J P Smythe’s Website.

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?

The iPhone, that last bastion of technology (no, not really: it’s a phone) has got a program to play interactive fiction text adventures on. TUAW is very excited about this. It’s been available on all molbie phone os’s for yonks, so whatever your flavour, just google it and you’ll find something.

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 finally got around to starting a blogroll here, which is good.  It’s not definitive – expect it to grow and grow to the point where it breaks the page – and I by no means endorse all the fiction found here.  However, it’s all interesting etc, and the non-fiction stuff is a good read.  Check them out, why don’t you?

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?

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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.

Five years ago I wrote a short story – well, if 25,000 words is ever short – that provided what was to be the basis for my (then) PhD thesis.  I’ve decided, after years of sitting on the story, to stick it up on the internets.  It’s called The MonkeyDevil. It was originally meant to be read with minimal structure, sort of 50% hypertext, 50% practical fiction.  So that’s how I’m posting it.  It’s not polished, and it isn’t all that – there’s some shabby writing – but that’s beside the point, really.  By posting it I am done with it.  Another day: the story behind the story.  It’s a doozie.

I recently read a book entitled How I Write: The Secret Lives Of Authors, edited by Crowe and Oltermann.

It’s a great book, very aesthetically pleasing, and full of writers (some of whom I respect more than others) telling the reader about their writing processes, the foibles that they have, the gimmicks, their stuggles with writer’s block and so forth. Some of them have special rituals, food or drinks that they take whilst writing. For some of them it is about the time of day, or the mood. And for some it’s the space, where they write, what they write on. And for me? Since 2002, I have written on an iMac.

I began by ordering one because I had heard about how publishers used them, and used Quark to pageset books. I wanted to learn this, contemplating a career in publishing. But there was also another motivation: the iPod. See, I had also heard about how this little MP3 player was revolutionising music (or, how it would), and, armed with little more than a fledgling Audiogalaxy account, I ordered a 5gb iPod and set about filling it. I struggled with the Mac at first, the nuances of OSX being tough to figure out unguided at first (as, like a child, I refused to properly read the manual). I ignored OS9.

[Actually, that's a lie. I tried it a few times, and constantly got stuck with basic tasks like working out how to shut down a program. I kept looking for buttons that weren't there.]

And then I started writing on the machine. And there’s such a pleasure to writing on a Mac that I cannot even explain it. Even if you look at it from a basic level, looking at the aesthetic pleasure of the screen that you are using, how can it not charm you? The machines are designed to make people want to use them. And the keyboard is charming, soft and crisp at the same time. And as you type to the screen, your words appear smoothed, the font presentation being miles and miles away from anything that windows can offer. That isn’t hyperbole: it’s like reading a .pdf that you are typing in real-time.

So, I love Macs. I began with a G4 iMac, went to a 12inch Powerbook, then a 15inch Macbook Pro. Now, the iMac has gone to a good cause, the Powerbook (which I am using to write this) is ticking and buzzing a bit and crying occasionally, and the Macbook Pro is overheating constantly (hitting mid-80degreesC with alarming regularity, and sometimes creeping towards the big three-figures) and has started giving out tiny little static shocks (not to worry, I bought a keyboard – and it will be going off to make good use of my Applecare pretty damned sharpish).

Now, I could probably write on anything, if I had to. I have, in the past – I’ve used a Sony Vaio laptop, which was fine, and I’ve written on some shocking computers, if they are all I have been able to find when the need arose – but there’s so much to be said for looking at a computer and wanting to write on it. Now, I know that people don’t buy into the whole “Cult of Mac” thing, and whatever, it doesn’t matter to me what you use to do your work on. But I use a Mac.

And that’s why, on tuesday August 7th, I will probably find myself visiting the Apple website and ordering a new iMac (going halfsies with my girlfriend, and buying the cheapest model possible, more’s the pity). Apple are widely expected to announce new models tomorrow, and I am in the market for a new desktop.

And, as soon as it arrives, I have to Christen it. I have a superstition that the first thing I write on a new computer will set the tone for everything that will follow it. So I have to start a piece – in fact, I’ve been saving just the piece for it, if I’m depressingly honest with you – and hope that it isn’t terrible.

*****

I finished a first draft of my novel the other day, which was great, so I can finally turn my attentions towards my fictional blog, a project I’m doing concerning family trees and another blog that I am starting with a friend that will be more focussed on the internet and technology (with the customary twist). I’m also ploughing on with the Critical part of my PhD, chunks of which I am going to try out here, and would really invite discussion on (for the PhD itself). It’s a really busy time.

I’ve had a tinker with the stylesheet for this place: the last one was a little glitchy.  It’s still Hemingway, but now a tad more customised.  Delish.