Posted by Elyse on July 03, 2000 at 23:09:58:

When I was on the novela forum, we here in the U.S. were almost always the last to
get the broadcasts of novelas, compared to Latin American audiences. And there were
lots of forum participants from Latin America, so it was darned near impossible to keep
the story a secret. Some of us forum leaders fought valiantly to rip out revealing posts
-- called "spoilers," if you haven't heard that term before. But mostly it was a losing
battle.

When I was on the romance novel forum, people would sometimes mark their posts as
spoilers as a warning, but mostly these were for books that had just come out that
same month. Now, I know some of you are concerned about spoiling the stories for
others who haven't read them yet, but it's my opinion that when the body of work is
already out for decades, fighting spoilers makes no sense.

I really believe it's part of the territory here in L.L. land that you're going to get spoiled
if you're a newcomer. We don't have the luxury of two new books a year anymore, and
we never will again. It's kind of like worrying about spoiling an Alexandre Dumas story
or telling the end of "Zorro." That's the present and the future reality of L.L. books.
Everybody will know. It will be very difficult to censor out comments and will limit
discussion.

(Place your dos centavos here.)

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