Those of us who have any kind of authorial presence on the Web clearly have the expectation that our stuff is going to be read. We want you to read our stuff, and we love it when you e-mail us about our stuff...usually...and we even enjoy getting to know you. Well, some of you.

Sometimes, though, I get taken by surprise. I've had two readers whose presence in my e-mailbox has caused me some discomfort.

Several years ago, back when the "author's notes" at the beginning of Crosscurrents admitted that the story was autobiographical, I started receiving these very short and cryptic e-mails from a reader. The first one said, simply, "I know who you are." Gradually, over the course of a couple of weeks, I'd receive an e-mail every few days in which he'd tell me--correctly--some additional factual detail; my real last name, where I went to high school, my parents' home address and phone number, and the correct full name, address, and phone number of the other main character in the story.

Needless to say, this freaked me out. I had a wife and a new kid on the way, and my best friend from back in high school had a wife and a kid. Had my story exposed my family and friends to some psychopathic freak who might stalk us and do us some real harm?

Eventually the guy revealed to me that he was a college kid who had gone to the same high school I had. We were never in high school together because of the age difference, but from certain details in the story, he'd gotten a strong impression I was writing about the high school he had gone to. A trip home one weekend was all it took for him to go to the gym and see the pictures of previous football teams hanging on the wall, complete with full names of the members of those teams.

He hadn't been trying to scare me; he was just a lonely, nerdy college freshman trying to impress me.

So...no harm done. But it was enough to cause me concern. If it was that easy to discover my identity from clues in my story, some not-so-benign psycho could easily do the same thing. And it wasn't just about me; I had a friend with a wife and a kid, and I had my own wife and child on the way. Was it fair to subject them to danger because of my narrative exhibitionism? Was that something I remotely wanted?

I tried to get the archivist at Nifty to take down my story, but he was reluctant. He offered to remove my email address from the story, and in the back-and-forth between me and him, I decided that I was overreacting. But I asked him to let me edit it and resubmit, changing the first names of the main characters (only those two names were real, and only their first names; the rest of the characters were pseudonymous. Plus, I'd changed the gender of one character, split one real-life person into two "narrative" characters, and combined two real-life people into one "narrative" character), and removing the author's note at the front of each chapter which admitted that the story was true.

For a long time, even at my Yahoo group, I treated the story as if it were fiction. Once in a while, I'd admit the truth in a private e-mail to a reader who'd taken the time to e-mail me, and of course all my long-term readers knew it was a true story, but if my new readers just figured I was writing a fictional tale, that was fine with me.

Last fall I accidentally outed myself to my group, and I finally decided, to heck with it. I'm not playing this game any more. I don't spend a lot of time dwelling on the factual nature of the story, but if something comes up, I'm not dancing around it any more. You can walk through life always afraid of freaks and taking extreme caution to keep yourself out of situations where people won't go berserk on your ass, but that's no kind of living. So I've settled down and gotten over it. I changed the names, and I went back and changed my parents' vocations, and introduced a few other distortions-of-fact. Beyond that...screw it.

I had one other weird encounter with a fan. A pretty nice guy. Very intelligent. Significantly older than me. About my dad's age, I guess, but a really unhappy, troubled guy. Gay with children and married and working in an occupation where he couldn't come out.

For some reason he started pretending to other people online that he was me, or that I was him. Telling them that he'd written Crosscurrents. I didn't understand it. I confronted him when I found out, and he came clean and 'fessed up. He explained that he was so desperately unhappy he was trying to live vicariously through me or something, even though....well, it's a convoluted mess, and on the outside chance that he reads this I don't want to be harsh. We don't have a relationship anymore, understandably, and I haven't heard from him in ages. He never did me any real harm, and he was a nice guy who was hurting a lot. It's terrible what homophobia has done to people over the years, forcing them into closets and creating pain and misery for themselves and their loved ones. Still, he definitely crossed a line with me. I'm not excusing him; I just felt bad for him.

Those were the only two really odd encounters I've had with readers. There are two other kinds of reader e-mail, though, that annoy me:

First are those readers who tell me how I should write my story; you know, how to plot the damn thing. This happens mainly with readers who assume it's fiction, and I figure most readers assume that these days. But even if it were fiction, how effin' presumptious to tell an author how to write his tale! One guy wrote me a really rude letter because the Nifty archivist had put Croscurrents in the "gay male" section, when it's a story of a bisexual guy. He read my prologue, decided that the protagonist would have a love-relationship with another guy, then leave him to get married. He had huge political objections. In his opinion, nobody should write a story like that, because gay guys get the shaft often enough from life, and he wasn't going to read another chapter. Obviously he didn't get to see that my story was nothing like that, and anyway, even if it were, what the hell? Doesn't that kind of stuff happen? And if it does, why forbid chronicling it in narrative? We exchanged a series of e-mails, each one more heated, and finally I told him to go screw himself.

Then, of course, there are the readers who harangue and harrass because I've been so slow in my production schedule. These range from the "beggers" to the downright abusers, people who accuse you of high crimes for not making their next drug fix available to them. I feel like saying, "I'm sorry I have a life, but I can't factor your need to have a new chapter into my life decisions, at least not at the level of priority you seem to want me to give it." Still...I can't help feeling guilty. I've followed stories that the author walked away from <cough> <cough> Mark Arbour <cough> <cough>, and man, there's nothing quite as depressing--well, except for the idea that Republicans exist --as investing yourself in a story and its characters and having the author bail on the story. Still, I know from personal experience that guys who write stuff for no compensation and post it to the Internet have things that come up in their lives that make it impossible to continue. I don't hold that against them even though it disappoints me.

Okay, that's off my chest, so I feel better (I just got one of those e-mails about Crosscurrents). Republican readers, of course, are welcome to flame me for the smartass remark above. After all, some of my best friends...

--Adam