Okay, I’m waffling here….

Okay, I'm waffling here. See, when Dale Larson published my first book, Torn Shapes of Desire, he positioned it in reference to the whole internet censorship thing. The Communications Decency Act was being debated then, and there was a real chance that my website would be shut down. So there was a page of quotes at the beginning re: sex and censorship, for example, and my words were paired with photos by Tracy Lee, an early photography blogger who did a lot of nude self-portraits.

If I'm rereleasing it as an ebook today, without Tracy Lee's work (mostly because I can't get in touch with her), it's feeling a little weird to have this heavy internet framing. It's true that online (and other) censorship can still be an issue (see recent post I did re: Canada), but mostly, it's twenty years later, and there's a ton of erotica published these days. It's gone very mainstream.

What do you think? Do I keep all the original framing, and just add a second afterword or some such? That has the advantage of really preserving the history of the book in the second edition, but it also means there's a lot of bulk of other, not-so-relevant material before you get to the fiction and poetry.

Or do I delete the original introductions (three of them!), and the page of quotes about censorship, write a new (brief) intro that just mentions the history of the first edition (pretty much as I did here), and let the second edition of Torn Shapes be a simpler collection of my early work?

Thoughts?

3 thoughts on “Okay, I’m waffling here….”

  1. Mary Anne Mohanraj

    Thanks, Sean — I tried her on Facebook, but no response — maybe the e-mails will get through.

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