Love in Dark Settings

Title: In Darkness, Chained
Fandom: Eternal Dungeon (Dusk Peterson)
Rating: Mature
Characters: Layle Smith, Elsdon Taylor, Weldon Chapman, Durian Skyler (OMC), Fletcher Dawson (OMC)
Word Count: 25k
Author's Note: About 1/3 of this story first appeared as a series of draft posts in my LJ five years ago. This version represents substantial revision and expansion of those now locked entries. Since I started Dusk Peterson has made additions and revisions to her Eternal Dungeon series. I have attempted to (as much as possible) to bring this story into conformity with current continuity.

The events of this story are set during the events of The Balance, before "A Prisoner Has Need".

Legalese: The Eternal Dungeon is Copyright Dusk Peterson. Some rights reserved. The text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0).



(Prisoners always play games with their Seekers, but the Eternal Dungeon has never seen a player this adroit, nor a game played at this level.)

For those currently Friending duskpeterson_ij in order to be able to read my blog entries on your Friends pages: Unfortunately, LiveJournal is choking on the size of my feed (I will omit all relevant jokes here), so I've had to set up a second feed that will link to blog entries in my main journal. The new LiveJournal syndicated feed for my blog is eternaldungeon2. My apologies for the inconvenience.

For any of you who are not currently Friending duskpeterson_ij: I no longer post at this journal. You can continue to read my blog entries by Friending eternaldungeon2, which is a LiveJournal syndicated feed to my InsaneJournal blog. You're welcome to post replies to my blog entries at InsaneJournal. Just be sure to reply to the original posts rather than to LiveJournal's feed; I won't see your replies if they're posted at LiveJournal.

This is just a reminder to those of you who missed my previous notice that I now have a new blog. Though it's located at InsaneJournal, you can watch it on your LiveJournal Friends page. I'm continuing to post notices of my fiction and everyday life there.

Some of you will have already guessed that this announcement was coming. I'm moving to InsaneJournal. I'll no longer be updating duskpeterson, eternaldungeon, and gayleatherlit at LiveJournal. My other LiveJournal blogs, which are for other people's works, will continue at LiveJournal, though I'm going to be seeking new maintainers for a couple of them.

Whether or not you have an account at InsaneJournal, my new blog will still be easy for you to watch and post at. Here are some relevant links:

My new blog at InsaneJournal. If you have an account at InsaneJournal, please Friend me.

Switch the InsaneJournal site scheme to Lynx to make my new blog look nicer. No more grey pages!

Atom feed for my new blog.

RSS feed for my new blog.

LiveJournal: duskpeterson_ij. Watch my new blog on your LiveJournal Friends page. I won't be able to read your Friends-locked entries at LiveJournal; this is simply a syndicated feed.

(If you're ambitious enough to read the instructions, you can also log onto InsaneJournal through OpenID, which comes free with LiveJournal accounts. Here are the details.)

If you have any problems with the above, do post a comment here or e-mail me. I don't want any of you to miss out on seeing posts at my new blog. And please do post comments to future entries at my new blog - I value your feedback.

News via metafandom: rydra_wong reports that a member of LiveJournal's Abuse Team has stated that linking to offsite material that LiveJournal considers to be a violation of its terms of service can get you suspended. In other words, if you link to a story on your own Website, and LiveJournal considers that story to violate its rules, it will suspend your journal "in most situations."

LiveJournal's Abuse Team has been known to misinterpret official policy. However, if true, this is a new policy, because just a couple of months ago, LiveJournal refused to shut down a comm that was persistently linking to pirated e-books, because the e-books were hosted offsite.

Update, August 9: violet_quill received a response to a support request that echoed the above advisement by LiveJournal. elychari believes this has been part of LiveJournal's Terms of Service all along.

LiveJournal has posted a response to the latest protests. In addition, aura218 has kindly compiled a list of LJ staff members' buried comments.

msinvisfem has a pointed comment on the legal aspects of the official post. Various folks have pointed out that at least one staff comment contradicts things they've said elsewhere.

At any rate, their bottom line is that they'll suspend any user who posts content they consider illegal and "content that encourages or advocates hate crimes, the abuse of children in any form, or rape, even if the content itself is not illegal and may be protected by the First Amendment." From what they stated in an earlier post, their definition of "advocate" appears to include statements that an LJ user believes that laws related to these topics should be changed - in other words, I'm reading them to say that if someone said, "I don't think such-and-such should be regarded as a hate crime," their journal would be suspended by LiveJournal.

A message from alicettg in this post at voxpopulli, referring to the hosting service found here: "In light of LJ's ridiculousness," she will soon be offering free hosting again for sites by people from fandom (including original fiction writers). "Remember that Vox Populli is fan-friendly, post all the porn you like! :)" RPS fiction is also welcome. The service (not surprisingly) forbids the posting of "images depicting real children involved in real sex."

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Though she doesn't mention it in her post, if you're not a member of fandom, alicetgg also offers dirt cheap Web hosting through her other company.

Responses posted earlier by LiveJournal's administration here. I am not reassured. I am especially not reassured after reading this thread. It is clear that LiveJournal has decided to do what courts find it very difficult to do: become literary critics.

Two enlightening posts on the recent LiveJournal suspensions, one by Erestor and one by Kara McKay.

News via maureenlycaon: Strikethrough has begun again, with reports of several fan artists being suspended by LiveJournal for posting underage fan drawings. All of the reports are from the Harry Potter fandom so far, which was the main target of the last Strikethrough.

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I posted this at a forum for professional writers and thought it might be of interest to some here. The initial quotation is reprinted with permission of the person I was responding to. It was part of a thread where a bunch of us were talking about professional authors who take part in the fan fiction community.

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"yeah, and you're known forever afterwards as 'that [writer] who started off in fan fic'... eesh!"

I should be so lucky.

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