Removing Fictionmania stories

[madmaddy]

What it says on the tin. I’m trying to pull my Fictionmania stories but haven’t a clue about how to do it. Emailed the FM support team but no response.

Suggestions?

[Chrissy]

Sorry, Maddy; as far as I'm aware, that's the only way of getting something removed from there. The site is something like 87 years old and doesn't have the facilities we tend to take for granted nowadays. You could try posting your request on the message board and see if that achieves anything, I suppose.

[Tanya]

I asked for some of my earlier stories to be removed fournor five years ago. They need an email request from the same email address the story was submitted from. Mine were taken down within a few days of the request.

[Bryony Marsh]

For removals, I’ve always written to [e-mail] and my story has disappeared within a day or so.

[jessica]

Same. I just emailed and they pulled them down. Correct me if I'm wrong but it's not a site run by professionals, so maybe whoever has to do it is on vacation.

[madmaddy]

I heard back— they needed the request from the submitting email. I used an old email for my submission. Once I submitted my delete from that email, stories were taken down.

I’m going to be honest. FM was a place I found a lot of really good transgender fiction back in my closeted days. But those gems are there next to a lot of often explicit fetish stories. I won’t kink shame, but that’s just not my thing.

I pulled down my old DeviantArt and blog pages as well. I’ve left my stories up in TG Storytime (which isn’t as fetishy as FM IMHO) for now. And of course, honored to have my short up on the TransScripts site, as silly as that particular piece is.

[Bryony Marsh]

I’ve been reading old TG stories, courtesy of the site that Angela recommended. It’s really interesting to see how ‘innocent’ the fiction of the late 1960s was – probably in some degree a consequence of indecency laws and the need to operate a physical printing press in those days (when a printer could find that the law considered them to be the publisher if a book was judged to be beyond the pale).

At some point, along the way, we (the literary genre) went from heterosexual stories about the machinations of wives and aunts, to abusive stories in which the transgender character often ends the story being ‘owned’ by powerful men, mutilated, trapped in miserable circumstances and so on. I might also decide that FM is not for me, because of this... but I wonder what a first-time reader of things transgender would make of the community today? Perhaps it’s best that some of the less overtly sexual stories remain there.

Then again, I wrote ‘Petronella’s Choice’, so... er...

[liamslade]

Nov 27, 2022 13:30:48 GMT madmaddy said:

I heard back— they needed the request from the submitting email. I used an old email for my submission. Once I submitted my delete from that email, stories were taken down.

I’m going to be honest. FM was a place I found a lot of really good transgender fiction back in my closeted days. But those gems are there next to a lot of often explicit fetish stories. I won’t kink shame, but that’s just not my thing.

I pulled down my old DeviantArt and blog pages as well. I’ve left my stories up in TG Storytime (which isn’t as fetishy as FM IMHO) for now. And of course, honored to have my short up on the TransScripts site, as silly as that particular piece is.

Way back in my early days I used to comb FictionMania for those diamonds in the rough, stories that could actually hold my attention. I had quite a few bookmarked, but that was on an old, OLD computer, long gone by now. One of the ones I remember reading, but never finishing (gads but FM stories could be LONG) had one of the big no-nos of TG writing -- identity death. It concerned a couple that became mother and daughter somehow, and whichever one was the daughter lost their memory. (They ended up moving from England to Australia and had a long, long life after the transformation, and usually I tune out of stories like that but I was intrigued.) I honesty don't even remember if it was through the husband's or wife's perspective, but my gut is telling me the wife/mother was narrating, meaning it was only tangentially TG, which I found a fascinating choice. Lost to the sands of time, alas. I haven't turned to FM for a new story in many, many years (although I still occasionally cross-post my work there to see how they'll take it.)

Anyway. Glad you got it sorted out. I had to use my old email to change the author name on my old stories, and remove one. I removed it partially because I want to re-write it someday, and partially because it contains a trope that bothers me now.