J P Smythe’s Website.

I’m going to try and do this, then: this thing of making note of how I am writing what I am writing. This is awfully presumptive, and more than a little bit egotistical, assuming that anyone else might find what I am writing of interest, but I am hoping to really delve into the creative process here in a way that is utterly reflective of literary criticism movements of today. I’ll be looking at how this works for me, and for you, potential reader, and seeing where we can hopefully meet.

So, I shall start at the start. The plan for the novel is that it will be titled El Lobo De Plata Vs. John The Baptist, which is the title of a novel that I would buy in a heartbeat. It started around two years ago – the idea, that is – when I got a new notebook, an ordinary brown moleskin (“Gosh! I am a writer!” etc etc), and wrote a quote in it that popped into my head. At the time I was planning a short story set around a luchadore wrestling match, diving in and out of the match to tell you about their lives. Whatever, right? So, I wrote this thing, just what I thought would be a two sentence prologue to the tale. Here it is.

Now, I’m fallible, I get that, and the quote wasn’t meant to be LITERATURE, per se. Rather, it was meant to evoke a slightly clunky and archaic battle by immediately giving the reader an overly scripted language.

This is nearly moot: this isn’t the novel. There is a character called Hector, but doesn’t share that surname. But this is the first seed, and this was where it was sown.

*****

Eli over at Novelr has written a post about why you probably shouldn’t write a fictional blog. I agree with him, nearly. Write some fiction, see if it is good. Is it appropriate for internet posting? Want to post it on the internet? Great! Do it. Don’t force the form into the format and all manner of other evils.

Also, I posted this on my tumblr the other day, but it deserves more views: 

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It is taken from the Penguin Blog – the first Business-driven blog I have ever added to my RSS feeder, fact-fans, simply because it is frequently interesting – and it funny and true.  

So, as I’ve bleated on about already, We Tell Stories has a secret seventh story that is, essentially, an ARG. What I didn’t realise is that I am actually a character in said ARG. Check out this email I got sent today by Eli from over at Novelr:

Also found a comment from a Dr. James Smythe on the Penguin Blog and followed it to his blog. He mentions a novel he wrote and gives an email address for anyone who might be interested. I sent him an email. Waiting for reply. THat blog has several posts and I think they are clues but I haven’t figured any out yet. The picture there is a mystery. He mentions that he doesn’t like the layout and will be changing or erasing everything…

Alice’s blog mentioned deleting messages too.

That was written by somebody called Nara at the Unfiction Forums. Now, how did I hear about the Alice story?

This was me, here:

I can’t be sure, but the other day I got an email, unsolicited, saying “hi, tell me about your work” and I occasionally get these, so I thought nothing of it. However, it also asked if I had heard of Alice, and the seventh story. Well, I’m pretty sure this is a ‘secret’ part of that penguin project that I spoke about a few posts back.

So, this person thought I was the ARG, and I thought that they were. GENIUS. It is both testament to a) the cleverness of launching the game so secretively and b) the chaos inherently involved in launching such a game that we both feel for it, but, regardless, at some stage I have been seen as part of something bigger, as part of something far, far grander than my own little world actually is, and, in many ways, this ‘Dr Smythe’ character is someone totally other than myself. It makes me want to play along, to try and enhance the game, to make it a game-within-a-game, almost.

I think this sort of unplanned, chance encounter is what will drive ARGs forward, what will make them something that we eventually end up taking for granted. It is almost like a midway point between something utterly contrived, like Perplexcity, and something more user-generated, like PMOG. As soon as ARGs stop being the realm of marketing speak, we get into the stories that they can tell, the places that, imaginatively, they can take us, and the ways that we, as readers, can help generate what we read, playing this gigantic living-theatre that actually tells us all a story depending on how far we want to take it.

It’s brilliant, and this time it isn’t Penguin that have done the brilliant bit: it’s the readers. Well done, everyone.

{BTW, I can’t help but wonder if any of you think that this is part of the ARG as well. It wouldn’t shock me: That would be one heck of a double-bluff.}

Yes, yes, we’re still UNDER CONSTRUCTION, as the big sign says, but this was too important to not post.  Penguin, responsible for the much-maligned Million Penguins experiment of last year – which, you may recall, went hideously wrong (or right, depending on what side of the “Can Collaborative Fiction work?” fence you sit) under the need for control and editing, and proved that mass collaborative fiction without real rules can only end up a mess – are trying another experiment, a team-up with the good ARG-minded people at the unfiction forums into non-linear, internet-ready writing.  Which is right up my alley.    

It’s quite risky, I think, when a publisher takes hold of an experiment like this.  We cannot forget that they are a publisher, and that they are, ultimately trying to sell books and find new ways to market them – they have an agreement with the Hon brothers, creators of Perplexcity, to do research into ARGs for those very purposes - and if the experiment fails it’ll be all too easy to write whatever it is that they actually come up with (link-heavy fiction? wiki-fiction? open ended choose-your-own-adventure style fiction? something that ultimately just resembles BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates?) as a fad when the preparation can be being done for authors right now.     

I’ll write more about this another day – it was the topic of my thesis – but there’s so much that can be done to texts now, when they are being written, to future-proof them for a time when we do all walk around with the Kindle (insert arbitrary number here that isn’t 1) in our pockets: they can be making indices for self-textual hyperlinking, thinking about how to open up the form of a structure to allow the text to breathe more under the auspices of the internet, thinking about how it can be presented if it were to be read, say, through RSS feeds… All that stuff is natural to forget, but, if we’re all walking around with super-novels of the future in 20 years time, don’t you think it would be useful to have planned for it rather than have extra features shoehorned in, have your texts remediated to seem up-to-date?    

And, for what it’s worth, I don’t think that this means that the novel has to take an odd form: there’s no need to force poetics or fragmented microfictions or epistolary fiction on a reader if what the author wants to do is tell a straightforward story: there are ways to do it; for my PhD I had to write a novel to back up the Critical component, and I wrote a traditional print novel, with a traditional beginning, middle and a nearly-traditional end, and I wrote it all whilst being utterly aware of the technology of the day and including hundreds of hidden formatting options that the reader will never notice, but which would make its transition to the internet easy as pie.  But I will talk about that another time.  {Edit: Also, I can’t get this new layout to do anything I want (display more posts, archive, even paragraph), so I’ll be changing it again, which is a shame, as it looks really nice.} 

I can’t pretend that I have the time for blogs at the moment.  This is terrible, I know: I am neglecting the thing that has really driven the reason that I am neglecting it.In other words,  the thesis that I am doing about blog fiction has stopped me writing my blog.  I am weeks away – less, if I admit how scared I am – from submitting.  My Viva panel has been decided and my forms are right in front of me.  The Critical Component/Commentary thing has taken my very soul, and I fear I might never get it back.  I’m ten thousand words over the word limit in both sections and I don’t know how to cut them back.  So, this – this thing here – I don’t really have the time for.  So I’m going to point you in the direction of some things and you can see how you feel about them.   The Booker Prize entrants are going to be digitized for everyone to get for free for a lot of money. Interesting article about whether the net is good for writers.  Were the Hardy Boys gay? An article over on Novelr about increasing readability on the net: is this why people don’t read blog fiction?  At some point I’ll pop back on and update about the PhD progress, and also start to diversify what I writer about: looking more at literature as a whole is the first step, with some articles based around my recent experiences teaching – and workshopping – Creative Writing at University level. 

The Times and if:book are reporting that, starting very soon, people are going to be able to download the full text of Booker-prize nominees from the internets to allow the texts to reach every possible audience.

The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.

What a novel concept, the thought that if people like something they might actually buy it.  Wait a minute!

Hearing about the initiative from The Times yesterday, Robin Robertson, deputy publishing director of Jonathan Cape, likened it to Radiohead’s experiment this month in which the new album, Rainbows (sic), became downloadable on an “honesty box” basis. An internet survey of 3,000 people who downloaded the album found that most paid an average of £4, although others claiming to have paid more than £40.

Let’s not question the Times’ research here – many people did pay £40, rather than “claiming” to have paid such, as the boxed set was that much blah blah, but this is interesting.  Might we finally be heading towards my oft-thought goal of having a free downloadable copy of a text available to everyone who buys a copy of a print novel?  It’s certainly a step in the right direction.   Also – and this is a question for another day – why shouldn’t we be allowed to ‘sample’ books?  I think if the publishing industry legitimising downloading texts in a way that the music/film industry hasn’t – that is, free, on a trust basis – we might get somewhere.  It would certainly be an interesting experiment.

*****

IN other news, I haven’t posted as I’m a couple of weeks (!) away from finishing my PhD.  You’ll have to excuse me for a little bit longer.

For my PhD, I am conducting some interviews.  Some will be with regular readers, people who read fiction in whatever form it takes.  Hopefully, that’ll be you.  Below are some questions.  I’d be eternally – a long time, all told – grateful if you would answer them, and then either leave your answers in the comments here – with your full name etc – or email me the answers at jp.smythe@gmail.com. Answer as many or as few of them as you like, with answers as long or as short as you can be bothered to provide.

Many thanks: I’ll remember you when I’m rich and famous etc etc.

Questions For A Reader.

1. What do you think that the internet has to offer fiction that traditional print doesn’t?
2. What do you think that the internet – or, online fiction, more specifically, in all of its forms – has to offer print fiction?
3. Have you ever read anything in print that you wished you had been able to read online?  And vice versa?
4. Have you ever read online fiction?  If so, do you read it through the sites themselves or via RSS?  Do you think that either method is beneficial?  Are the aesthetics of the internet, such as they are, important to fiction?
5. Do you agree with the statement that “the notion of fiction belongs with the print book”? [Please read article before response, or leave answer blank.]
6. Is there anything that would make you want to read online fiction more?  Big name authors, writing that can only work in the format, legitimization… Anything?
7. Do you feel that online fiction is a genre unto itself?  If we assume that 50% of online fiction doesn’t utilize the format, and it is just a means of vanity publishing – big assumption, I know – does that make it any different, really, to reading a novel made famous in print as a text file?
8. If it became accepted that novels should be given away in digital form when you buy a print edition, would that entice you to read more digitally?
9. Say I am a famous author.  My early novel – 20 years old, let’s say – is going to be published again, only this time on the net.  Remediation has added hotlinks, imagery, hypertextual stylings; all those things that were going to revolutionize writing.  Do you instinctively think that this would be detrimental to the original text?
10. Would you ever shop at, say, lulu.com as easily as you would shop at a Borders or Waterstones Book shop?  Or even amazon.com?
11. Did the announcement of this years Blooker prize winners drive you to buy any of the books?  Have you even heard of the Blooker Prize?
12. For you, personally, what is your definition of ‘interactive fiction’?

We Are Spineless is the name of a website that I’ve been trying to get off the ground for a while.  In basic terms, it’s a site for people to publish stories – fiction and non – and other creative pursuits, such as artwork in a magazine-style format.  And there’s been some design being done by a couple of lovely people, and the design isn’t quite ready yet, but I’m going to launch it anyway.  And I’m using Commentpress, which I spoke about in my last post.

So, to anyone reading this, this is an open call for submissions.  I want whatever you are writing for the site.  It’ll be published there – as long as it is well written and of interest, which about the sum of the editorial policy for the moment -  and then people can come along and comment on it.  It’s really simple, and made even better by the use of Commentpress, which can really allow discussion and even – shock! – workshopping of pieces.  So, come along, read, submit, whatever: let’s try and get this website off the ground.

One of the issues that I have found – and I’d assume that it’s an issue that most readers find – is time.  Specifically, finding it.  We live in an age of television, games, music, websites that tell use things that we didn’t know we wanted to know and show us videos of things that we didn’t really want to see, but watch anyway.  And, as people will always remind you if they sit on this side of the literary fence, what gets forgotten about is literature.  It’s the one thing that, lets face it, hasn’t developed past its original format, and likely won’t, not for the foreseeable, at least.  And, for most of us, we wouldn’t have it any other way.  Whether it’s Andrew Marr trying out an e-reader or William Gibson likening books to the invention of the wheel, the traditional print novel is here to stay.

And we’re better for it, all told: we want, as we frequently remind people, the tactile sensation, the smell, the product.  But then, what place does the internet have as a medium for offering literature?  We can argue blind that it is a viable format, that is can run concurrently, that it has a place, but we’re never going to stop buying novels; we’re never going to want to download a file.  And the same goes for writers.  Despite what some might tell you, they want their book on a shelf.  Even something as product-ambiguous as lulu.com doesn’t actually offer you the chance to see where your book fits alphabetically amongst all those other authors whose names you’ve seen your whole life.  It doesn’t offer you the shelf in the shop.

But, time.  Back to time.  Time is what holds us back.  I have hundreds and hundreds of books on my shelves.  I would estimate that around 5% of them have never been read.  Of that 5%, I reckon I’ll never get around to reading half of them.  If we assume I have a thousand books, that 5% is 50 books, that half 25.  25 books I will never read.  Why?  I’d put it down to time, if I were pushed to make an excuse for it.  Those novels, for the most part, are classics.  They are Henry James or Thomas Hardy or Robert Louis Stevenson, novels that I purchased on a whim because I thought, “Well, I really should read that someday”, and they’ve just sat there.  I feel like I’ve read them.  I feel like I’ve read Gulliver’s Travels, like I’ve read Frankenstein.  I haven’t, though I would, were it just for the time.  I have time to read, but I read other things, more modern things.  I read those things that I think I should catch up with.

And of course, time plays into all of our lives.  We sit at work and kill it, watch it drift past as we wait to do something other than sit.  I’ve seen people in offices notably perk up when their inbox swells.  They suddenly have something to read, and everything, for a few minutes, is alright.  So, it was only a matter of time before some bright spark mixed the two ideas together.  “Why not read a novel,” they thought, “over email?”  And they weren’t thinking about writing something epistolary, or creating some ARG/Novel hybrid that you got emailed every day.  They were thinking about taking classic novels, open source, and emailing them to you.  This is Dailylit.com.

This is a free service, and that’s fantastic.  It isn’t charged for, and they’ve done it because they want people to read, I assume.  But what they do is chop up the novel into chunks, each of around 700 words, and then end that chunk at the most convenient full-stop.  You, as the reader, choose what time of day you would like these chunks emailed to you, and you receive the email, open it, read your 700 words and then stop.  That’s your reading done for the day.  [I've based this on my own subscription to War Of The Worlds, incidentally, which I've never gotten around to reading, and certainly won't in damned emails.]

These novels are all open source, all the sort of thing you can download for free for yourself over the net.  But you don’t want to do that: you don’t want to be in control of how much you read, of where your natural stops are. You don’t want to follow the author’s guidelines, actually let the book ebb and flow naturally.  You want to let somebody else – or, I’m assuming, a computer – chop chunks out for you, and throw it at you, allowing you to fulfill your remit of daily literature as if it is your 5 portions of fruit and veg.

I’m not getting at DailyLit specifically: I think it’s a good idea, just poorly implemented.  And maybe theirs is a plan to harness the technology early, to sell their idea to a publishing house.  A digression: it’s becoming more and more common for LPs – as in, the old-style records – to come with a code that can be entered onto a website to download MP3s of the album.  It’s a great idea – five the consumer the best of both worlds.  They bought the album, they own the album – make it easy on them to listen to the album.  Why doesn’t the same apply to books?  When you buy a novel, wouldn’t it be a breeze to enter a code onto a website and download a locked PDF file of the novel?  That way you could do with it what you liked.  Stick it on a pen drive to read at work on your lunch break, put it on your phone to read on the train, even maybe use it in an e-reader.  As companies search for ways to persuade us to buy their technologically advanced ‘books without pages’, if we, as readers, had immediate access to something(s) to read on them, we might be more inclined to act as purchasers.  If I knew that I could still buy my holiday books – say, six books – and have the paper editions on my shelves whilst only taking away my e-reader, well, that might just persuade me.

DailyLit are giving away, free, what is also available elsewhere for free.  That’s fine.  But they are chopping up the text and making it an edit that the authors never intended, and that will never absolutely fulfill the reader.  Download these things yourself, in full.  Visit Project Gutenberg and grab yourself those books that you never saw yourself reading. But find the time to actually read them.  Dickens was never meant to be read whilst you try and cram in twenty other things; he was meant to be read in a nice chair, comfy and free of distractions.  Even if you’re reading it on your laptop screen, find the damn time.

*****

if:book have a wonderful offer out to high schools and colleges to take advantage of their wonderful Commentpress WordPress theme – they’ll install and test it for free and everything.  Take advantage of it.  And then, read over the rest of the site: it’s one of the best sites in the world to actually learn about where the book as we know it could be headed.

Let’s try something: Digging online fiction.  Horton’s Folly is a great and funny fictional blog, and you should probably digg it. 

[In case you don't know, Digg is a site where you can tell other users that you got a kick out of something, and recommend that they check it out.  The more people that recommend something, or Digg it, the higher it goes in the Digg charts.] 

We could make something of this, the idea of shouting about the fiction that you like – even if this site isn’t your thing, others will be, surely.  So Digg this, and then tell everyone you know to digg – let’s push Horton’s Folly to the front page, eh?

Every day when I wake up I log in to my computer and see what’s happening in the world. This involves checking my netvibes page, with the hundred-ish rss feeds that that process involves. And on the front page, third item down, is my Wired news feed. Today, it gave me a gem.

The Chinese Novel Finds New Life Online.

However, the title of the article is rather misleading, as it is actually talking about how online fiction has led to an upsurge of sales in print fiction. The writer of the story, Aventurina King, says that

writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth… Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.

And why wouldn’t they? The article centers around an author, Zhang Muye (author of the 600,000 selling, 6 million online readers novel Ghost Blows Out The Light), a publishing house, Magic Sword, and a website that publishes online fiction, Source Of Chinese. It’s really interesting, you should read it. But it raises the question: Why China and nowhere else?

The business is so huge there that you have whole websites dedicated to charging people to buy online fiction. And we aren’t talking about a country with an enormous GDP or anything, and sales of PDA devices and the like aren’t any higher there than in the West. So, this is just people willing to sit in front of their screens and read. In China, whereas the internet and piracy have driven sales of cds and dvds lower, book sales have risen thanks to online fiction. We’re talking about a world where the number one search term on China’s biggest internet search engine, Baidu, is ‘Novel’! We’re talking about an industry that has gone back to the old tradition of serialised fiction, whereby writers get paid by the on-screen character (“In three months, if [the writers write quickly], they can write more than a million characters. The model is very simple: The more you write, the more money you make.” – Luo Li, head of Source Of Chinese). I spoke about leaked novels a few weeks back, and look – not only have people in China translated Harry Potter early and leaked it over the net* (in a country where it actually will get read), but people actually make their own sequels (and yet claim that they are written by Rowling): Harry Potter and The Filler Of Big (wherein Harry finds a big funnel), Harry Potter and The Beaker and Burn (and you can see the cover to this below: the novel apparently features a triceratops, a cartoon buzzard and characters from Pixar’s A Bugs Life), Harry Potter and The Walk-Up Dragon (my favourite, this novel is Tolkien’s The Hobbit with the names changed to Harry Potter characters, apart from Gandalf. The novel’s opening lines are:

“Harry doesn’t know how long it will take to wash the sticky cream cake off his face. For a civilised young man it is disgusting to have dirt on any part of his body. He lies in the high-quality china bathtub, keeps wiping his face, and thinks about Dali’s face, which is as fat as the bottom of Aunt Penny.”)

As a nation of readers it would appear that the Chinese are far beyond the rest of us. I have never seen a knock off copy of a novel in a British market, ever. BUt then, maybe that shows the relative stability of our own publishing industry?

Of course, the story doesn’t have a happy ending: whilst the internet offers freedom of speech in China, ‘real’ publication doesn’t. Ghost Blows Out The Light, upon going to print, had to be rewritten and edited to remove any reference to the Ghost of the title, as there is a governmental ban on superstition. And maybe that’s it? Maybe it is the freedom that the internet affords that allows novels to flourish online? If you know that they only place that you can write and read what you want – in this case, a basic ghost story – why wouldn’t you be driven there? We can walk into a bookshop and pick up novels that feature horrific sights, degrading sex, ghosts, superstitions, whatever authors want to write about (as, don’t forget, literature is still the only form of media without a central governing board of censorship). Or maybe it’s a comparative quality issue? The Chinese publishing industry is well-known for publishing fakes, counterfeits, copies and knock-offs – maybe that drives readers to the innovations afforded by online printing? I understand why writers would turn to the net – you make more money from online fiction, and the freedom of speech – but the readers?

Thoughts, opinions? I’d really like to work this one out.

* Am I the only one who wonders how accurate these translations are?  Maybe they change the ending?  Incidentally, given China’s rules, does anyone know if all references to ghosts and magic (both superstitions) are taken out of the books?