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: 

| View | Upload your own

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.  

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.} 

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.

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?

Blooks seem to disappear when they are published ‘for real’, and the authors seem to realise that they might be able to make a little money from them. It’d be awesomely easy to suggest that this is the fault of publishing houses – they surely want their investments to be exclusive, right? – but I think, in reality, if a publisher wants to sell your work in bookshops around the world they won’t be too concerned about the relatively niche market that would prefer to read it for free via the internets. I mean, sure, they’d probably like it to go from the net, but it would never be a deal-breaker, right?

Which means that somewhere people are forgetting where they started.

At some point, authors who ‘make it’ decide that they should really take their novel away from the internets, and if you want to read it you should really order it from Amazon (or Lulu, if that’s the way that they’ve gone). And yet, interestingly, most of those pieces of work started on the net because “that’s the way [the author] saw it”. It’s very easy to claim “Vision” when what you mean is “there was no alternative available”; but as soon as that alternative trips along it is infinitely preferable.

Case in point: Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time In Iraq. Now, I am aware that it isn’t fiction, but I wanted to get a feel for the text. It’s been so hyped etc I felt I should (plus, I want to judge it, for better or for worse), but the actual text of the blog has now gone from the net, never to return.

[I am interested in those sites that log the internet, though, like the Internet Archive: I wonder if some things will never completely disappear?] So, clearly people don’t want to give the public something for nothing. It’s funny, but that sort of goodwill just doesn’t much happen. Maybe the public are rarely grateful? I doubt that very much.

So we have books that were on the internet, that were a part of ‘our’ community (that is, the writers who want to further the use of the internet as a legitimate publishing tool) that are suddenly gone, like their authors, never to return (unless their fortunes change). And I think a huge part of it is because many of the authors who publish their writing on the net, on blogs or websites (note: this excludes Hypertext writers, for reasons that will become apparent) just don’t care. The concept of community isn’t there, the very notion of reading other authors next to non-existent. Most authors, naming no names, publish on the net because it’s easy, cheap, accessible. They “have a novel in [them]”, and they want somewhere to publish. Brill. But when they become famous (or whatever), why do they forsake us?

Now, it’s obviously a writer’s choice as to why the text isn’t on the net any longer. I’m not here to judge them for that (not really, anyway). But earlier today I read something on the pressure put on publishers to release content as e-books (due to the inherent recycling issues found in releasing print novels), and it got me thinking about why it isn’t standard practise to offer readers a downloadable pdf of the novel that they have purchased.

Insound.com (in conjunction with the record label Matador), my online music shop of choice, offers an amazing new deal with some albums, that it you buy them you can listen to a stream of the album straight away and you get to download b-sides and live tracks for free. And many vinyl albums come with a code allowing you to download MP3s of the tracks for your iPods (probably knowing that if people want them they’ll get them illegally, and, if you own the vinyl, that’s an odd legal grey area). This system would surely be, therefore, perfect for the novel industry? People would get their print text and their pdf, so the concept of the e-reader would suddenly have a practical use – everyone who bought a book could take advantage of the downloadable version!

But this hasn’t become a ‘thing’ yet. Some writers – Geoff Ryman comes immediately to mind, with his 253 novel – do leave their work on the net: some let it fester. And I’d never suggest that writers give free pdfs of their novel to people in lieu of publishing (and publishers would have to have a hand in the distribution of that, or it becomes a crazy free-for-all). So what can writers do?

I think the biggest issue comes from people not thinking about how the net can be used to enhance a text. I’m not talking about hypertexts and such: I’m talking about the concept of a special edition. I’ve been thinking about how to present my novel on the net. It has been heavily influenced by the internet, and features much ‘spin-off’ side-fiction that is net-exclusive, but the main novel itself isn’t. And I don’t want to just stick it up on a website. I want to tinker, Hyperlink everything I can (in hopefully new and inventive and slightly ARG-ish ways). I want to offer readers of a print copy a reason to visit the online text. I want to come up with a way to offer an overlay to the net copy with authorial notes on, or a commentary that can be listened to as the reader scans each chapter. I want to offer alternative chapters, endings, deleted scenes. I want to offer something far better than what we have, something that uses the internet to the best of its ability. We have this amazing thing to use and we are in danger of wasting potential. If I love a book I love it more than I could love any film, and I would seek out every single morsel of information about it that I could. And maybe that’s how we should use the net – to give readers that information.

*****

Things I love today?  Nina Nastasia & Jim White, Magnolia Electric Co.’s Sojourner Box Set, The Bees’ Octopus and the new album by The Weakerthans (which is pop and 80s, oddly, and great).

I know it’s hard to get people to comment on posts like this, but I have to give it a try.  I’m desperately trying to compile a list of novels (printed & published) that have been influenced by the internets, either being published as fake blogs, emails, web pages and such, or even influenced by the web in different ways – formatting, language etc.  If you could comment and leave your suggestions I’d be super grateful.  Super grateful.

I’ve been doing some research for my PhD thesis – and it is increasingly research these days, with two incredibly wordy tomes just arriving the day before yesterday and one of them hitting me, slam, on the first page with Descartes, Foucault and Barthes.  I’m not in fantasy world anymore.  And so I’ve been doing my own side of the research thing, ploughing through fictional blogs, searching for what makes them stand out.  I was using as many as I could find that were on-going for this (and that numbered 46 that I felt were worth my time (and yours, I suppose)), and decided to have a cull.  Said cull is on-going, but so far I have lost three or four from my ‘regularly read’ list, and they happened to be, essentially, well-written and postmodern fanfic.  And it got me thinking, as these things invariably do: we’re still working from other formats, taking influence from films and comics for our writing.  Why aren’t we writing from memes*?

I mean, fine, that’s a tad facetious, as if we worked from memes we’d be writing fiction based on the guys from Lonely Planet or some video we saw of a large Welshman singing adequate opera on a tv talent show.  We, as a group of writers that might use the internets to publish, would never be taken seriously, right?

BUT WAIT! We aren’t taken seriously now, not really.  I’ve spoken before about the Blooker, and I’m being careful with my words, but really, that fictional category didn’t do much to sell the case of there being legitimate talents on the internet.  We live in a world where the internet can make legitimate stars from nobodies, where people can get film deals based on shorts that they upload to Youtube, where some of the world’s most legitimate journalists publish their work without editorial reprieve or a printing press (and that isn’t advocacy of a lack of editors – argue with me about that another time, okay?)  So where’s that rockstar author to prove to the mainstream that we’re all worthy?

As much as I hate celebrity writers – it’s built into my genes, I think, to have a predisposed dislike of people who want their face on the front cover of their novels – I have to say that I think it’s what we need.  As an internet populace, the hardcore adopt people who relate to their areas – William Gibson has a huge internet following, and the Myspace Generation leapt onto the likes of JT Leroy (RIP) as forcefully as they could, but they couldn’t hang on.  And once we get past the immediate mainstream, who gets the most google hits?

[Sidenote: anyone know where I could find that sort of information out? I'd love to see a list of the most-searched for authors and novels.]

I’m willing to bet that it’s genre-fiction authors, mostly, your Timothy Zahn and Iain M. Banks types.   And that’s awesome, as the internet seems the perfect fit to publicize them to ready and willing-to-accept Slashdot audiences.  But if you don’t write genre fiction – if you work, as I do, in the literary-fiction field, for example – where do you find your audiences?  Maybe more cultural-zeitgeist-focussed sites, such as music zines or film sites.  Maybe through mailing lists, or articles on literary sites.  But success in those areas is more reliant on you having a clicky-link for an Amazon purchase after your name, and again, we’re at the crux: how do you get yourself taken seriously is you write a fictional blog, for example?

Well, last week, one of my friend discovered how to get a ‘win’ in the blog world.  A post on his astronomy website, Orbiting Frog, clocked over 35 thousand views, and all because he wrote about something that people found interesting.  And a post on Novelr last week raised an interesting conjunction of a point: blogs have trouble reaching audiences because of the lack of a community (whereas in the, say, technology world, there’s a delightfully old-school style web-ring that leads around the latest Apple product releases, for example).  Now, I do agree: an independent site that rates blogs, provides links and updates would be great, but without editing and quality control it’s liable to misuse and abuse and etc.

Now, I am the first to admit that there’s an inherent difference between Orbiting Frog and any fictional blog.  But that isn’t to say that the basic principles remain.  Why did the Orbiting Frog post get so many hits?  At the most basic level, it was interesting and people wanted to read it and look at the nice pictures.   And they did, and they told their friends through Digg and the like, and it led to thousands and thousands of people who, I’m willing to bet, aren’t astronomers (and aren’t part of any astronomy community online) coming and looking at the site.  Some will stay for the duration, many won’t, but the success was there.

So, for a fictional blog to replicate this success it needs either to be linked to thousands of other blogs, which it isn’t going to be, really, unless the story on the blog is so bleeding edge it is daily updated with relevant information that will lead it into search engines, or enough people tell their friends about it that they want to see what all the fuss is about (by, say, Digg or Stumbleupon).  Now, I’ve never seen fiction get Dugg (?), and it’s odd: why wouldn’t you want to recommend something you like?

And so we get to deeper topics, the same old ones that I circle around, with the primary one being that there’s just a lack of readers of online fiction.  It’s depressing, but most interviews with blook or blogfic writers I have read – no, in fact, all interviews – give away that their writers don’t read other online blogs.  It’s that same old topic of validation again: we need an author of repute to come along and unite internet fictions.  I vote for Douglas Coupland.  He could do a blogfic site that is bleeding edge (in the vein of JPod or Microserfs), appeals to an pre-existing fanbase on the internet, and would probably have the sort of insights that would get Dugg regularly.  So, let’s start the petition site now, eh?

*****

I have recently read two novels by a writer called Holly Howitt.  One of them, Desk, was the best thing I’ve read thus far this year (and it’s a year that includes reading booker prize winners and bestsellers and number in the many, many books range). If any agents and publishers happen to stumble on this, give her a call, eh?  (PS – Then call me.  Srsly.)

*****

I’m halfway through Jeff Smith’s Bone.  Anyone who doesn’t think comics can be literature can read this and then shoo.

*****

Last thing (and this has become a slight “shout-out” style post, by this point): I recently purchased some prints from this site.  You probably should as well, and get in whilst the buying’s cheap.

The music and film industries (bear with me) seem to be devastated on a weekly basis by leaks. Something or other that was expected to make [x] amounts of money for whatever company leaks, and the parent company decrees that it has been devastating to their health. Recent examples include the Michael Moore film Sicko (which may have been helped by the leak, such is the Word Of Mouth that Moore relies on, especially when his film isn’t high-profile wartime (anti)propaganda, but a scarring treatise of the US health system (and thus of less interest to those outside the US, and, arguably, less reason for it to be a cinema release), the popular (or, apparently, not-so-popular) Hostel 2 (whose director, Eli Roth, seems devastated by the leak of a workprint of the film) and, just this last weekend, the new Smashing Pumpkins album Zeitgeist. There’s been no fall-out from this last one yet, but there probably will be – it’s a fairly high-profile release, as these things go, and I’m sure that they would rather it hadn’t leaked at all.

(Or would they? There’s not enough evidence either way, despite the bleatings and crying of the industry. So, make up your own mind and live with your decision. Me? If I like it, I buy it. Simple rule. If I’ve seen/heard it through a leak, well, that’s life – it’s the new radio, don’t you know?)

So, the film and music industries are being constantly brought to their knees. And the book industry is suffering as well, which must be because of the leaks as well, right? Don’t be stupid. Books don’t leak, because they sort-of can’t. (I say “sort-of can’t” because, with a reviewers or proof copy and a scanner you could leak a book really easily, but then, who would want to?) And if they did leak, why would people want to read them? Books are that last bastion of ‘the experience’, of actually buying something tangible and it being yours. There used to be ‘the cinema experience’, ‘the vinyl experience’. There were replaced by lesser experiences: DVD night, or reading an inlay card of a new CD. And whilst these experiences get more and more diminished – streaming TV that is designed to be interruptible, PDF files of inlays when purchased with an MP3 download – the book one remains.

It goes like this:
You see a book you like, either in a shop or online, and it might be by an author you love, or you might have read the blurb, or just like the title/cover > You buy the book > You read the book, creasing it in the way that you, as the reader, see fit, and the way that you, as reader, have the right to > The book goes on a shelf with other books, or similar.

And whilst people might push e-readers and the like on consumers – and I would like an easy way to e-read, I must say – nothing replaces the book as an object. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?

I could be done here, and just say something like, “Yay for books! They are the only ones that keep their class by not leaking all over the shop!” but that would be me lying.. Because, you see, I think that books need to make that step over in order to fit in with the whole “2.0” zeitgeist (NOT the album).

I’ve spoken before about the nature of ‘side-fictions’ and openly shared writing by authors, and how it hasn’t really been adopted by the industry. But the nature of leaks are that they are only a step over the wall of legitimacy from the likes of Myspace, a platform where bands will frequently allow listening to the entirety of their new albums for free before release. What difference the cd leak? I can listen on my iPod. But there is no Myspace for fiction. Fine, publishers will often put samples of a text on their websites, but, really, if we’re being honest, who gets excited about these? Who even reads them? They are little bonuses, and nothing more. Where are the things for the fans?

Stephen King (who I’ve spoken about quite a lot, but he does try really hard, bless him, to keep up with this lark) has some contact with his fans through lists and minor blogging on his website, but offers them nothing that they can’t get from buying his books like the rest of the world. Some authors have commentaries and such on their publishers sites, but they are usually quite typical, and seem to just be stolen from EPKs, rather than actually be properly considered exclusive materials. And that hype, that way of building up excitement about a release date is practically non-existent. When was the last time that somebody told me they were excited about an upcoming book release? [This is almost rhetorical: it was the Danielewski, and they were bitterly disappointed.] In fact, book release dates seem shaky as all hell. I used to go to HMV on my lunch break from school on a Monday to get the latest album releases. I buy computer games on a Friday, the day that they sneak onto shelves. I – if excited – book cinema tickets for the opening night of films in the cinema. But books? I can’t even find reliable release date lists, and Amazon.co.uk’s “future release” category is pitifully full of mass-market biographies of whatever void of personality is currently gracing the cover of Star magazine that week.
And there’s no way to build hype without release dates or assisted communities. There is no way to share the work of a writer you like with friends in online communities unless you can persuade them to shell out cash before having any contact with the product, something that, in this day and age, is increasingly difficult. There is, therefore, no way for people to get excited about releases by less-than-huge-name writers. And this leads to the concept of leaks: if a writer was big enough, people would want the leak. I’ve – twice in my life – bought proof copies of books that weren’t yet released through Amazon sellers, and nobody in the world damned well cares – apart from me (I was quite excited). Now, I know it’s a question of practicality to some degree – as I’ve said above, who wants to read a scanned copy of a book? – but if people cared enough, they would find a way to share what they had. Maybe it’s time for the publishing industry to adopt the concept of all books being available as, say, PDF files just so that they can ‘leak’ and be shared on communities desperate to help them grow in popularity?

*****

This is my first post at this, my new home, and I’m really grateful to those of you who have come here along with me. I’ll be posting more and more as time goes on, as well as putting my money where my mouth is and posting some fiction, as well as some posts on a collaborative project about Family trees that I am working on. Go to my homepage at Jpsmythe.com for links to both of those. And for what it’s worth, recently I have listened to leaks by The New Pornographers, The Smashing Pumpkins, Okkervil River (wonderful!) and Spoon, and not-so-leaks by Justice, Muscles, Ryan Adams and Blitzen Trapper, all of which are worth your money. Also, McSweeneys are poor right now, after some Shyster (Possibly Irwin R.) stole their monies or something, so go and buy something from them: a subscription to either their fiction quarterly or their excellent interviews/reviews magazine The Believer would suffice, or, if on a more modest budget, why not pick up ‘Comedy By The Numbers’, a very funny book about comedy – “a fake comedy manual that’s actually funny,” says The Onion, and it’s associated with Matt Walsh (of UCB), Bob Odenkirk of Mr Show fame, and is co-written by another Mr Show writer, Eric Hoffman. So, yeah. Grab it.

*****

Last but by no means least, I’ve been on a new podcast panel show, called ‘The Web Quiz Podcast’ (say what you see as it is on the tin). It can be found here, and it’s really quite funny. What have you got to lose?

I’ve increasingly become concerned of late, when reading about blog fiction, that people (including myself, since writing it) are pigeon-holing and narrowing the field of what can and can’t be blog fiction. So, I want to set aside my own prejudices about what I think blog fiction should be, and address what it actually is. That doesn’t mean that this won’t have my opinions in it – how could I escape them? – but, rather, it means that I won’t pass judgement on if things said/done are right or wrong. Although, I probably well, so tell me off when I do. And, if possible, I’d really like this to be a proper conversation/discussion (which would be immeasurably useful for the PhD, pop-pickers). Oh, and I’m doing this over a few posts over a few months, probably– it’s going to be a pretty big topic, I think. So, please, join in the discussion below. So, let’s start at the start, and go right back to zero.

*****

Wikipedia (which, as we all know, cannot be really trusted, but is probably the best source for stuff like this in the whole world) tells us that blog fiction came into prevalence after the advent of the major blogging sites in 1999, and is influenced by Charles Dickens, Lawrence Sterne, Arthur Conan Doyle and Henry James, all of whom were major proponents of serialised instalments of fiction. Now, stylistically, I get it, and I think that for some people a return to the concept of serialised fiction is paramount. But for the majority it really comes down to the form and how it is used. You write in a chunk, and you save it. It’s natural to want to present your work to the world. So, it gets uploaded to the site in a chunk. In order to cope with the standardised formatting of most blogs – that is, newest posts first – many writers adapted to the format, and, taking into account the use of blogs as diary, simply made their fiction take the form of missives.

If we look at the history of the use of various stylistic literary implementations in fiction, we can see that people cannot help but be influenced by the time in which they live. Henry James’ The Ambassadors, for example, was in twelve sections, knowing that it was to be published over the course of a year. The format was adapted to fit the presentation of the story – no chapter could be the length of half the book, for example, or of less than x amount of pages. If we look at e, the 2003 novel by Matthew Beaumont, we can see, too, here, how the formatting forces the tale – the story is pushed by the use of basic time signatures and presentation options. There are interesting surveys waiting to be done – and I would do them, were even a tenth of the people that I have emailed about their blogs to reply to me – concerning blogs, their style and the influences they have gathered (Danielewski vs. Dickens, for example). And whilst you can trace a line of influence and be argumentative (The Observer, on Sunday, argued about the lack of influence that Nirvana and Prince have had on music, saying that the influence hasn’t come from them, but from those people that they idolise and imitate, and golly, you might argue, but in literary circles this can be more than true), you also cannot ignore a) Zeitgeists and b) trends amongst the ‘trendy’.

I am a great lover of the concept – not necessarily the implementation – of belletristic fiction. I love the idea of writing to be pushed by the aesthetic, but am left cold by much of the writing that occurs from this style. And as people became bored with basic hypertext writing – that is, the use of links in text to push readers to other media – they began looking for places to enhance their text, because that it is (one of) the joy(s) of the internets. So, as Postsecret becomes a phenom, so fiction blogs start littering their words with imagery. As LonelyGirl13 tears holes in youtube, so fiction writers start adapting and contemplating how to add video entries to their words. And, as ARGs have more influence and sway (more, even, than I Like Bees and The Beast) amongst the general public, and in how advertising occurs, so writers try to think of ways to play games with their readers.

Then, of course, there are the blogs that break themselves down into chapters, and present themselves as a standardised format story. First of all, there are semantic issues. If we look at the roots of the word ‘blog’, do they actually conform to the Webster’s definition of “an online diary or chronology of thoughts”? For the most part they do not, instead choosing to use the blog publishing format – a very different kettle of fish – to present their work, utilising the formatting graces afforded by blogging tools as opposed to struggling with HTML or the like. Are they blogs, though? Should they be eligible for the previously mentioned Blooker? Not for me to say (but, Damn you, self imposed non-judgemental rule!). But, when taken as blogs, do they conform to commonly held opinions of the format (which, if we look at the example given in Webster’s, is “Typically updated daily, blogs often reflect the personality of the author”)? And, for the most part, how have these blogs assimilated or been influenced by their peer blogs (or anything down that chain of influence)? One of the finalists of this year Blooker prize essentially wrote a novel, broke the chapters into web pages, called it a blog and then self-published it. And in terms of influence it would be arguable that there was anything taken from the world of web fiction, in any of its forms.

So, in essence, Blog Fiction seems to be, nowadays, a kind of catch-all term for Web fiction. That is, if you write fiction and present it on the internet in a form – any form, really – you can term it blog fiction. Which is horrendously vague, given that analysis above, but the vagaries of the form and the products that result from it mean that there is little choice but to make such a broad, sweeping statement. However, one thing can be said for certain: just because it’s blog fiction doesn’t mean that it is interactive. Interactive fiction is something else altogether, and I’ll address that another day.

Next time round – which might not be for a while, and in a few posts: The reverse influence that blog fiction has had upon traditional print literature, and how fiction bloggers might adapt their work to suit publishers and Joe (no pun intended) Bloggs.