The Slash Pile discussion

The bookshelf now has all the books that were rec'd on the LJ group, or at least all of the ones that were on goodreads. They are categorised for your convenience! All the shelves except the 'read' one say 0 but that's a lie, there's stuff there if you click 'em.

Please let me know if you find any errors or if you want to heap praise on me for a job well done.

Well, the ones that were already on goodreads have their links so that's fine. I just added a few books to goodreads as well, so I'll need to either find a librarian or become one myself to add their links in.

Oh that's awesome. I'm kind of on a campaign to close the weird gap between freebie original slash and M/M published stuff or w/e so maybe having more stuff on GR will help.

Actually I'm not on a campaign. I just thought that it's weird and didn't do anything about it at all. Fail campaign.

Yeah you're too lazy for actual campaigns. What do you mean by the weird gap between the two?

It's basically two separate communities or something and I was surprised because for some reason I thought it was one big community because I am naive and foolish. But there are several TSP people who have never read/heard of books that are like "mainstream" in published M/M side of things, and I'm sure it's the other way around as well.

I think they can be very different types of stories, like slash vs. gay literature or whatever. Don't know what the proper terms are. Also perhaps because some people don't buy books, just rely on free online stuff. I admit I probably haven't heard of a lot of the mainstream stuff. My interests are rather narrow.

I don't know if I'd categorize a lot of it as gay literature. A few books that I felt came close to that so far are like Eric Arvin's and Soldiers, but i haven't read a lot of what's out there either. A lot of it reads like the equivalent of heterosexual romance books to me which have their place and that's fine, but yea.

In some cases I've been more wowed by the freebie stuff. Captive Prince before she self-published, blew 99% of things out of the water when it came to writing style and skill and world building.

I'm really not into straight up romance. Sci fi and fantasy are much more interesting.

There are some really great stories you can get for free, and some really awful ones you have to pay to read. Guess it's about picking the best from both piles, which isn't always easy.

Exactly. I rely on recs a shit ton. That is how I found Soldiers which is my favorite M/M book ever.

Goodreads is pretty good for recs, though less so for free stuff. I'm enjoying playing around with it, anyway.

Rec me things.

Goodreads says we've read only a few of the same things and your feelings on most of them were somewhere between ambivalent and negative. So idk, have you read the Shadow of the Templar series?

What kind of recs do you want?

Potatoe wrote: "Goodreads says we've read only a few of the same things and your feelings on most of them were somewhere between ambivalent and negative. So idk, have you read the Shadow of the Templar series?"

Reaffirming the rec for Shadow of the Templar. Still a real favourite of mine. Potatoe, do you know anything similar? Doesn't matter of it's free or published.

I don't, unfortunately. Usually I prefer fantasy. Does anyone else know of anything similar?

Sonny wrote: "It's basically two separate communities or something and I was surprised because for some reason I thought it was one big community because I am naive and foolish. But there are several TSP people ..."

Yes, the community does seem to be separated between those who follow published and those who follow free online fiction. Which I think sucks really, because I feel that there is so many unpublished fiction that I would recommend, as well as the published fiction I would recommend. As an minor complaint, a surprising number of published fiction that I would recommend don't read to anyone even if it were the only thing to read, due to lack of editing, bad writing, etc.

And no, not talking about Twilight or Shades of Grey series. No idea if they really are good or bad, I just prefer M/M fiction.

I listened to an audio book kinda thing of someone reading the first Twilight book with funny voices once, so I can attest that it's pretty bad.

I used to only read free online stuff because, well, it's free, and I like how you can communicate with the authors so easily. Recently, though, I've been reading a lot more published stuff. I think my standards have increased to the point that it's difficult to find anything for free that I can really enjoy. Hell, it's pretty hard to find any published stuff I enjoy too.

I only read original m/m stuff and I'm pretty fussy when it comes to good grammar and structure. I have a short attention span and don't like much contemporary stuff (mostly I like fantasy). So it is REALLY DIFFICULT.

Kenny wrote: "Sonny wrote: "I feel that there is so many unpublished fiction that I would recommend, as well as the published fiction I would recommend. As an minor complaint, a surprising number of published fiction that I would recommend don't read to anyone even if it were the only thing to read, due to lack of editing, bad writing, etc...."

I've found that there are some free fics with a far better standard of writing, and sometimes also better editting, than that of published fics.

Meep wrote: I've found that there are some free fics with a far better standard of writing, and sometimes also better editting, than that of published fics.

That's a good point. Some of my favourite stories are free, and I've read some published stuff that I've hated. It's particularly annoying if I pay for something and it ends up being disappointing.

Wow! You did a brilliant job, Potatoe. (My spell-check keeps wanting to change your name!) What a lot of work.

I was thinking about TSP this morning while reading an article on how there is no explicit sex in so-called "young adult" books (http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com/201...). I was thinking: thank goodness for places like TSP where they can find good stories which do include sex, and are therefore more true to life.

That's an interesting article and honestly I didn't read the whole thing because I got distracted looking up information based on the first thought that came to my mind when the reviewer was wondering why there isn't explicit sex. And it's this: child pornography laws.

In the US at least, there are acts that have been passed that can criminalize explicit depictions of minors engaging in sexual acts. There are some debates about it, but even though the age of consent varies state by state, in many jurisdictions the minimal legal age for accessing any explicit material is 18, regardless of if the age of consent is lower. Same with it being illegal to film people in sexual acts younger than 18 even if the age of consent is lower than 18. I don't know whether writing falls into that too but I wouldn't be surprised if someone made a big stink about it and turned it into law at some point. And if we're talking young adult, what age range would young adult be? Probably not much higher than 18? If so, then having sexually explicit material in published works wouldn't work for the most part. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_c...)

So anyway I wouldn't be surprised if part of the reason is less the target audience and more the publishers' or writers' fear of repercussions were they to write explicit material at younger ages. Especially since, in the US at least, for as weirdly sexualized as everything is in the media, Americans are kind of conservative about sex itself in depictions-- hence why some pretty vanilla books can seem OMG SO NAUGHTY to so many people because they've never really expanded beyond a pretty small area. Also, people can be pretty protective of children and to be fair, the child pornography laws are good to have for actual child pornography to protect minors who may be taken advantage of and hurt. I don't know what studies might be out there as for whether or not having sexually explicit material available would be better, worse, or make no difference as far as keeping a pedophile from acting on anything and hurting a real person.

That's for North America for the most part or at least the US, though. I don't know if you would find a lot of explicit material with younger MCs were you to look in native language stories of other countries where they may have a much lower age of consent (Spain's is 13 for instance) and perhaps if their child pornography laws differ.

If in my distraction of looking up child porno laws I missed where the reviewer mentioned all this and had a great argument against it, sorry! And let me know because then I'll go back and read it more carefully :) I just get excited about research and distracted myself *cough*

I can remember there being sex in a couple of young adult books, but I can't remember how explicit it was... Probably not very. I think slash is better than a lot of books at having sex in it without it being some cheesy romance novel. Also the internet is the only place you can really get proper sex scenes in stories that are otherwise targeted at younger audiences, such as in the case of high school fic.

Ais wrote: "That's an interesting article and honestly I didn't read the whole thing because I got distracted looking up information based on the first thought that came to my mind when the reviewer was wonder..."

I'm sure you're right, that publishers are terrified of repercussions. But one point which is being made is that the description "young adult" implies that the intended reader is over the age of consent, so is an adult (albeit young). Why then the omission? And are film ratings in synch?

What age range is "young adult" supposed to be?

Oh, and film ratings suck anyway if you ask me, at least in the US-- there was a documentary I watched about it awhile back. It's kind of ridiculous and at the time at least it was actually pretty biased against GLBT. You could pretty much get a straight sex scene in a PG-13 movie but a gay couple kissing and touching each other in an R, because the gay part of it made it OH SO SCANDALOUS. I'm not sure if that's still the case and I might be exaggerating a little bit from their examples but it was ridiculous.

Heaps of praise!!! Three exclamation points worth!!!

Sometimes the authors of free online fiction publish under other names. That's one reason why there's no guarantee that free will be inferior to published, and vice versa.

Urbanista wrote: "Sometimes the authors of free online fiction publish under other names. That's one reason why there's no guarantee that free will be inferior to published, and vice versa."

That's a good point

Ais wrote: "What age range is "young adult" supposed to be?"

I think the young adult section in our old library was mostly targeted towards teens, actually. It's kind of the next step up from the kid's section. Other places might do it differently, though.

Hmm, I just added A Suitable Lover by plumblossom to the bookshelves and then realized that it is also listed under Lucy Kemnitzer. Not sure which one to add or whether these two should be combined.

They should probably be combined. I wonder if she knows it's like that...