catfishing

FOR WRITERS AND READERS Today’s reader topic comes from QSFer Angel Martinez: Let’s talk Catfishing – the practice of assuming a fictitious identity in order to pursue relationships with unwitting victims. Sometimes writers pretend to be entirely different people – creating a fictional life solely for the purpose of sales and/or sympathy. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about pen names here, which many writers use for totally legitimate reasons. Instead we’re talking about large scale deceptions – like when a writer pretends to be an abused teenager, or fakes a major illness, or co-opts whole-cloth an identity not … Read more