http://www.armyofpuppets.com

jamesbent.com/blog – daily offbeat (digital) fiction short stories.

Oline Novel: A Mountain Too High by Duke Stevens

This veteran firefighter knew the count-down to the most unusual rescue of his life began the day he met Ashley

http://dukestevensamountaintoohigh.angelcities.com/index.html

So yeah, there’s a whole market out there that adults aren’t aware of. When it comes to teens and kids, believe me, there is a HUGE market for YA fiction. Kids spend tons of time online, right? Well a lot of them spend it reading other kids’ writing. It’s mind blowing how many young authors are out there.

I find there is plenty of time for the concept to prove itself … or otherwise. But I still firmly believe in blogs as the perfect medium for posting fiction on the Internet, if only because it gives absolute control over how the text is presented.

Now I’m beginning to rethink the whole ‘posting short stories’ idea.

Oh well, back to the drawing board.. or is that the blank page?

These days I have a limit of 350 words per post and I try to take as my model those comic strips you get in newspapers like Doonesbury, The Boondocks (RIP) and Garfield where you have a short, punchy and relatively self-contained piece; but if you read several in a row you see that there’s a larger story at work.

I don’t think I’ve succeeded yet, but I hope I’m getting there.

Oh yes, and I’d avoid the Pilot Episode if I were you–that was my attempt at writing a novel online. It’s waaaaay too long and not very user friendly. And you don’t need to have read it to understand anything from ‘Season 1′ onwards.

One of these days I’ll probably take it down.

I haven’t started reading it yet, but I’ll bookmark it for future reference. Looks promising enough!

I started off trying to write a (somewhat episodic) novel online. It was hard to read, disjointed to write and impossible to retain readers.

It took me a while to realise just how different the presentation of fiction needs to be in order to be relevant and interesting online.

Over the last few months, I’ve tried to implement almost all of your suggestions. It seems to be working. Certainly, I’m getting a heck of a lot more out of it than I was!

You might be right with the fact that office workers will resort to reading novellas online for entertainment because videos and music are too obvious (I’m refraining from saying ‘lol’ here ;P). But the fact remains that reading long-form fiction that has not been specifically customized and presented with the web environment in mind is tedious and hard. We may get readers, but more likely than not they’ll go away to check their inbox or to email their friends or to IM thier spouses. So we’re facing problems both with the form (we can’t present our readers with a LONG block of unappealing text, all our chapters) and the content, which is more often than not written like the paper novel.

Thanks Gloria for your comment. Now you’ve started the little cogs in my head going round and round again.

I admit what you’ve suggested hadn’t occured to me while I was writing this post, mainly because I was trying to build upon the points in Cory Doctorow’s essay.

And you know what? I have to agree with everything you’ve said. If a novel has been written ‘offline’ and a lot of sweat and blood and soul has gone into the novel, and it’s not published, then it should be posted online, mainly because there’s nothing to lose.

Brilliant point. I’m going to brood over this and write something on it.

Thank you.