I attended the Fictional Bloggers panel at SXSW. The panel featured Liz Henry and Odin Soli. They are both active in Latin American political writing, which is an area I admit I don’t follow. I spent some time in Brazil when my mother was stationed there and got some creepy awful illness which caused blood to exit from strange places and caused me to take medication which made everything taste like metal for a month. Also, despite huge natural resources and local wealth, there were homeless children there and that kinda freaked me out. I haven’t followed much in the way of anything Latin American since. Even though I live an easy drive from Tijuana, the only people who generally try to get me to go south of the border with them tend to be professional adult webmasters. These are the sort of guys who just can’t help bribing public officials and finding out where the donkey show is. As a result, despite having lived all over the world and living in Los Angeles now, I have never even visited Mexico for an hour.

Liz Henry’s work these days is working for Socialtext, which is a company attempting the interesting enterprise of introducing wiki technology to the corporate environment. She also blogs for Feminist SF which lists yours truly in their index of female authors of science fiction, so they have to be awesome. Bonus points: Liz Henry wears purple hair well. Odin Soli works for a company called Aveso, which is either a webhost, or more likely a company striving to sell big business on the cyberpunk giftcard accessory of teensy weensy electronic displays. I know it doesn’t seem like this is a more likely thing to even exist, but the Interactive portion of SXSW is about new tech and next time someone mails me a Starbucks giftcard as their holiday thanks for helping them have a good year, I’d like that card to have an animation of ice cubes in a latte. Actually, I’d like to claim ironic detachment on that one, but I really do think miniature electronic displays on cards would be pretty spiffy.

However, what Odin Soli is best known for is creating a fictional blog. And that was the main topic of the panel. From 2001 through 2004, he wrote an online diary of the supposed life of a young woman named Layne Johnson or Plain Layne. Odin Soli explains his concept of the character of Layne on his site saying, “Layne Johnson was an unlikely protagonist for that kind of fame. She was cute but gap-toothed, a twentynothing infowaif laboring in the lower GI tract of Corporate America. She struggled with her conservative Lutheran family and a revolving door of boyfriends — and later, girlfriends. She described herself as “un-out-dorkable” and tended to finish sentences with “hey?” And most of all, she shared her innermost thoughts and feelings with brutal honesty.” He thought it would be an interesting creative exercise, writing in the first person, with a female voice, in a medium like the internet where the readers could interact with the fictional character of Layne. He had previously written a travelogue in this style from 2000 to 2001, but, The Sex Pistols are Alive and Well and Living in Sohatsenango, the travel diary of the fictional female journalist Acanit became ethically uncomfortable for him after the events of 9/11. So he created Layne. Usually, an author would be very pleased if something he or she wrote garnered hundreds of thousands of fans. Unfortunately for Odin, his fans kinda thought Plain Layne was a real person and they cared about her like they would a real person. And, when he grew weary of the creative exercise, his creation’s fans clamoured for more. And, when he actually stopped writing Layne’s story, “her” readers turned sleuth, did some detective work, and outed the real author as being a man. The mainstream press went beserk and Odin had a pretty unpleasant time of it.

Liz Henry, whose BlogHer blog identifies her as “feminist, geek, punk, poet, mom”, made the point that, in situations where fictional journals are being put out there, the “dominant culture can be speaking for people who actually know much more about what it is like to be them.” She also pointed out to Odin Soli that all testimony is undermined if you undermine the social trust. His view was that, if the writing could potentially impact international public policy, then that was ethically dicey, but, even after all he had been through, he seemed to still feel that there ought to be a way to be entertaining with a fictional blog.

I admit I’ve played both LARPs and table top games with the best of them. But, in those situations, everyone knows you are not really a 10th level illustionist/assassin of half-orc descent. To write good fiction, a writer absolutely must be able to express voices besides his or her own. When I had one of my fiction pieces in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica, I participated in a reading for it at Slim’s in San Francisco. I never do readings because, although I enjoy public speaking, actually reading my work aloud makes me experience agonizing shyness, but, hey, it was Susie Bright asking and she’s a real inspiration. At any rate, the story I had written was from a first person male point of view. I wrote it under my own name and Amelia sure ain’t a boy’s name. There was no question that the story was intended to be taken as fiction. Yet, some people who reviewed the show said that they found it sort of odd to see me up there in my red sequin corset talking about my cock and not meaning a strap-on. But it only struck them as humorously off-kilter, not actually enraging. Because they honestly did know, in a general way, what was real and what was not. Then again, they certainly couldn’t know which characters in my short story were based on which real life people and which parts were wholly fiction and which ones less so.

So how far is too far when it comes to online roleplay? Lots of writers use pseudonyms. Is that wrong? Does it become wrong when they use more than one? Does it become wrong when the illusion is broken? Does it become wrong if they have an actor perform the role of being their pseudonym on book tours the way J.T. Elroy did? One of the reasons so many people felt J.T. Elroy was more a hoax than a pseudonym was because they felt they were having a relationship with a real person, but their friend turned out not to really exist. Another reason people felt J.T. Elroy was so wrong was perhaps because the hoax was so very successful. Is it wrong for someone to pretend in their online profile that they are someone they are not? Is it more wrong if they pretend successfully enough to get laid IRL?

When does fiction bridge the gap and intrude too far into real life?

I used to watch music videos and just feel the mood they were trying to evoke. I’d believe that the peformers really were that cool. It was all so sexy and exciting. I just wanted to pass through that TV screen into a cooler and more passionate world.

Given that I kind of did manage to live my life so that I got to pass through the screen to the other side, I actually only got cable television because I was offered a really good deal on getting it with a cable modem. Time Warner Cable recently bought out Comcast, who I think bought out RoadRunner, and maybe AT&T was in there somewhere. I didn’t totally follow all the transfers and my cable bills literally did not have a return address on the envelope for a while because the changeovers were so hasty.

The upshot of all of this is that I recently had a channel line-up re-shuffle and it is easier for me to TiVo lots of music video shows, fast forward through stuff I don’t like, and still get to enjoy lots of videos I do like and might not have come across otherwise. Music videos used to be one of my favorite forms of entertainment and one of the only types of television I would watch. My college had a room in the student center with a gigantic projection TV and a friend of mine (who had a first and last name which were surreally both slang for penis – he was even more surreally named after his father) and I used to sit there and watch MTV on it, missing stuff we were supposed to do because we were just going to stay until the good video came on. When I finally had access to a television with cable and a closed door, I wasted no time finding which shows had the highest preponderance of rock videos I found worthy of self-pleasure.

My new Time Warner Cable line-up includes a couple of MTVs and VH1s and CMTs, and the delightful relative newcomer FUSE. I should be in heaven, but I have trouble stopping the negative ideation those video channels evoke in me today. The problem is that I have too much of a sense of how the sausage is made and I’m discomfitted by a lot of their cooking methods. I see a video with some teenage boy singing about how wrong it is to beat your girlfriend and the song is catchy enough and the boy is okay-looking and has a nice enough voice which works for the material. But I can’t stand the pretense that some teenager wrote the song.

Cablevision Systems Corporation, the corporate parent of FUSE, has sports holdings which account for nearly 20% of their revenues. I wish music understood teamwork like the world of sports does. Sports fans know and understand that, while some people are really standout stars, there are a number of positions which need to be played and the coaches get airtime too. If someone gets too flamboyant in drawing attention to themselves, they can get penalized for showboating. In the world of music, there is this desperation to pretend that the lead singer just came up with everything. Unfortunately, the product is so manufactured that a lead singer who really can come up with his or her own songs, style, and message is likely to be buried and ripped-off and asked to change, but never played by the music video stations. A headstrong artist is a pain in the ass and nowhere near as desirable as a compliant and good-looking youth who can sing and dance and sign contracts which offer a low percentage.

And I can’t stop myself from thinking about how the singer doesn’t understand the words he is singing. I can’t stop myself from thinking about contract law. I can’t stop thinking about how roughly seven companies own most media in America. I can’t stop thinking about how the music industry’s response to YouTube was not to offer kids in Peoria the video-directing opportunity of a lifetime, but to offer those talented kids in the boonies the opportunity to line the industry’s pockets for nothing. I can’t stop myself from thinking about how many talented musicians I know, who will never get a real chance, precisely because they are the whole package, in an industry which has come to prefer people who can fit snugly into small roles.

And then I find myself wondering about a band like Evanescence. The band has sold more than fourteen million albums worldwide and they tend to be marketed somewhat as a Gothic band. I’ve had some interaction or other with someone from most bands which are marketed as Gothic or industrial or deathrock or anything along those lines. If I haven’t, then someone I know has. Either I or someone I know will have interviewed someone from the band, partied with someone from the band, had sex with someone from the band, or at least shown up at a nightclub and had a conversation in line for the bathroom with someone from the band. But nobody I know has ever mentioned having anything to do with anyone in Evanescence.

Dictionary.com defines the band’s name as “to dissipate or disappear like vapor” and the Gurl.com top interview in a Google search for amy+lee+evanescence+interview explains the band’s name as “The word Evanescence means to dissipate like vapor, it puts an image in your head of like a ghost/specter that isn’t really there.” The Gurl.com interview has no interviewer credit. So I watch videos late at night and I finally start wondering if Evanescence really exists in any man-in-the-street sense of what a band is or if some enterprising producer for the surreally-named Wind Up Records just made up the whole thing to, you know, wind up the public. And sell fourteen million records. Which is a lot.

The question is, if Amy Lee and Terry Balsamo don’t really write Evanescence songs, don’t pick out their own clothes, don’t have the personal lives claimed for them, or maybe don’t even speak English, does that make their performances less enjoyable for their audience? If it does reduce the pleasure, does that mean it is good and reasonable to hide the origins of the music and the performers? Is it okay to lie, if it makes listeners happier? Is it still okay to lie, if it makes listeners happier, but the lies mean a genuine struggling band, who tells the truth, can not compete?

Someone, please tell me you have met Amy Lee from Evanescence and she speaks English like a goth girl from Arkansas. Someone, please tell me how to block the part of my brain which wonders if Evanescence is a hoax, when all I really want to do is watch some cool videos.