of you may be aware that I think S. Bear Bergman is pretty neat. I enjoyed The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You a great deal, and got to see hir speak this year.

I might have fanboyed hir a little. Very large values of a little.

Ze posted recently about hir experiences of having fans, but also of being one, and having to negotiate that weird space between being a fan while also being a peer (and, in this case, a would-be collaborator). This is odd territory, and a place I've been on occasion, and so I've been reflecting on the values I try to bring to those kinds of interactions.

After some reflection, I've managed to parse my feelings out into a sort of Pirate Code -- guidelines I try to apply (with varying degrees of success) in an effort not to be a creepy jerk. I can't swear I've always managed to uphold these, or that I haven't made ridiculous missteps along the way, but I thought it might be interesting to share them here:

1) Do not be ashamed of being a fan. There's nothing to be ashamed of.
2) Remember that you're a stranger, and that while you may know a lot about a person, you don't personally know him/her. Do your best to gracefully accept all the consequences of that, like not having a magical instant connection with someone, having your name forgotten, etc.
3) Sincerity and kindness in the moment is still sincerity and kindness, even if some of the hard lessons of #2 are also in play.
4) Be respectful of time, personal space, etc. Particularly bad choices include trapping someone in an elevator, grabbing, cornering, etc. If you would be alarmed if a stranger did the same thing to you, it's probably a bad idea.
5) Don't oversell -- or undersell -- yourself, especially if you're trying to establish a peer/collaborator relationship.
6) Be sincere. Don't treat the person like a means to an end, even if you really want that end.

I'd be curious to see what some of you think about this, especially since I know people who exist on wildly different ends of the spectrum. Thoughts? Additions? Hilarious and awkward experiences? Awesome outcomes?

~*~

- Jolene (of "Flat Jolene" fame) is doing an F U Cancer BBQ Fun and Fundraiser. You can read more about her experience with metastatic cancer here. (Note: you may need to have a Facebook account to read these links.)

- Randomly interesting thing from the 1700's: Instructions to Apprentices on Leaving the Foundling Hospital over at Georgian London.

- Bart Leib will shave his glorious curly locks for charity if Broken Slate sells sufficiently well on Friday. Check it out!

- Netflix is changing their pricing structure. Considering that I have to maintain DVD service because a) their whole library is not available for streaming, and b) my mother is a deafened adult without a gaming console, and is thus doubly unable to utilize their streaming service. I am less than delighted, and I think it's a bad business move, but the boycott rage I'm seeing in certain quarters strikes me as a little bit ridiculous.

- Good news: Congress is at least vaguely looking at the concept of whether DOMA harms families. Bad news: Republicans continue to reject actual reality and keep trying to postpone final repeal of DADT.

- Random Acts of Publicity Week is coming up! Anybody else want to play?

- You should probably quit your job. Reading this article made me incredibly angry. Not because it's wrong, but because I identify more strongly than I'd like with the problem of dreams deferred for things that drain us. (ETA: One of the things I'm seeing a lot of comments about is how this article comes from a place of privilege, and how doing "meaningful" things often involves doing other work to make that meaningful work possible. I agree wholeheartedly -- I'm a writer, and a day job is likely to be my way of life indefinitely -- and I probably should have included that when I posted originally. It just wasn't the place from which my own feelings were arising, so it slipped my mind as I was trying to wrap up this post.)

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com