Posted on by Eileen Young

Fandom part something

One of the interesting things that has stemmed from the corner of Homestuck fandom to which I pay attention is the surge of literary criticism.

Casual, lengthy, in depth literary criticism that examines motifs and characters and mines them for all they are worth. It’s generally referred to as ‘meta,’ since it is discussion of the story that does not directly relate to speculation about future events. It does not typically make negative statements about the original work, either, which may be a reason the word ‘criticism’ is shied away from.

To illustrate:

  • Take your high school English class around the time you had to read The Yellow Wallpaper
  • Take the worksheet or quiz with questions on it like “Who was Jennie? What was her relationship to the narrator?”*
    • Burn it.
  • Instead
    • At least one group of people is hotly debating it as a feminist critique of late-19th century treatment of post-partum depression.
    • Someone is writing a story from the perspective of Jennie.
    • Someone is writing about it as reflective of the social unrest in England throughout that time period.
    • Someone is writing about it as reflective of the untenability of separate sphere ideology in an industrialized country.
    • At least six people are writing commentary on it that I can’t even fathom.
  • Now make the source text all about teenagers kissing in space and you have the part of the Homestuck fandom that I follow.
    • It is like having a huge fantastic book club that only ever discusses one book.
This has been incredibly inspirational to bear witness to, to say the least. I think the Homestuck fandom has contributed more to me being a critical reader than most of the rationalist stuff I read, largely because it is explicitly about examining literature.
So I’m going to start an exercise: on Sunday, I’m going to post a short story. On Monday, I’m going to post about the thought process that went into it and what certain aspects of it are derived from. I will repeat as needed.
This serves a whole bunch of purposes: I will have a place to put fiction too short to submit to other places, or that I have no interest in submitting, or that have been submitted to contests and they don’t mind me reposting. I will have a log of the thought process that went in to it. And, down the road, when I have perspective on them, I will be able to read the pieces with fresh eyes and read the though process and judge how successful I was at incorporating the ideas I wanted to incorporate and what subtext I might have included unknowingly.
*To be fair, my high school English class did discuss its historical context as well, in terms of how women were treated for ‘hysteria.’
Posted on by Eileen Young · 2 Comments

HULK SMASH

I may have to read 50 Shades of Grey.

I am not enthusiastic about this.

I have heard that it is Twilight fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off. This is an issue for me not because of any opposition to fanfiction, but because of an awareness of the common tropes of fanfiction, vast tracts of which exist only to have characters kiss.

I have heard small sections of it read aloud (not safe for work), to dawning horror and helpless laughter.

I have heard how it treats BDSM relationships. Stories that feature BDSM relationships that are creepy and abusive and push boundaries are even more culturally abhorrent than the never-ending stream of coming-out YA fiction. The only mainstream stories featuring gay youth being coming-out stories is boring and repetitive. The only mainstream stories about people in BDSM relationships being about really questionably abusive relationships is detrimental to things like submissives being able to safely go to the police if their safeword has been violated, resulting in assault. If all media representations of BDSM relationships (with the exception of Dan Savage’s column, of course) have issues with consent and none of them draw crystal fucking clear boundaries between acceptable play and creepy abusiveness (you know, the kind of boundaries that exist in real life), then it makes the world less safe. This is a problem. I have heard that 50 Shades of Grey contributes to this problem, and also that it attributes interest in BDSM at all to psychological trauma.

But I don’t want to judge it without having read the source material. It is the entirety of the context I am missing, and I want to fill that in and not just pass on judgements based on hearsay.

Later:

This is the part of the post where I remember that my parents read this sometimes and I curl up and die a little on the inside, but am too angry to leave it alone. Mom, Dad, Sara, come back next week for something else, okay?

So I purchased 50 Shades of Grey, and read it in something like three days. I’ll say this for it: it has really phenomenal pacing after the rather slow start. Once the main characters start actually macking on each other, it alternates rather neatly between plot point and smutty bit.

Except for the majority of one chapter that was a contract.

I discussed the book practically incessantly with anyone who didn’t overtly tell me to shut up about it while I was reading it. They didn’t even have to be listening, just not fleeing in the other direction.

The only person I discussed it with who’d actually read it liked it, and said they liked it mostly after they remembered that it was only a book.

Remembering it is only a book would probably be key to me enjoying it, but I had issues doing so. Key to my issues with it is that I felt it insulted and demonized anyone who is a sexual dominant, thereby insulting and demonizing several nice, bright, conscientious people about whom I care a great deal. They are soldiers and nurses and students with jobs: people who contribute to society and have healthy interactions with varied social circles. Normal people who happen to have sexual preferences that run to dominance. Having Christian Grey presented as this quintessential dominant is like presenting sharks as quintessential fish. Yes, they both swim, but one of them is a predator and hardly typical of everything in the environment. Yet 50 Shades presents Grey’s deepseated psychological issues as not only a contributing factor for his interest in BDSM, but as the entire basis of it.

I had a very useful conversation with one of my many rant-victims about the things that bothered me. Paraphrased, they put forth that anything that normalizes BDSM is probably positive for the community. My response was that this would be true of anything representing a relationship that even shared a zip code with healthy, but that the relationship in 50 Shades was controlling, borderline abusive, and did not present the potential submissive with the initial option of adding hard limits.

Jokingly, they asked where’d I’d been when Twilight normalized stalking and abuse.

I replied: angry.

He’s also controlling and introduces power play elements to their sexual relationship before she has formally consented to power play elements. In mainstream culture, this is (stupidly, horribly) accepted to some extent, but he has already indicated to her at this point that he is interested in power play and that extended contact with him will involve explicit power exchanges. He proceeds to initiate power exchanges without her explicit consent. This is not okay. This is never okay. Consent is important.

For anyone who fell in love with the idea of a sexy prince, here are some things to know:

  • a significant other who wants to be able to contact you all the time and tries to enforce this (by demanding you answer phone calls or email, or by buying you expensive communication devices) should have red flags go up. 
    • Knowing your every move is a right reserved for parole officers.
      • And also everyone you have as a friend on Foursquare.
  • negotiation ideally occurs for every scene. Unless and until you are completely comfortable with a partner, you should know what you are signing up for once a power exchange of some sort occurs, because it can be super-hard to renegotiate mid-scene. 
    • It’s like Prom. 
      • “Wanna go neck in the car?” 
      • “Definitely! And it’ll only be necking because I want to wait.” 
      • “Hey, I know we said just necking, but is it okay if I undo this bit of your outfit?” 
      • Later: “Oops, I think one of us is imaginary-pregnant, even though I said I wanted to wait, because I make super-awesome decisions when high as hell on hormones.
But the BDSM itself was not horribly portrayed. I was happy about that. There are safewords, which is really important. The major issue for me with the BDSM aspect remains the ascription of psychological damage to anyone who is sexually dominant.

Probably the thing that freaks me out the most about the portrayal of BDSM and dominants in particular is how much it has boosted interest. Apparently Fetlife, a kink social network, has had a huge boost in interest and membership. Then there’s this article from Salon, and this article from Pervocracy referencing a really terribly thought out article from Cosmo. 50 Shades is encouraging people into BDSM without encouraging any kind of outside reading or research. I have read more socially responsible fiction on erotica sites. You know what would be neat? If, instead of giving Ana a car, Christian gave her SM 101 (Amazon link, perfectly safe for work, unlike most of the rest of this post). Then not only would she be more informed, it might be contributing to a cultural narrative where people do their research before letting people tie them up (even in toilet paper). Informed consent is sexy consent.

On to those things which are not ranting about BDSM.
Despite being original fiction now apparently, the number of times they make comments about wanting read each others’ minds (mostly him saying it) was annoying. In fanfiction, this would be a reasonably entertaining nod to the original canon. In ‘original fiction,’ it’s those places where someone got sloppy with the metal file and left part of the serial number intact.
It also revisited some themes that I found frustrating in Twilight, but enraged me here. A lot of the things that enraged me are the things we’re supposed to grow out of. Things like accepting compliments gracefully. Yeah, it’s a skill. If you don’t have great self-confidence, it can be a hard-won skill, but it’s still as fundamental to wider social interaction as ‘please pass the salt.’
My feelings on how Steele is about accepting gifts are ambivalent. On one hand, accepting gifts without trying to throw them back in people’s faces is also a basic life skill. On the other hand, someone I’ve know for like a week buying me a car, no matter how rich they are, would send me screaming irretrievably for the hills. With my GPS turned off.

Steele’s complete lack of self-worth also annoyed me. Yes, I understand that some people feel that way, and it’s always good to have characters one can relate to. But just once I’d like to see a romance novel heroine who has some sense of self-worth, or can observe that practically every dude they meet throws themselves at her and use logic to extrapolate that, irrelevant as looks may be to their general self-image, they are apparently fairly attractive. And it’s another layer on the ‘normalizing stupid things’ cake: I do not particularly look forward to a world in which stalking, controlling relationships, and crushing lack of self-worth are all considered the norm.
The writing itself was not monumentally execrable. Again, pacing was excellent. The vocabulary employed was not entirely puerile. The vocabulary employed were mostly Australian ex-pats. This is a situation in which the author could possibly have spent some of the time they spent on Washington geography on, oh, finding out that very few people refer to tank tops as singlets in North America. Seriously. Regional vocabulary is not hard to research, and the internet is really helpful.
And there we go with 1500 words of why I need to stick to reading things which are recommended to me instead of things which are popular.
Posted on by Eileen Young

So I Lied

So my friend Pat linked me this post.


I found myself terribly unsurprised, a little sad, and feeling like I don’t want to go out and talk to people, because people suck.

So I linked it to another friend, one who plays video games and is not the same kind of social justice activist. I spend a lot of time with people who are, so the comments are alien to me. It felt a lot like the comments were coming from some strange ‘other’ that is aggressive and anonymous and hates women. I don’t have any kind of mental bridge between the kinds of people who make those comments and the kinds of people I actually have conversations with.

An interesting conversation ensued. I don’t play a lot of video games: I’ve played Trauma Center, and some Mario Party, and Wii Fit. I’ve played online MMOs like Rift and World of Warcraft. I’ve played flash games on the site Kongregate (mostly puzzle games and tower defenses). But he is coming from a world where he owns gaming consoles that are not the Wii, and actually plays games on them.

See, I have been reading a variety of articles about rape culture in video games. In Rift, despite being in a guild with people I quite liked, I knew a woman who never spoke in Ventrilo (a voice chat client), because she didn’t want people to know she was female. Another woman, though, used the fact that she had the kind of mezzo-soprano voice that can sound really cute to get first pick at loot. There were also the kind of casually sexist jokes that I don’t care about most of the time. I don’t care about those jokes because I’m pretty awesome, and people who don’t recognize that can’t keep up very long: they get burned up like so much ablative plating on my colonizing spaceship as it enters atmosphere on Planet Awesome.

But I’ve been doing that thing where I try to expand my horizons and better understand subtext in media, which means reading a lot of material about social justice and media. I’m more aware of what subtext connotes, and why it’s not something we should perpetuate. I have more of a vocabulary about the whole issue. I’m more aware of the taken-as-given connection between trailers like the one for Hitman and casually insulting conversation in Vent that suggests (jokingly, of course) that I should either go make someone a sandwich or post topless photos.

Still, the overuse of tropes about both sexes in video games and tits in place of storytelling are separate issues from the prevalence of rape culture in cooperative video games and multiplayer online games and internet culture. They are often conflated, to everyone’s detriment.

Rape culture is tautologically bad, and should be discouraged.

Lazy sexualized storytelling is bad in a completely different way. Some romance novels share the same attributes. Many romance novels that I happily read share the same attributes. If I can read about sexy immortal shape-changing warriors with guns, I am pretty much okay with a straight male friend admiring Bayonetta‘s attributes.

Wish-fulfillment media being conflated whole-hog with rape culture is not a positive thing for anyone. If the entirety of a genre you imbibe is supposed to be disempowering to women and misogynist and hateful, how are you supposed to be able to tell when something actually heinous pops up?

You’ll note that most of the linked articles are a bit out of date. This is because the issue is something that I’ve been mentally prodding with a stick for a while. I had a really hard time figuring out what I thought about it. Video games are not the media I consume the most of, so it was difficult to get a broad sense of context.

On one hand, I am all for napalming the bejeezus out of anything that supports rape culture.

But at the same time, specifics matter, and context matters.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Fanfiction

At the last meeting of the Victoria Writers’ Society I attended, I ended up talking to someone a bit about fanfiction and how it can be a great way to re-contextualize a work as well as standing well on its own. It can be, and the Organization for Transformative Works has great information about various authors feelings about fanfiction, legal proceedings related to copyright, fan culture, and recently some interesting stats on the percentages of people who identify as fans who create fanworks.

The fanworks themselves can be utterly amazing, and I gushed at length about a couple in particular. She suggested that she might look some up herself, and, while I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet, I have full faith in her ability to find archives of fanfiction on the internet.

Fanfiction is like any other sort of self-published work. Some of the stories are absolute gems written by people who know their craft and get other people to read them over for errors. Some of them are adolescent wish-fulfillment posted before the pixels are dry. As everywhere else, the latter outnumber the former rather spectacularly.

So here is my short, incomplete list of recommendations. These are not necessarily those stories that I love best, but those that I feel both stand alone as literature and are stronger and more interesting because of their context as fanfiction.

First, Strider’s Edge, by tumblr user Paratactician

It is the combination of Homestuck by Andrew Hussie, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh. It is set in Oxford, and we are informed that most places mentioned in the story map to real places, though names have been changed.

Strider’s Edge kicks off with an A. E. Housman poem, the whole of which foreshadows the entire story, and only part of which is included in the text itself. The story itself is difficult to summarize without giving away all the important bits, but the one at the top of the story is “It was a Tuesday late in September when I went up to Oxford University.” The story follows the adventures of John Egbert as he grows up, meets new friends, falls in love, and is peripheral witness to several murders. The solving of the murders is not central to the plot.

One of the central themes is that all things are repeated: this is addressed explicitly in one of the interesting conversations about literary constructs that occurs in John’s Tutorials sessions, as well as being a central facet of the way the story is presented and integral to the fact that this is fanfiction.

Second, One of Our Submarines, by Luka Grindstaff

It should be no surprise to anyone that one of Luka’s stories ended up on this list: I adore Luka’s comic Kagerou so much that I am writing fanfiction of it myself.

One of Our Submarines is summarized as “Sollux Captor, recently drafted into the Service of Her Imperious Condescension, discovers a secret community of Helmsmen hidden inside the Imperial communications network. Meanwhile on Alternia, Karkat Vantas is up to his goddamn nook in revolution.”


Yes, it makes more sense initially if you have already read Homestuck, which it is a fanfiction of. It is also not complete yet.


One of Our Submarines explores what it would be like to be a sentient and formerly autonomous computer system, the horrors inherent in that transition, and storytelling entirely via chatlog.


Third, General Vantas Gets Hitched, by Jesse Hajicek

I probably link Luka and Jesse entirely more than I should, but I deeply admire both of them as writers.

General Vantas Gets Hitched, whose full title is “General Vantas Gets Hitched, or, The Limits Of Bilateral Diplomacy: A Black Powder Romance,” is a deconstruction of the rather silly trope of two men forced into an arranged marriage. This trope is a reasonably recent convention, largely in anime and fanfiction, but this story is also a wider deconstruction of arranged marriage stories in general. It is, as everything else on this list, Homestuck fanfiction, and is summarized as “In which a mutant too famous to cull is dropped like a grenade into the midst of the peace process, a foolish monarch proves himself secretly shrewd, the power of friendship functions as a force multiplier, and it is discovered that in the Great Game of espionage, the dealer does not always win.”



It, as One of Our Submarines, is easier to get into as a story if you have read Homestuck. General Vantas Gets Hitched follows the titular General Vantas as he navigates the very alien human culture he finds himself in the midst of.


It is somewhat less an experiment in storytelling than the other two, as well, but where it finds real strength is in the characterization. All of the characters are quite plausible ‘what ifs’ if the main plot of Homestuck had not disrupted the characters lives the way it has.


Oh, and happy Independence Day, Americans.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Comic Books

I had a brief, intense love affair with DCs new 52 when they relaunched. By ‘intense’ I mean I spent a few hundred dollars on comics over the course of several months, and by ‘brief’ I mean I still haven’t read all of them.

I’ve been reading webcomics since 2005 or so, and those are a different experience completely: they update usually at least once a week, instead of once a month, most are not quite so sweepingly epic as superhero comics, and most have a specific end-point that they will eventually reach. All of these things, and the fact that they are free, make the emotional investment in the story easier for me.

But movies aren’t made about webcomics (usually, Piled Higher and Deeper being the only exception I know of), and most won’t recognize a Halloween costume as Kano from Kagerou (though more people should: it is an excellent comic, and fully as epic as any superhero comic). It felt like an important cultural thing that I was missing out on, so when the new 52 made everything fresh and accessible to a new reader, I went straight for it.

The week they launched, I was in Florida on vacation, and I and the person I was with scooped up all of the ones that had come out and spent the afternoon reading. It was really cool, seeing the different ways paneling was done and the various distinct art styles. So when I came back, I went to a couple of the local comic shops until I found one that I really liked – Legends on Johnson St – and asked them about setting up a pull list (so that they would set aside issues of all of the comics I wanted to read as they came out). I also started reading Fables and Batwoman, starting with the compilation Batwoman: Elegy.

They were amazing. I have a weakness for fairy tales, and Fables is done amazingly well. Batwoman: Elegy had amazing art and a complete storyline in one book and an admirable hero with no superpowers. Then everything else started coming out. Aquaman was neat in the way he was so incredibly grumpy and no one took him seriously in-world. All Star Western had horror and gore and Western stuff and lots of whores in can-can dresses. Wonder Woman had takes on myths that were interesting in their own right, as well as the superhero aspect.

But then, across the board, the whores in can-can dresses proved to be some of the most conservatively dressed female characters. I have no problems with fanservice (otherwise I’d have objected to the gratuitously shirtless scene Chris Hemsworth had in Thor), but it seemed that most shots with female characters were about fanservice. Many more socially aware people than I have talked about the issues with that, like Escher Girls. I didn’t have explicit problems with that at the start, just the kind of instinctive ‘meh’ that I also get around video games where the high-level armour for female characters would get someone arrested for public indecency. Batwoman and Wonder Woman were the exceptions to that, but Wonder Woman didn’t grab me as much as Batwoman, in part I think because I’m not as familiar with Greek myth as I ought to be.

It was also that the stories didn’t go anywhere. Sure, they killed or avoided killing bad guys and there were conspiracies and things blew up, but there was no real character growth or change in the world, and I’m aware enough of comics to know that before the reboot, they’d gone a good 50 years without sitting back and going ‘okay, this is done now.’ The prospect of nothing ending was one of the major factors in my disengaging, I think. I want my reading, whether it takes three hours or twenty, to eventually yield a conclusion and let me walk away. If it’s well done it’ll haunt me and I’ll want to revisit it or hunt down other things the creator has made or wish desperately for just one more sequel, but it’s done. Comics don’t give you that very often.

I have that issue with book series, too, like Animorphs or the Aurora Teagarden books. If I can’t see some manner of wrap-up looming on the horizon, I lose interest. Given the popularity of long-running series, I am not necessarily part of any kind of overwhelming majority there.

That’s a rough summary of my love affair with comics. I’m glad I had it, as I have more context to be excited now when superhero movies come out, and I understand a bit of the culture around it. I also have most of the components of a fantastic Batwoman costume.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Kishotenketsu

Yesterday I learned about story structure: specifically the idea of kishotenketsu. It is the convention of plot without conflict, and the post that introduced me to it can be read here.

Just go read the articles so I can blither about implications without explaining the basic concepts, okay?

I find it really fascinating how kishotenketsu contrasts with the convention of three acts. The role of plot without conflict in Western culture can be found somewhat in how we treat vignettes and one-act plays, but our approach to it is much different. When I think of vignettes, I think of Slums of Beverly Hills, where there’s some conflict within the family and internal conflict over growing up, but no over-arching conflict. I still remember it years after seeing it, because it had a tone all its own and I think it was also the first time I’d seen breasts in a movie, but it didn’t leave me inspired or emotionally satisfied the way The Hunger Games did.

Part of this is probably my predilection for adventure stories and grand fantasy and science fiction adventures where the world is changed forever. I like conflict. I like it when characters triumph. I like it when there’s something to fight.

I am not overly fond of vignettes. But kishotenketsu is something distinct from that, despite a vignette being the closest Western approximation I can think of, and it seems to me contains different opportunities. Kishotenketsu is less about personal agency than adaptability, and so requires a different mindset, which is always interesting to explore.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Writing what you know

“Write what you know” is both absolutely worthless advice and touted as the height of wisdom, depending who you ask.

The principle behind it is to write those things you are familiar with.

This can be interpreted a number of different ways.

It can be interpreted as writing only those things you have direct experience of, as in travel and memoir pieces, or only writing about places you’ve actually been. This is probably the narrowest definition, and limits us most.

It can be interpreted as only writing about those experiences you can directly relate to, as in fiction set in the present day, about circumstances with which you are at least tangentially familiar. This is the mid-range definition, and one of the more commonly used ones. It is the basis upon which I’m going to take the pain radiating up from my jaw like being repeatedly sucker-punched by my own teeth and go write alien body-horror dentistry (I went to the dentist today. It is good for me, and my general health, and makes me feel like a Responsible Adult. I don’t care: it hurts now that the anesthetic has worn off, and I’m unhappy about it).

It can also be taken as an exhortation to go forth and do the fucking research. This is probably the best way to interpret it, as we should all do more research.

I had more plans for this post, talking about research resources and reading memoirs and not just statistics when researching groups, but all of you know how to use Google, and my face hurts.

Posted on by Eileen Young

Changes

I’ve taken down my non-fiction book on epublishing from Smashwords.

It wasn’t an easy decision: I’m proud of what went into it, and it was a decent introduction.

But the verb tense is important, there, as are the incredible shifts epublishing has undergone since February 2011, when I put it out. One of the websites I recommended, a fledgling then, has now become a haven for episodic teen fiction. It is the Pandemonium of werewolf love triangles and poorly-edited tragic orphans. It is not something I highly recommend anymore.

Blogging has changed somewhat, and Twitter is now a place where groups discuss writing and publishing.

Navigating the Ebook Jungle is still something I want to revisit and update. I want to have that basic primer and list of resources available for anyone just getting into self-publishing, because it’s a big wide world full of conflicting opinions and at the very least summaries of approaches and links to more detailed sources are valuable for anyone just starting out.

It’s not something I can do right now, though, and I feel better about pulling it than I do about leaving up information that I don’t consider as up-to-date and thorough as it could, and should, be.

In the meantime, if you have a question, shoot me an email. I’ll probably at least have a link to recommend.

Posted on by Eileen Young · 1 Comment

Poetry

Sometimes I forget why I love poetry. In writing forums and reading for literary magazines, I encounter a lot that’s puerile and repetitive, themed around love and middle-class kids feeling oppressed and one-dimensional nature imagery. I encounter a lot of forced rhyme scheme and strange meter and badly-punctuated prose thinly disguised.

Then I read articles like this, and am reminded that poetry can be protest, can be a defiant shriek of identity. I am reminded that hip hop is a form of poetry.

I am reminded that I have been awed by Howl and quietly enchanted by Archy and Mehitabel. Robert Service’s Cremation of Sam McGee was the first piece I ever memorized, and stuck in my mind so well that when I first experimented with cryptography, it was the key I used. I am reminded that Edgar Allan Poe’s The Bells was one of the first things in any form to make me aware of the sublime perfection of careful word choice.
So why do we let ourselves read and, worse, write poetry that’s easy to consume? Shutting ones brain off to be entertained is what romance novels are for. I understand poetry as expression of self, as exposition of experience, and it exists for me in the same realm as most biographies: good to have on hand for later anthropologists. I am afraid I am an inveterate thrill-seeker, though, so I want something that fires the imagination or subverts my understanding. I fell in love with poetry that moved me so my heart beat with its meter, and I want more.
Posted on by Eileen Young

Connecting

At work, we can now directly email people their receipts. This is a handy feature, as a few weeks ago I managed to accidentally explode the printer for a while (it got better). It is reliant, of course, on people having email.

Modern life more or less requires some level of electronic engagement, even if it’s just a cell phone. I’m usually the odd man out in a group in that I don’t have one. I have a laptop and an old laptop that’d work if I just got a charger and a Wii and a Kobo Vox, but I’m still cell phone free (I make up for this by nearly constantly being on my laptop and having a Skype number). Most cell phones now come with the ability to browse the web – thus the rise of QR codes. Which means that even ads on the sides of busses now have an online component.

This is a long lead-up to tell you that, if you are an author, you need a website.

They’re not hard to set up – WordPress.com and Blogger both have easily navigable back-ends. They both make excellent blog platforms, but it you have no wish to blog, then you can set up a static site, just listing your works and where they can be purchased.

That is a bare minimum for engagement, in this modern era. Giving readers a way to contact you or interact with you is a better route: a contact email (set up a free webmail account if you don’t want it sent to your personal email), or a blog. A forum is perhaps not quite the thing unless you know there will be interaction on it, but it is an option as well.