Let's talk about books!
Today's topic: Oh My God, I Can See Your Id!
As the danger of exposing your asscrack is to the plumber's career, so the danger of exposing your id to the author's. In some circumstances, the author and reader both go in knowing this, (Poppy Z. Brite comes to mind) and the only danger is that the reader and author's ids will not meet convivially. However, in others, the reader has the unhappy experience of finding the author's id in their work, without warning, and with the unsettling conviction that the author does not know that he or she left it exposed there.
Possibly this ties in with my embarrassment squick, but there is very little that's more unsettling to me than a book where an author appears to be exposing her id, and doesn't know it.
What's the last or most memorable time this happened to you, and with which book? Bonus question: should it be a moral obligation on the part of an editor to inform their authors they're flashing their id at the world?
Disqualified on grounds of being too obvious: Jack L. Chalker, Piers Anthony, Laurell K. Hamilton. ETA: Also John Ringo, sorry.
As the danger of exposing your asscrack is to the plumber's career, so the danger of exposing your id to the author's. In some circumstances, the author and reader both go in knowing this, (Poppy Z. Brite comes to mind) and the only danger is that the reader and author's ids will not meet convivially. However, in others, the reader has the unhappy experience of finding the author's id in their work, without warning, and with the unsettling conviction that the author does not know that he or she left it exposed there.
Possibly this ties in with my embarrassment squick, but there is very little that's more unsettling to me than a book where an author appears to be exposing her id, and doesn't know it.
What's the last or most memorable time this happened to you, and with which book? Bonus question: should it be a moral obligation on the part of an editor to inform their authors they're flashing their id at the world?
Disqualified on grounds of being too obvious: Jack L. Chalker, Piers Anthony, Laurell K. Hamilton. ETA: Also John Ringo, sorry.