When does fiction bridge the gap and intrude too far into real life?

Avoiding Donkey Shows and Imaginary Friends
by Amelia G : March 23rd, 2007

I attended the Fictional Bloggers panel at SXSW. The panel featured Liz Henry and Odin Soli. They are both active in Latin American political writing, which is an area I admit I don’t follow. I spent some time in Brazil when my mother was stationed there and got some creepy awful illness which caused blood to exit from strange places and caused me to take medication which made everything taste like metal for a month. Also, despite huge natural resources and local wealth, there were homeless children there and that kinda freaked me out. I haven’t followed much in the way of anything Latin American since. Even though I live an easy drive from Tijuana, the only people who generally try to get me to go south of the border with them tend to be professional adult webmasters. These are the sort of guys who just can’t help bribing public officials and finding out where the donkey show is. As a result, despite having lived all over the world and living in Los Angeles now, I have never even visited Mexico for an hour.

Liz Henry’s work these days is working for Socialtext, which is a company attempting the interesting enterprise of introducing wiki technology to the corporate environment. She also blogs for Feminist SF which lists yours truly in their index of female authors of science fiction, so they have to be awesome. Bonus points: Liz Henry wears purple hair well. Odin Soli works for a company called Aveso, which is either a webhost, or more likely a company striving to sell big business on the cyberpunk giftcard accessory of teensy weensy electronic displays. I know it doesn’t seem like this is . . .

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