My issues, let me show you them

[lagilman]

So, we're sitting in the bar last night, as we do, and I mention how awkward it makes me feel, responding to tweets from Famous People (aka showrunners, actors, etc), and then wondering if they'll respond. Because that seems weirdly stalkery, doesn't it?

And a friend says "are you responding to every one of their tweets?"

"Oh hell no. Just occasionally, when they say something particularly comment-worthy."

"So, that's hardly stalkery, is it? I mean, they're on Twitter, so they're hoping you'll follow, yeah? And you have people who respond to your tweets, don't you? People you don't know, who follow you because they read your books?"

"That's different!" I say.

Why? Um... Because it is? Because... I have no idea why it is. I still feel oddly stalkery-awkward with this presumption of talking to Someone Famous I don't know (you famous people I do know are all fair game).

I still refuse to tweet to imaginary characters*, though (sorry, Rick Castle. You'll have to social network without me)





*The advantage to having fictional characters who are high-tech-adverse - nobody expects them to have a Twitter account or their own on-line presence. The cats, however, have been contemplating it...

Comments

[klingonguy.livejournal.com]

You are too funny.

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

I still feel oddly stalkery-awkward with this presumption of talking to Someone Famous I don't know (you famous people I do know are all fair game).

This.

Like now.

'Really Famous People you see on E!' I don't care about, but to me the authors/musicians I read or follow online are my celebrities. For a long time, I couldn't bring myself to post on any blog that I follow simply because I didn't want to seem to be a stalker or something. It is too easy to be working (or in this case waiting to take the kids to the bus stop) and fire off a comment on a blog I read, and afterward I sit there thinking that I must look like a stalker for responding so quickly/frequently.

The answer to the 'how much is too much' question is something I grapple with, because when you or somebody else posts something insightful I get that urge to continue the conversation. Considering my job is long amounts of boredom (and meetings) coupled with a few minutes of sheer terror, the temptation is very great.

I guess I really don't have an answer to your feelings, because I have them too. It's just that my list who is a celebrity is a bit different than others. (Kind of like the time my wife and I got to see Dar Williams in concert back in '95; she may be small potatoes in the music scene, my brain kept going "OMG IT'S DAR WILLIAMS! THIS IS SO COOL!")

A friend of mine calls this this Law Of Fame

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

It's fine when readers you don't know respond to your tweets because you know perfectly well that really, name on the cover of a book or not, you're just you. You are not alarming (much). You are not Especially Famous, from where you're sitting.

But as lithera pointed out in a discussion about this a few days ago, anybody who is more famous than me is Famous, regardless of where *I* feel I sit on the Fame-O-Meter. And for those of us with a modicum of social skill, intruding on the presence of Someone Famous feels slightly awkward and stalkery (God knows there are people who are on the other end of that spectrum, whose willingness to intrude makes me cringe with embarrassment on the behalf of all humanity). The fact that The Famous Person has put themselves out where they can be contacted easily is complete irrelevant to somebody who maintains a basic concept of personal space and privacy.

The flip side of this, lithera determined, is the Law of Fan, which says everybody is a fan of something. My favorite example of both laws in action was an entertainment pre-show red-carpet thing I saw some years ago, where the E-TV lady was doing a little interview with Julia Roberts. Julia said she was on a real music kick for some female singer whose albums she was listening to and singing along to at full blast on her way in to work at 4:30 in the morning every day.

"Oh!" said the E-TV lady, "that singer is right over here! C'mon, I'll introduce you!" And she hauled Julia off to meet this woman, and the whole way over Julia Roberts, the biggest female movie star in the world, is hanging back and going, "Oh my god no you can't I wouldn't know what to say to her oh my god no really I have NO IDEA WHAT TO SAY oh god hi I love you I'm sorry I'm such an idiot but I just love you and--"

So it apparently makes absolutely no difference at all where you sit on the Fame-O-Meter. We all feel like idiots and stalkers when presented with the opportunity to interact with someone we admire. :)

Speaking of Rick Castle...

[nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com]

I was in a Borders yesterday and saw, among the new hardcovers, HEAT WAVE by Rick Castle. They actually got someone to write the damn thing, and Hyperion put it out. In hardcover!

[timewanderer.livejournal.com]

The problem with responding to RFP Tweets: The RFP gets so many of them that by the time they check those responses, your tweet is probably 40 pages and 800 tweets removed from their Twitter front page. Unless they are willing to spend a half hour reading every tweet response, or you are lucky enough that your tweet is one of the last ones sent, the RFP may never see it.

I've seen this happen on Facebook, too. An RFP sends a FB post. Then, if you refresh the page several times, you see the number of responses grow exponentially in just a few minutes.

[threeoutside.livejournal.com]

I understand your reticence completely. I think it has something to do with "somebody who maintains a basic concept of personal space and privacy" - don't you think there's some kind of divide between fans who think the object of their attention is some kind of creature that they own, who has no rights of their own except to please that particular fan, all the time? It's why the few times I've read famous name-famous name (real people) slash it has kind of made my skin crawl. How must those two people feel, if they come across this? I know for most slash writers it's just fun, not pathological, but good God, how RUDE!

I think if you view people you admire as human beings, that right there sets you apart from the vast majority herd of Fen.

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[lagilman]

Hardly the first time publishing has gone that route! Projects like that can be a fun tie-in, a Good Read, or a terminal disaster. No idea which one this is. Hrm. Wonder if there's an e-form yet...

[lagilman]

Oh god, RPS just... freaks me the hell out. That's an invasion of privacy I think is waaaay over the line, especially when posted to a public forum. Nobody should ever run the risk of finding that in an ego-google search on their name, y'know?

Seriously. Keep it on your hard drive, people.

[lagilman]

Tweeting is Reatime e-teraction and therefore if you blink, it's gone. The idea of being able to keep up with everything... forget about it. My brain just broke. Also: people! Go outside! Talk to someone face-to-face! Using your voice!

/cranky old fogey

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com]

I remember they did it for LOST too, claiming one of the people in the plane crash was an author and this was the book said author was working on. I can't recall how well it sold, but it's already gone from the public consciousness.

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[annathepiper]

Hi! Drollerie author Angela Korra'ti here. Yeah, there's an ebook form of Heat Wave; I bought it. It's not half bad even if it reads pretty much like an episode of the show, and the male lead is totally Castle's Marty Stu. Which is very meta. ;)

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[lagilman]

Oh, I vaguely remember hearing about tie-ins like this in the 70's, and probably even before. It's all Entertainment and Marketing....

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[nick-kaufmann.livejournal.com]

Sure. Alfred Hitchcock, Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, they all "edited" anthologies at the height of their fame. In this case, I don't know how a tie-in supposedly written by a TV character will do compared to a tie-in that actually stars said TV character, since ostensibly you'd think CASTLE fans would want to read about Rick rather than read something that doesn't feature him at all except as a name on the cover and an author photo on the back, but we'll see.

I'm just shocked that they did it in hardcover, though! In THIS economy!

[autojim.livejournal.com]

Complicating it on FB is all the twits commenting "First!" and the like and then slagging each other instead of providing any useful content.

Gotten to the point I don't even look at comments on RFP (or, for that matter, most group) posts on FB (the only RFP I follow there is Lance Armstrong, anyway).

[lagilman]

I'm not sure I follow any Famous People on Facebook... I mean, FP I don't already know, which is a different category entirely.

And FB comments can get out of control immediately -- once I post I tend not to go back unless it's an actual conversation. That's why I like LJ -- you can maintain comments-reading at a semi-sane level.

[ex-fashioni.livejournal.com]

I mention how awkward it makes me feel, responding to tweets from Famous People (aka showrunners, actors, etc), and then wondering if they'll respond. Because that seems weirdly stalkery, doesn't it?

*snicker*

You and me both. You and me both. Half the time, I start to respond and then go, "Eh, why bother? It'll a) disappear in the blink of an eye or b) come off as stalkerish."

Issues, we all gots 'em.

[otterdance.livejournal.com]

Yep, know how you feel. I made a comment on Eddie Izzard's Tweet, then thought "Omingod, he might read it. He might RESPOND!"

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

*The advantage to having fictional characters who are high-tech-adverse - nobody expects them to have a Twitter account or their own on-line presence. The cats, however, have been contemplating it...

because the cats think that tweets equal BIRDS...

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I had a major row with someone back in the winter - they were very vocal on Racefail, talking about the awfulness of appropriating people from other cultures and failing to do any proper research on their backgrounds, and misrepresenting them... Scroll down the LJ and there's a ton of RPS, plus the blithe remark 'I know they're not really gay, but who cares?'

I mentioned the, um, slight cognitive dissonance inherent in this and got an icy email that implied I did not know what I was talking about because Slash Writer worked for a university as a literary critic and thus understood the basic difference between these phenomena, whereas I, a lowly writer, could not.

Checking her out on Rate My Professor, it was not hard to see why she seems to be one of the most despised tutors of her university.

Anyway. I agree with Mizkit about the fame thing. We're all somewhere on the hierarchy and if one has a half decent set of boundaries, one's unlikely to go too far wrong.

[lagilman]

Please, answer away! Anything that distracts me from this manuscript fills my brain with lively thoughts is much to be welcomed!

[mtlawson.livejournal.com]

Right now, lively thoughts are a bit of an impossibility as I've just spent two mind numbing hours in meetings, with the promise of another half hour meeting shortly.

Once this workday is over I may say to hell with beer and wine, and instead go straight for the Maker's Mark.

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[lagilman]

"Rick Castle" and NathanF were tweeting at each other a few days ago. It was both meta, and rather disturbing. I had to look away.


[I'm curious what people thought about the Castle "hiatus" Tweetpisode. I lost interest quickly, but it did seem like people were playing along...]

Re: Speaking of Rick Castle...

[annathepiper]

Yeah, I've seen those tweets flying back and forth. I snickered mightily, especially with them complementing each other on how "ruggedly handsome" they are.

I rather liked the Twitter storyline, for what it was. :)

Re: A friend of mine calls this this Law Of Fame

[amberley.livejournal.com]

I think that's very true.

Neil Gaiman had a charming story about this in 2002 when his daughter asked about fame. Scroll down to Maddy: Dad. I need to know the truth. Are you famous? (http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2002/09/when-i-got-e-mail-from-pen-drama-maven.asp)

[mskiara.livejournal.com]

It's funny you say this. Because I had the *exact* weird and slightly stalker-ish feeling about "friend-ing" (following?) you on Facebook. I think Facebook's terminology is what makes it so intimidating.

(No, I still haven't done it. It just feels - weird.)

[rovanda.livejournal.com]

same here, exactly :)

[lagilman]

ffffpt. also, pbbtttthht.

*is eloquent*

[xmurphyjacobsx.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what that's like. I worry about it every time I answer one of your tweets or comment on your blog. Am I being -- you know -- one of those intense, weird people who try to take up too much of the Admired Person's time and attention? I've seen them and made fun of them. I worry about becoming one of them.

I wish there was a meter I could hook up to that would warn me when my attention and interest in some Famous Relative Stranger is approaching the Stalkerish zone.

[lagilman]

Having had an actual stalker (of the 'call the house at 1AM to tell me what I had been doing that day' sort) nobody needs to worry just yet about freaking me out.

[just keep Fantasy and Reality in their own little separate categories, and I won't have to ban your (collective, neutral-directive) ass]