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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9554685" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Your final paragraph is on point. We do come to know people at a distance. Imperfectly, sure, but that’s true in person, too. See Ann Rule on Ted Bundy, or anyone who discovers they’re in a relationship in a domestic abuser. There are many people who share a lot of their lives in various online contexts. He turned out to be editing it so as to convey an outright lie, but most people aren’t, and those who failed to see the seams weren’t all fools.That is, we weren’t all fools. For much of the 1990s, I was on the GEnie network. It gave free membership to people in professional writers’ organizations like SFWA, HWA, and RWA, which meant that for a certain kind of fan, there was no better place to be. I made friendships there that lasted as long as the authorial friend lived (like George Alec Effinger) and some that endure now, since we’re both still alive.And I was a regular in Neil Gaiman’s topic.When a tour brought him to Portland late the ‘90s, I took a friend. We waited in line, I handed him the book I wanted signed, and I said, “To Bruce, please. That’s Bruce Baugh from GEnie.” He froze mid-signing, looked up, and his face lit up. “Bruce! So good to meet you!” We chatted a little then and more after the signing time was over. My semi-date was mightily impressed, and she was not an easy person to impress (having had prior experience with the sort of person Neil turned out to be).So that’s one significant friendship that turned out to be part of an ongoing lie. But others that weren’t, I’ve learned from others physically closer to the ones now gone. I was on a short list of people one author became estranged from later and whom he wishes to reconcile with but had no way to contact then. He had a list of our names. That wasn’t a lie.I can’t demand others be more infallibly wise, nor that they like even remote, superficial contacts any less than I still do.</blockquote>

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