Scholarly Source?

Recently—well, in fact, after May 29th of this year, I've been seeing traffic from Wikipedia on this blog. At first it didn't make sense to me, since the last time I had looked at the entry about balloon fetishes, there was no reference to me at all, which is how it should be, because I'm not (as I keep saying) an expert.

Although I guess I'm as much of an expert as any of the people who are claiming to be experts out there, so who knows?

But when I looked, there it was, a footnote with a link to my May 29th entry about the difference between kinks, fetishes, and fetishistic disorders. It follows the text:

"However, it is now in the DSM-VI to where a fetish is no longer considered as a disorder (except for fetishistic disorder where if the fetish interferes with the person's life)."

Ignoring the poor writing for a moment, linking to my blog to support this statement hardly seems rational. Especially because I was mistaken, partly. I think I read something that mentioned DSM-VI and the description of fetishistic disorders (I can't find my source because I was not writing a scholarly article), but in fact DSV-VI has not been released, and the definition I used was as from DSM-V, which was released last year.

Unlike the editor of the Wikipedia article, I have corrected my mistake.

If someone is going to edit a Wikipedia article, they should be looking for more authoritative source material than, well, me. It would be fine to mention my blog or any of my books as an example of writings on the subject, but not as a factual authority.

I am not a Wikipedia editor (and I don't have time to become one), but I hope someone will correct this error sometime soon. I want the entry, such as it is, to be as factual as possible, and including me as a scholarly source hardly serves that purpose.

There are a lot of Wikipedia articles that are lacking in factual information, written by biased people, which is why, in my opinion, the site should only be used as a jumping-off point. And since the subject of balloon fetishism is near and dear to me, I hope that everyone who reads the Wikipedia article about it will, if they have any interest in arriving at the truth of the matter, heed that advice.

And on that, you may quote me.

Surprise

There is a story that I have been struggling with. I think I know where it is going, but I don't have any idea how it gets there. I probably will have to abandon it altogether or start it over with a different situation or a different character to support the same theme. I don't know.

What I do know is that, out of the blue, another story idea came to me, and to find out whether it seems to be going anywhere, I decided to just sit down and write for about 30 minutes.

And I pumped out about 700 words! They just flowed out, as if I had been preparing to write the story for months. I don't know if I'll run into any roadblocks or not—that sort of thing does happen—but from the first scene, knowing who these characters are and what their relationship is (although I haven't actually revealed that in those first 700 words), I find myself liking them already and seeing ahead to what's in store for them, and being very excited about getting them there.

With luck, you'll be able to see the results of this burst of creativity soon. No pun intended. Well, maybe a little.