1) Novelr was compromised for most of today and part of yesterday. Those of you using Google Chrome (or a browser with a Google search bar installed) would’ve likely seen a warning screen telling you to STAY CALM AND WALK AWAY. If you didn’t, and you visited Novelr in the past day or so, I must say that I’m sorry about this, and I recommend that you run a virus scan on your computer, just in case.

(You won’t need to if you’re on Mac, or Linux, but I suppose I don’t need to tell you that.)

2) I’ve hardened up security on Novelr’s WordPress installation. If you see something funny over the next couple of days, do feel free to drop me an email. For those of you out there with WordPress installations of your own, I’d recommend you install this, this and this plugin, and follow some of the guidelines in this document.

2a) I’ve been running WordPress for close to five years now, and must admit that I’m very annoyed with a day spent on hunting down exploits. Annoyed enough to consider switching to a static site generator like Jekyll … though I’ll probably have to put that off till when I’m freer.

3) I’ve implemented Disqus comments. As some of you probably know, the last week or so saw some pretty rabid discussion in the commenting section of Novelr. The Disqus system allows you to flag comments you find particularly nasty, and it allows me to collapse comment threads I have no interest in reading. My thanks to L. Lee Lowe, Jim Zoetewey, and Chris Poirier for helping out with some of the more ridiculous commenters.

The best way to complain is to build things. Let’s do that, and carry on.

Some of these articles are four years old, and sometimes you’ll see a badly articulated idea refined through multiple posts. Looking back on it, I find some of my attempts rather pathetic, and also kind of cool – we’ve certainly come a long way since those early days of experimenting around the blog format.

I hope you find these posts to be of some use.

Why Write Web Fiction?

• (Guest post): To reinvent the novel
• (Guest post): There’s no editing, and that’s a good thing.
• (Guest post): Before you begin writing online fiction!

Web Fiction – The Format

This section contains ideas and observations on the web fiction form.

• Why Web Fiction Discourages Comment-Based Criticism
• Exploring Personality Bias (Why writer personality affects a reading experience)
• Writing as Performance Art (Livewriting web fiction)
• Ebooks vs Web fiction (How ebooks are winning in 2010)
• The Form and Function of Penguin’s We Tell Stories (interesting ideas from the 2008 writing experiment)
• Who Serves The Mobile Web? (on the shift to mobile ebooks)
• The Golden Notebook and Group Reading (ideas from if:book’s 2008 social reading/publishing experiment)
• Why you will never read fiction, online (based on a Cory Doctorow essay, really old!)
• Why writing long chapters are perfectly fine (a.k.a why the Doctorow essay was wrong)

Designing for Web Fiction

Designing your web fiction site is probably going to be one of the most important things you do, second to the actual writing. Conclusions: the back button is your enemy. Do everything to convert the browser to a reader. Set a tone through design.

• A Format For Online Fiction
• A Format For Online Fiction (Part 2)
• How to Design For Readers
• Picture Book Theory (a.k.a why design is so incredibly important for a reading experience!)
• Design: Improving Readability Without Lifting A Pencil (Part 1)
• Design: Improving Readability Without Lifting A Pencil (Part 2)

Writing Web Fiction

Some thoughts not included below: 1) some people recommend keeping a buffer of one or two chapters while publishing. 2) Talk to your readers while writing. 3) Find a posting schedule and chapter length that is best for your story.

• No Time? Don’t Even Try (aka: web fiction takes a regular schedule. Stick to it)
• Simple Rules for Writing Fulfilling Web Fiction
• Where does your web fiction go after you die? (Suggestion: print it out and save it for your children)
• (Guest post) Fictional character blogs can be bad – here’s why
• (Guest post) Beginning, Middle and End

Talking to Readers

If you want a fulfilling web fiction experience, talk to your readers. Respond to any and all comments. Be nice.

• How to Build Community Around Your Fiction
• On Getting Comments in Web Fiction (reasons as to why you have a reader:comment ratio)
• Internet criticism: the good, the bad, the ugly (when readers criticize via comments)
• How Readers Can Help Write A Book (Really old post!)

Finding Readers

This is a fairly new category – posts dealing with a problem that I’m not sure how to solve, even today. I’ve moved most of my work in this area to Pandamian, but it’s worth looking at, just to see what ground’s been covered.

• What We Can Do About Self Promotion
• (Guest post): Why A Reviewer Class is Important for Online Fiction
• Why Do You Read Online Fiction (figuring out what makes our field attractive)
• A Series of Unflattering Questions (a First-Look at a bad writer-reader ratio)
• Floods and Streams – Where Traffic Comes From (Really old post!)

Web Fiction Community

How to get around the web fiction community. (Note: most writers call this weblit too!)

• (Guest post): A Very Basic Introduction to Twitter for #Webfiction
• (Guest post): Please Don’t Pay Me: Dispatches From A Digital Publishing House
• How Reviewers are Important to the Web Fiction Community
• Why Collectives Need Focus (Dan Halloway on why manifestos are important when writers band together to form a collective)
• Do you support the F-word?
• Blooking needs a community (back in the day when I called it ‘blooking’; this post led to efforts that later created the current web fiction community)
• (Guest post): Four rules for community (historically interesting, but probably not relevant to today’s web fiction community)
• Blooking has a community (the work for Web Fiction Guide started here)

Making Money with Web Fiction

• (Guest post): Making Money from Online Fiction: I’ve Done It, So Can You (MCM on his Novel+ model)
• What If It’s Impossible to Make Money from Web Fiction?
• Why Pay-Per-Chapter Sucks
• Lessons from The Variant (How Previews Can Work in Selling Online Fiction)
• Accept Piracy as a Given
• Why Free Isn’t Really Free (Is sharing an already free ebook considered piracy? Is this good for you, as an author?)
• Software, the Internet, and the One Man Show (What small software shops can teach us about making money from web fiction)
• What Authors Can Learn from Radiohead
• 1000 True Fans – Making Money Off Your Fiction
• Rethinking 1000 True Fans (or: why it may not work)

Thoughts on the Publishing Industry

These posts are all fairly recent (2010), and tied to the start of my work at Pandamian.

• Surprising Truths From Richard Nash’s Publishing Talk
• (Guest post): Paper Houses (Why self-publishing is not credible)
• To Change Publishing, Make Publishers Obsolete (Logical conclusions from Paper Houses)
• The Publishing Support Layer (early thoughts on Pandamian)
• Why Editors Are Important for the Bookfuture
• What the iPad Means For Digital Fiction
• How to Prepare for a Digital Shift
• Merry Christmas, Publishers (first signs of a publishing shift to digital fiction, circa 2008)
• Digital Publishing’s About To Explode, Will You Be Sidelined?

Learning To Write

Most of these posts were from Novelr’s early days, when I was still writing fiction (and figuring things out for myself). I’m including this here only because a couple of writers have found them to be useful in the past.

• Vonnegut’s 8 Rules for Writing Fiction
• Vonnegut on How To Write With Style
• How to Write Long Sentences
• Purple prose: not a problem
• Why Adverbs Suck
• A reason to write badly: the watcher at the gate
• Are First Lines That Important?
• Don’t describe your characters

Random (usually funny!) rants about bookish things

• A Book Buyer Complains About Books-to-Movies
• Good writers, bad storytellers
• Genius Literary Criticism
• Top 10 Ways to Write an Anticlimax
• In which I extol the smell of books

Filtering Web Fiction

The posts in this category contain a series of ideas developed over the period of a year. They led to the creation of Web Fiction Guide, amongst other things. Probably not very useful now, but they may be of some historical interest.

• (Guest post): Filter Shmilter (or: why we shouldn’t have filters, at all)
• Applying the Long Tail to Online Fiction (or: yes, we do need filters!)
• Filters are elitist – so what?
• Small Crowds Aren’t Very Wise
• The Story Behind Web Fiction Guide
• Life as a WFG Editor (outdated)

In the past six months a couple of things have changed at this site. Some of you – the older readers, I’m sure – may have noticed these changes. Novelr has begun to move away from helping writers write for the web, and has lately been posting links to, well, new-sy stuff. Things like the recent iPad launch, for instance, or articles on Margaret Atwood’s Twitter account.

This isn’t a good thing. I suspect one reason for this change has to do with the fact that there isn’t much left to explore about online writing. Novelr has done a fairly good job of connecting one good idea to another: there was information out there on how best to write for the web, how best to design for readability, and so it didn’t take much for me to constantly keep a lookout for the best ideas and to link those to the particular challenges of online writing.

Writers now know, more or less, how to write their fiction for the web. And if they don’t – well, they’ve got a decent chance at figuring it out. I daresay that Novelr has done a good job of teaching people these things. Writers ask each other for advice now, something that started here, and spread later on to other places. And many of the ideas that are in circulation in the community today were originally developed on this very site.

But Novelr is no longer needed today.

Or – if it is, it isn’t needed in its current form.

The easy topics have been written to death. For the past couple of months I’ve begun to feel increasingly uncomfortable as I’ve updated Novelr – I thought, rather, that I was starting to sound like a pundit. I don’t like pundits. I’m terrified of becoming one. Pundits tend to be more interested in complaining about things than in doing anything useful for the community. And for the large part – this is true. You don’t have to be a special someone to write about the state of the publishing industry today – indeed there are many people who’re already doing this, on their publisher blogs and the like.

I don’t want to sound derisive, but there are only so many articles on the future of publishing before you feel like tossing your laptop out the window.

What I want to do now, however, is to work on doing. On making things better for writers. Novelr’s had four years worth of good ideas all stored up in its archives – and it’s about time someone put them to good, coherent use. I want to do just that. We still have problems, after all:  problems that I believe – with experimentation – we should be able to overcome.

In the coming months I’ll be working on a startup called Pandamian. The site’s not up yet (it’s just a fancy splash page, at the moment), but we’ve started work on several interesting ideas, behind the scenes. Most of these ideas were taken from Novelr’s archives. Some of them will be released in the next two to three months. Others would take longer. The core philosophy, however, is that Pandamian will do everything in its power to make writers – particularly online writers – as awesome as they possibly can be.

But What About Novelr?

I’m far-sighted enough to know that Novelr will no longer be as central to the web fiction community as it has been, in the past. This may be a good thing, particularly so for web fiction. When it was first created, Novelr’s sole purpose was to figure out how best to present fiction on the web. I’m happy to say that we have figured it out, more or less, rendering Novelr’s original purpose – well, moot.

So two things will happen at Novelr. The first thing I plan to do is to compile everything we’ve learnt – and that means everything, or four years worth of ideas – into an ebook. In true Novelr fashion, the ebook will be available on the web, as well as as a pdf file. And the best thing about that is that I plan to make it free (unless, of course you read it and you feel like donating) – but I’ll be happy so long as you point new writers to the Novelr book, and tell them to ask good questions about the information presented within.

The second thing I hope to do is to write about what we’ve learnt, doing Pandamian. I’ll be honest here – I’m not sure how that would play out. Pandamian’s problems are large problems – problems like promotion and reader acquisition (ooh yes, I did just say reader acquisition) and big, thorny things like elitists filtering and community building and the like. I want to document the process – I’m not sure if it’d be helpful to the individual writer – but I think it’ll be an interesting topic nevertheless.

I’ve got a lot of work to do, soon. Till then, drop me a comment, or subscribe to Novelr for Pandamian updates. More stuff (on various other things) coming soon.

Note: this post has been edited after publication, for sentence structure and clarity.

Today I’ve gone and done up a simple definition site for web fiction. My hope is this: if you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to explain your work – repeatedly, say – fear not the ignorant man. Point him to the site, instead. I hope that this would save you the bit of time needed to explain your work; the same way it should prevent publishers from rejecting you as ‘fan-fiction’ material.

Two more things.

First, I’ve asked a number of people about the definition, and most of them think that it’s fair. If it isn’t, or if there’s something that you think it lacks – feel free to start a discussion in the comments below. (Note: you may want to read Jan Oda’s excellent primer on web fiction definitions before you do so). My position, however, is simple. I believe that if a work is published to the web, it should be considered web fiction. There are two additional clauses in the definition:

1. The work must be original. This clause was added to differentiate the field from fan-fiction, something that I think most of us would agree with. Web fiction is not derivative; it should be always original (in the copyright sense of the term, that is).
2. The work must be written for the web. A tad puzzling, but we must remember that not all fiction found online may be considered ‘web fiction’. Take Google Books, for example. Google will soon upload a large number of books – some of them novels – formerly published under copyright law. These books cannot be properly considered web fiction, simply because they were not meant for the web. However, if an author takes a previously published work and takes pain to put it online, make it presentable for long periods of on-screen reading, etc; then the work may be considered web fiction (though, I have to admit – this is a loose interpretation of the above clause). I realize that I’m quickly approaching a thin grey line here – when is web fiction … web fiction? When is it an everyday novel? I do not know; and I do not presume to know at all times. I’m not sure if this definition will ever be all-comprehensive. I do know, however, that I recognize web fiction when I see it, and I expect that with enough time a reasonably bright reader would, too.

The second thing I would like to mention is how odd it may seem, to a reader several years down the road, that someone had actually taken the time to create this site. I certainly hope that this would soon be true: that in the near future, people won’t need a definition site like this one – that they’d know what web fiction is the same way you and I know what a movie is, or an EP, or a picture book.

Till then, pass this link to people who don’t yet know what Web Fiction’s all about. I hope this helps, and – lest I forget – Merry Christmas, everyone! Consider this Novelr’s gift to the community. Now off you go, and have yourself a very happy new year.

Firstly: why settle for a name? The reason most commonly given is that a name serves to unify the platform on which we’re writing, making it easier to promote and/or find our fiction. On Twitter, these terms are particularly important: the hashtag feature of the medium serves as a community gathering point, and there should only be one of them in use (in order to prevent community splintering, word limit, etc et all). And so if we see promotion as a primary reason to choose a name, then it would be useful to note that we are really talking about two platforms on which said promotion occurs: normal web search, and Twitter.

Let us now look at the semantics of the two terms being proposed. I am particularly interested in ‘literature’ as it is used in the phrase, ‘web literature’. We must acknowledge that there are really two uses for this term in daily discourse. The first use (the one, I suspect, that is being adopted by the WebLit.us crowd) is the definition taken from the Oxford Dictionary: i.e. (any and all) works of artistic merit. This definition includes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, and even certain forms of journalism (though this last category is certainly debatable). ‘Literature’ as is used in this manner can best be seen when a potential customer approaches a technical salesperson, and asks “to see the literature” on a particular technology. What we’re talking about here is that of ‘literature’ being used as a category, the same way that ‘prose’ is a category, and ‘photography’, and so on.

So what is its second use, then? The second use of ‘literature’ is the equivalent of the term ‘literary fiction’. We use it like this, I think, because academia and publishing have seen it appropriate to brand the genre under such and such a name. There are a number of academic definitions of literature [see: What Is Literature? (Meyer, 2007)], but the easiest way to understand it is to see it as fiction that strives to have ‘literary merit’. What that really means is beyond the scope of this article, and while I recognize that it may be impossible to define such a loosely-held standard, for the sake of completeness I shall provide you with a couple of examples to give you some idea of it. A book may be said to have literary merit if it attempts to discuss something of universal human value. This discussion may be about the nature of consciousness, perhaps, or the problem of pain, or the tricky issue of identity in a globalized, culturally-displaced world (which, by the way, probably explains why so many awards go to Indian authors writing about Indian characters immigrating to New York/London/Chicago/wherever). Or it may be that the book has literary merit because it captures the spirit of an age (e.g.: The Age of Innocence, War and Peace). Literary writers use different methods to achieve this. Some of them use classical techniques such as the allegorical story, or satire (Horatian/Juvenalian), or symbolism. Others use the form of the novel against itself: David Foster Wallace, for instance, made liberal use of end-notes (200 or so pages of them) in his novel Infinite Jest in order to mimic the splintered nature of our consciousness; he also ended his first novel in the middle of a sentence, to illustrate this idea that stories never end the way books say they do, in real life.

So now there are a couple of things that we must make clear. We certainly cannot use literature as it is defined in the second definition, because very few works in the online fiction-sphere can be said to have literary merit. As a community, we are primarily genre writers: we are interested in writing sci-fi and fantasy; in good stories and strong characters, but not so much thematic symbolism/literary discourse. Using literature as defined as ‘literary fiction’ to describe our work would be dishonest of us. Secondly, however, almost anything that is written can be described as ‘literature’ (under the first definition), and so it is perfectly reasonable to have ‘web literature’ describe our field of writing.  The question we need to ask now is this: to the average Joe on the street, which meaning does he associate ‘literature’ with? I would say that he associates ‘literature’ with ‘literary fiction’ more than he does with ‘literature as a category’. This understanding should explain most of the opposition to the use of ‘weblit’: many of us assume that it refers to the second meaning, while its proponents insist that it is the first definition that they base their usage on.^[1]

With that out of the way, I would like to make the case that as far as web fiction vs web literature is concerned, web fiction should be used. However, where #webfic vs #weblit are concerned, #weblit can (and should) be used (and oh God, what a headache I have now). The second argument is simpler to make: both #webfic and #weblit matter only as far as Twitter is concerned (that is: not particularly important, in terms of promotion). Both terms are shortened versions of the full word, and therefore lit does not draw upon the double meaning of the term literature. Of the two, #weblit sounds better (no fanfic interference); more importantly: the hashtag has already reached critical mass. It would not do to forcibly ask everyone to change their hashtags at this stage. It would be more acceptable, however, if we recognize that weblit does not in any way refer to literature as we understand it, the same way that chicklit does not refer to literature (or have any pretensions to be credible).

Now let us discuss web literature vs web fiction. Bear in mind that we cannot use web literature to describe our community – too few of us are interested in writing literary fiction, and doing so would be dishonest (not to mention instantly discreditable). Before I go any further, however – humour me and Google web literature, web fiction, and weblit. The first search would give you a link to the Web Literature Digital Online Library. The second search would give you Web Fiction Guide, right at the top. And the last search would give you a link page with a three way split between a few top results (two Twitter streams), webkit (Safari’s web rendering engine) and a series of random writer blogs that neither explain the term, nor provide prominent linkage to the general community of works. In this particular case, if we consider the fact that search is a larger source of conversion/traffic than Twitter, ‘web fiction’ is the clear winner of the three.

Now let us look at the existing search data for the three terms. How many people are likely to search for ‘web literature’ over ‘web fiction’? Quite a number, in fact (refer to Google graph below) which is rather interesting even if I don’t understand why the results are so. But seeing as a) our community is nowhere near the top for ‘web literature’, and b) we cannot use ‘web literature’ without being dishonest, we shall have to settle for web fiction. (Weblit as a search term is not even worth talking about, because so few people search for it in the first place).

So where does this leave us? Web Fiction Guide is still, perhaps, the best entry point for our community, and with the next iteration it should get better at converting readers to web fiction. Novelr shall, from now on, use web fiction to describe the writing we do, on the web, and on a personal note I hope to be able to use #weblit as a Twitter hashtag without much discomfort. It should be interesting, though, if one of us decides to build a new site around the term ‘web literature’ … but as the top result on Google for that describes itself as a directory for ‘the greatest literature ever written’ this should present itself as quite a problem.

^1. I find it interesting, however, that while weblit proponents say the term is based on the first definition of ‘literature’, they attempt to buy credibility through association with the second definition. This is not particularly clever – it wouldn’t take long for any credibility to be destroyed by a slush-pile work. ↩

In the future of writing there are many websites. All the writers have one, like a new toy, or a fountain pen. They are easy to navigate, easy to read, nothing like the vacuous crap you sometimes find in the back-bowels of the present Internet. All the books are digital in this future, and all the books are published online (for free! – depending on author, the grouchy ones refuse, and so have less readers, and that serves them right -) or you can choose to buy them in Kindle/iPhone/pdf format. Some of these websites – design, tech and all, are run by the publishing houses. It doesn’t matter. The platform is intuitive and simple, and very transparent: new writers can set it up without reading even one line of code; they choose from a choice selection of basic web-fiction themes, all optimized to provide a unified, satisfying reading experience, and then they write. By golly they write! Gone are the days of the steep learning curve, the lonely writer piecing together the technology for publishing; gone is the code. There is no need for code, not in the future of writing. Everything is drag-and-drop. The barrier to entry for fiction publishing is effectively zero, the writer weeps for joy!

There are reader-centered communities in this future: review sites, filter sites; the interaction is instantaneous and warm and really neat. You can choose to chat about your favourite author (link to site included in discussion), and/or when you tire of conversation, you head over to the filter sites to choose from a list of editor’s picks. Everyone has a favourite. A favourite site; a favourite reviewer. You choose from the latest recommendations, and then you curl up in a corner of your sofa to read: laptop on pillow, head on hand. The hours go by. If it gets uncomfortable, and you have to go, you purchase the book for your phone and you grab the phone as you leave: for reading in the train.

Still later, you buy the book. The papers are crisp and fresh, and they smell good right out of the envelope, exactly like the old books of yore, of before Black Thursday – the publishing houses have converted the old printing presses into POD facilities. They’re very efficient now. Less paper is wasted. You customize the cover for your bookshelf – all your books look exactly the way you want them to, different covers, but embossed black spines. When you want to recommend a book, you shoot an email to your friends, or poke them in TheBigOnlineReadingRoom.com, and they say oh thank you we’ll see it later and they are happy because you send them books they like. Then you poke the author and write him/her a short note: thank you for that, it made my week so much better, and the author pokes you back, tells you that you’re welcomed, dear, it’s been a pleasure. And literacy programs are so much cheaper in the future of writing, your daughter buys all her books online, chooses her most loved ones for print, reads the rest on her phone, her PSP, her Kindle. One day, she tells you, she wants to be an author. And you smile now, you bring her to a computer, and you show her how.

[Update2]: Day 3, the final day, is finally over. So I’m now back to blogging at Novelr. Will be posting a summary of the whole even on The Dispatch later.

Just a shoutout to everyone who’s into online fiction: this Tuesday (the 6th of October) fellow writer and webfiction-lover MCM will be attempting to write an entire novel in 3 days, in front of a live, online audience. Some of you may already know this, and are looking forward to watching him work his magic. For those of you who don’t, I’ll be working a Novelr special throughout that 3 day event – a one-time only liveblogging gig, over at The Dispatch. Hop over for behind-the-scenes commentary, novel-as-its-being-written analysis, and Twitter summaries throughout the 72 hours of live writing. This is a really cool way to be writing a book, made possible only by the Internet, and I can’t wait to get started.

(Edit: the image above is, by the way, MCM’s laptop, which will be his writing workspace for the next three days. He uses Pages, and then uploads his materials online.)

One other thing: a sprightly discussion has sprung up around my proposal for an online fiction format, and I’d like to say that there are quite a number of suggestions in the comments thread that I’ve never considered before. I don’t know how this is going to turn out, or if one such platform will ever come to light. But if you’ve got a suggestion, as a reader or a writer of online fiction – post it in the comments thread, and let the community hash it out. Our eyeballs will thank you for it.

You know book-movies, don’t you? Yes, I’m sure you do. Most people don’t care much for them, and neither do I. But if there’s one thing I detest about book-to-movie conversions, it’s that every single time (and I kid you not about this) one such conversion is made, the cover of that particular book changes. And that happens like clockwork, doesn’t it? The publishers will decide – one month before the movie release date – that it would be best to switch the existing book cover into a bloody movie poster. Or a still from the movie. And then suddenly you see your favourite bookstore plastered over with these hideously moviedified books, all covered with a messy porridge of actors and faces and backdrops that can only come from a studio-sponsored photoshop, and it’s all crass and horrible and you wonder at the state of taste in the publishing industry.

What’s worse is that the original book covers are often works of art in their own right. Don’t believe me? Alright. Take Atonement then, by Ian McEwan.

Before:

After:

That first one was better, wasn’t it? And when the movie came out I hopped over to the nearest bookstore to find the book, but I came back empty handed. I did not want Keira Knightly’s face on my bookshelf, hot as she was; if I did, she would pop up in my head the instant I sat down to read … and the idea of having my reading experience shaped by a hot girl on the cover; no sir, not my cup of tea.

I have by now lost count of the number of times I have stopped myself from buying a book … because of a movie cover. I own a movie-cover version of The Kite Runner, and a movie-cover version of The Lord of the Flies (think: half naked boy holding spear looking at second half-naked boy on a leafy set that can double as the backdrop to Gilligan’s Island … hell, I should sell the thing as a novelty item on eBay) and they are by far the two most despised covers in my collection. They stick out like sore thumbs. I bought another copy of The Lord of the Flies, and I now keep the second one in a storage drawer, far from prying friends and curious relatives.

Oh and The Kite Runner? That one sits buried under the casing of my external hard disc drive. I think it makes a fine shock dampener.

This is a quirk, sure, just as even the best of us have quirks. But it is a quirk with a reason: I want my books to be as perfect as they can possibly be, and in this day and age where we consume most of our text on the Internet, the book is the last remaining proof that there still is care in this world, and good taste. It is the final bastion of loving typography, and new-paper-smell, and tight binding, and I want my books to be beautiful things I can own, and when I’m done I want to pass them on – to my kids, perhaps, or to friends and family (and yes, by gum – I WILL get them to read).

Just – imagine now, would you? You’re old, and the movie stars of today have passed on the way of Marilyn Monroe and James Mason, and one day you give your kid a movie-copy of Atonement along with all the other books in your collection. And your kid asks: “Who’s that?”

I fear for my book collection. I really do.

With this, I am officially reitiring the Bookmarked! category on Novelr, and will be pushing links through just the Linked List. There’s also a new Suggest A Link feature which you can access from the navigation bar (see: top right on every page), should you find something that you really, really want to share with the rest of Novelr’s community. I’m still working out a way to separate the Linked List posts from the article-only site feed, though: I’ve a feeling that some of you may only want to read the long articles on Novelr and not have links delivered to your feed reader. Sorry about that. Also: note that these short posts don’t have comments enabled for them, and that they’re removed from normal post pagination. 

Otherwise, it’s business as usual.

I admit that I’m not happy with the latest writing on Novelr. I feel that it’s starting to become too stuffy; too pedantic. Of the past 7 posts, 3 contain arguments that lack clarity and structure, 1 is a note on a month-long absence, and all involve writing processes that felt much like shitting through a bloody anus.  Moments like these call for a close look at my sentence-level construction … and I realized that I was using far too many long sentences. Dammit! I say. Bad habit of mine … and in front of a live audience, to boot!

On Novelr, I realize that I’ve got periods where I write stuff that I’m happy with – even two years down the road – and I’ve got periods where I just can’t seem to express ideas in a clear, chatty manner. I notice, too, that these writus horribilis periods seem to coincide with the waning of the moon, and are always preceded by a chorus of howling wolves. (I, err, was joking). But allow me to put up a short style guide for future reference, one you can bludgeon me over the head with if I stray too far from the beaten path. Also, feel free to learn from my predicament.

The Novelr Style Guide

The following are several tenets that I shall attempt to maintain over the next couple of months:

• This writer shall put a lid on multi-clausal, long-winded, over-comma-ed, unstructured, rantish sentences that, added together, create multi-clausal, long-winded, over-comma-ed, unstructured, rantish paragraphs. (Sorry – couldn’t help it … I swear that’s the last!)
• This writer shall use short paragraphs as much as is feasibly possible.
• This writer shall stop pretending he is writing for the New York Times. He shall be personal. And chatty. Oh yes, who doesn’t love a chatty writer?
• This writer shall stop playing casual games whenever he thinks he’s got a massive case of writer’s block.
• This writer shall ask good questions, and (hopefully) find unexpected answers to those questions.
• This writer shall attempt to be funny. If he isn’t funny, then he shall at least die trying.

I’m not sure how successful this style guide would be, considering that I’m supposed to have developed a proper style by now. (I have, after all, been writing here for about 3 years already.) But then again I seem to lose my way after every major examination in my academic year. No harm going back to the drawing board, and hashing out that idiot of a writer’s block. I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Update]: Thought I’d add several other things that I’ve been doing here at Novelr. All of the above are writing-related issues, things that I’ve been grappling with ever since I took that study break late last year (yeah, I lost my sense of direction during that period, which should change … in a bit). But the ones below are stylistic decisions I made, on the fly, while producing this blog. See if you’ve noticed any of them:

• Novelr is referred to as a separate entity. Never my community; always Novelr’s community. Never my writing; always Novelr’s wiritng. This is to remind myself that Novelr is supposed to be community-centric: the ideas and the discussions are Novelr’s, and hence belong to the community clustered around it.
• There are three kinds of articles in Novelr: Commentary, Ideas, and Bookmarked! posts. Commentary is a post providing in-depth analysis of a 3rd party link; Idea posts are original content written specifically for Novelr’s audience; Bookmarked! posts are collected links that I think you’d find interesting. This is an internal categorization, mind; not something you’d find anywhere in the blog’s archives.
• All posts must be edited at least twice before publication. Sometimes more after. If a large amount of restructuring is needed, the post will be updated with an (edited) tag attached to the title.
• I try to respond to all comments all the time. Lately, however, this has been erratic. Sometimes you guys are better at hashing out an issue than I am, and I gladly take a backseat in such situations. 

When I first started writing, I reasoned that the blank page was a beautiful thing; an invention that gave the outside world the inner workings of my head. I could give a gift of imagination - my imagination – to others; to allow them a smell of the flowers planted outside the palace of Samarkand, to give them a taste of stolen cloud, taken from underneath a flying monkey God. And indeed that was the ideal that I strove for, that little imagined place where both writer and reader could meet; not over ideas, but over stories and shared experiences.

But then take non-fiction, where you’re still writing, and you’re still using the same tools of the craft, but you’re not actually telling any story. I find that non-fiction is often a weaker substitute for fiction, in the same way some people may chew gum to make up for an addiction to nicotene; or watch porn to make up for a lack of human love. Writing essays and blog posts are easier; they’re instant gratification to the slow-release pleasure of writing a novel; they make you feel as if you’re still engaged in the act of writing, with one crucial difference: you’re not actually doing any storytelling. And we all know how much harder storytelling really is, compared to the direct, non-fiction electricity of ideas from head to hand. This could be one reason why so many novelists turn to essays in their downtime, between books. It could also be one reason why I’d been writing so little fiction over the past 6 months. And it was true, and it was painful – the crux of the matter was that between Novelr and my blog I didn’t feel any need to ease myself into the hard grind of crafting and telling a good story. And that was sad indeed.

I wonder now if writers like Malcolm Gladwell and Seth Godin write non-fiction because they believe in this lie. Or if they’d examined themselves as fiction writers, found themselves wanting, and settled for the still-respectable, instantly-gratifying joy of non-fiction. Because to me it suddenly seemed that if you were not writing fiction you weren’t partaking of the most powerful thing writing had on offer: the ability to take yourself out of time, to live beyond your years in the curls of your letters and the ozone of your paragraphs. I believe now that stories last forever; that only ideas grow old and die. And what I was doing, I found, was that I was writing so much non-fiction that I was putting aside almost nothing of myself for the timeless craft of the fiction writer.

So what made me come back? Two things, I suppose. The first was a 43 folders podcast, How To (…) Turbocharge your blog with Credibility!, a punchy, inspiring chat between two old-time bloggers that reminded me of everything I had started out to do when I first launched Novelr. But that’s personal, and you aren’t likely to identify with me on my reasons. It’s the solution to my second problem that I find worthy of sharing: I decided that no matter how much work I was going to do on Novelr, or how many essays I wrote for myself, I would always, always set aside some time for wrtiting fiction.

And the thought of this – the very idea of it – made me instantly happier. I’m sorry for the hiatus. But I’m back now, and writing again. Thank you for sticking with me.

N.B.: Have any of you struggled with this? Or has fiction/non-fiction been your one and only calling? I’m interested to know if anyone’s had similar doubts, and similar blocks. Drop me a line in the comments section; I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Before I talk about the upcoming changes in Novelr, I’d like to explain the idea behind the visual lift Novelr now sports. I have been intending to redesign Novelr for quite a bit now. Part of it was due to the Picture Book post I did last year, where I discussed how a website design affected the way readers saw your content (and in the case of blooks, how they saw a story). It was one of my favourite posts of 2008, but I felt a little off about it at the time because Novelr itself was a very colourful, hippy, non-serious blog; quite at odds with its content, as you can imagine. A redesigned Novelr would mean a Novelr that wasn’t so dissonant – a redesign would mean a stronger message.

Throughout the 4 week redesign process I didn’t write on Novelr as I did before my study lift. I know that my last few posts have been lacklustre at best, and I also realize that this is completely my fault – I have a bad habit of not writing for a site that I’m designing, and this applies even when said redesign takes an extraordinarily long time to complete. For that, and for the lousy, linkish posts I have churned out over the last two weeks, I ask for your forgiveness. Novelr will return to its core immediately in the posts that follow this one, that I promise you.

Wait, What Core?

Novelr is now two years old. When I first started writing it I set out to create a one-stop resource for all the writers on the Internet: the ones who weren’t yet published; the ones who wanted to use the Internet to get their work read. That core remains. Over the next few weeks I’ll be editing and rewriting major portions of the Ultimate Blook Guide, much of which had been rendered obsolete in the months since I first published it. By the end of Step 7 of that guide a novice writer should be well versed in the ins and outs of publishing on the Internet – how to write, where to write, and where to find other fellow writers. 

There are other things to do, of course. In the past year Novelr has become a point of community for the many who already write web fiction. The joint efforts of that community resulted in Web Fiction Guide, a fantastic filter for new readers to the medium, powered by a wonderful team of editors, writers, programmers and readers. But that is only the beginning. There’s a recession going on, and the mass publishing-industry-shift to the Internet has changed the landscape quite a bit. This is ironic, this is: many of the things Gavin Williams predicted in a 2008 Novelr guest post are now coming true, and more besides: the middlemen are bleeding red ink; the publishers themselves in need more than ever of a new business model, or at least a new bestseller. These are bleak times, yes, but great ones for those working only on the Internet. And it’s Novelr’s job to make sense of that chaos. Web Fiction Guide may be a good start, yes, but how do we channel new readers to that site? How do we get more people to read? How do we make webfiction mainstream? These are problems that Novelr and its community have been struggling for a full two years, and our jobs have suddenly turned easier with the stumble of the traditional literary establishment. If you’ve got some insight to the situation we’re facing, or if you’ve got something to say to the online fiction community, feel free to contact me to write a guest post about it.

Advertising, Funding and Some Honesty

You’ve probably noticed the ad box near the top of Novelr’s sidebar. As of now, all image ads are $5 a month, on random rotation, with a maximum of 5 ads every month. I’ve reduced the price mainly because I now realize that the Text Link Ads evaluation of $15 per link is an overinflated one, and also because it’s only reasonable for a writer to fork out so much for publicity of his work. Novelr’s stats (about 400 a day), RSS feed subcribers and other relevant information can be found on the Advertising page. Spots for January are going at $4, seeing as it’s already a few days into the year, and take note that there’s a limited amount of slots per month. Email me if you want in, or if you want to book a slot in an upcoming month.

I am grateful for the money that Novelr’s community had pooled together mid last year, when it seemed that the site would go under. I’d like to say here that I haven’t forgotten, and I want to take the opportunity to once again thank all of you who chipped in, and particularly Sharon Bakar, (who, if you’re wondering is the Malaysian litblogger), who made it sure that Novelr would be able to continue for at least another two years. I was and still am humbled by that episode, though I hope that I’ll never have to do that again.

The last reason for this advertising push is the upcoming launch of the Shelves Project. I assure you that it hasn’t been shelved (pun intended – couldn’t help it, sorry), and that I’m fully commited to bringing it to life. I’ll be talking more about the project in the future, as well as the other ideas that I’ve planned for launch under Novelr’s umbrella. All of them are community-centric, and all of them should bring value of some sort to our work.

Some other things I have to close. I’ve pulled NovLounge – Novelr’s forums – for instance, because I believe that one forum is more than enough for the community. That forum is WFG’s, and I do hope you’re already a member. You’ll find a bunch of caring, down-to-earth writers over there, most of which won’t mind lending you a helping hand with your site or with your writing. It’s a good place to hang out, and I do suggest that you sign up, if you haven’t already.

There is one last thing I’d like to share, and it is personal. Most of you know me as Eli James, and indeed I’ve been writing under that name for a very long time. But here’s the truth: Eli James is a pen name. A nom de plume, as they say. I made a choice a long time ago to write as such, and the reason is simply because I live in Malaysia. Now I’m not saying that the Malaysian government is out to arrest bloggers (though it most certainly has, of late, particularly political ones) but I do admit that in my country, bloggers and their blogs are pretty big things. A few have wondered why this is so: I suppose it’s mostly because we’re shut out and kept quiet by the mainstream media, so people just feel liberated when they go online and find themselves with no constraints. The bottom line is that Malaysians read and share with each other their favourite bloggers, and our press is equally happy to shine the spotlight on these personalities. Their fame is beguiling. I decided that if I were to blog, I wouldn’t allow myself the opportunity to boast about my work, or about the number of visitors I received. For what is blogging to the Malaysian but attention-seeking? I’ve had one or two friends who wrote respectably popular Malaysian blogs, and I saw first hand what that did to their ego. And I didn’t want to be like that.

I am sharing this with you now because I’ve a feeling that our writing futures will be shared together. If we are to succeed with web fiction, with the publishing opportunities given to us in this most perillous of times, then we’ll have to do it together. And doing things together means community, and community in turn means trust. And I hope we can trust each other.

Happy new year.

My exams ended on the 4th of December, and I was suddenly left alone with my newfound freedom. I surfed the Internet a bit, clicking about in random directions, in much the same way a criminal may run in circles after being released from prison. His freedom renders him purposeless after years of confinement, the same way I was rendered purposeless after 3 months of crazy studying. I think it’s quite possible for one to equal the other.

I’m back, and I’m sorry for not updating Novelr earlier. My exams have left me frazzled and a little woozy, and it’ll be some time before I can get back into gear here. It doesn’t help that I’ve got quite a few other things to do – I have been spending the last couple of days reading up on PHP, because it’s about time Novelr got a redesign. And there’s design work to be done on Web Fiction Guide (WFG) as well. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

This post is a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to be a WFG editor. The editors, if you don’t already know, are the people in charge of reviewing and rating the 144 or so blooks listed on the site. I’ve not been a very good editor: WFG was started months ago, but I’ve almost never reviewed anything there. Put it down to my academic schedule, I guess, and bang me on the head with a wooden spoon.

Behind The Scenes: The Art (or torture) of Reviewing

What, you think we randomly choose what we review?

A review assignment usually begins as such: we hop into the Editors’ private forums and skim through the latest discussions. The topics here run the gamut from serious to nonsensical: one might be about a delisting request (the editors decided it was against WFG policy), while another might be about how we’ve been called semi-professional (go check them out!) by a StumbleUpon user. Very often, however, our personal lives slip through and colour our discussions: Gavin Williams had a baby a few months back, and we paused our discussions to congratulated him and the missus.

The chief reason we log into the discussions area is because of a spreadsheet Chris Poirier updates. It contains all the new listings and it tells us who’s reading, or reviewing what. The unreviewed listings are marked in bold, and the editors place R, W or X under their names to mark the various stages they’re going through, with regards to that particular work. An R is for Reading, W means ‘Writing a review’ and X marks a completed assignment. R sometimes last two weeks, if the blook in question is boring as hell.^[1]

Review Systems: Should You Read Everything?

There’s been some discussion in the WFG member forums as to what system to use while reviewing a blook. A rule of thumb that many use is to read and write a review based on the first five chapters. The reasoning goes as such: after five chapters, “the story’s had its chance to draw you in, and if it hasn’t it might simply not be your cup of tea – in which case you might as well jump around at random and see if things change.”

I’ve had some time to mull over that system, and I have to conclude that whatever system we use is often created out of necessity rather than personal preference. WFG posts up to 3 new listings a day, many of them novel length, and to keep up with all these listings is nigh on impossible if we’re to read through everything. Part of our problem is that most of these works don’t even deserve a review in traditional critical establishments – they get filtered and are left in the slush piles of publishers. There’s actually an agency that provides professional assessments of unsolicited manuscripts, but there’s a catch: you have to pay good money for that service (and they will read everything, and pass it on to a publisher if they think it’s worth a shot). WFG editors aren’t paid anything, and so we have to make do with what we have.

My view on reviewing systems (and we all have different ones) is that I will read as much as is needed for me to write a fair review. Some works, the good ones, I’ll read through from first to last. The lousier ones, however, I’ll pass after 1 or 3 or 5 chapters. My job is to tell you if it’s worth your time, and the best way to do that is if I’m honest. Forcing the editors to read through everything, particularly if that story is bad, does nothing for either reader or editor: you’re not likely to appreciate a work for its themes or ending if you can’t get past the first few chapters.

It’s a fine line that the editors walk. We have self-imposed deadlines, so the backlog won’t get out of hand; but at the same time we realize that the people we write the reviews for aren’t the authors, but the readers. This balance between speed and fairness has been highlighted once or twice in the editor forums, and I will say as much: as dedicated to the community as we are, we won’t be able to cover everything in the near future. If we take what’s happening now (3 new listings a day occasional lulls in between) and scale it with what we know of the increasing importance of the Internet, then it doesn’t take a genius to realize there will come a time where listings will outstrip the editors who can review them.

The solution? We have no idea. We’ll work on it, though (because we’re semi-professional). Till then, however, we’ll read, we’ll review, and then we’ll read some more.

^1.The RWX term usage is also a geek joke only Chris, Jim and the Unix programmers of the world would understand.↩

[Update]: I’ve just realized that it’s not very nice of me to take a leave of absence without leaving behind something for you read, do, or think about. Here are two things:

• Sharon (of Bibliobibuli) recently alerted me to a Guardian blog post about online fiction. It’s a rather comprehensive cover of works and web fiction history I had no idea about, and I’d like to highlight one line from the article:
  
  

  Meade (of if:book) himself confides that he is yet to be “seized by a digital fiction that is utterly compelling”. 

  I wanted to email both Chris Meade and Andrew Gallix (the writer behind the blog post) alerting them to our portion of the blogosphere, perhaps by pointing them to the concentration of online fiction at Web Fiction Guide. But I don’t at the moment have enough online time to do so. Here’s my proposal: will somebody from the blooking community please start an email correspondence with them? Just to tell them: hey! we exist! and we’ve got a couple of ‘utterly compelling’ works out there, you know?!

• Johnathan Harris recently did a controversial presentation at Flash On The Beach, a Flash developer conference. He says
  
  

  … our medium – the online medium – has the potential to become the next great way of processing and expressing our world. Some would say it has already reached this point, but I believe it still inhabits an awkward adolescence, with no real virtuosos and no real masterpieces, and that the only way for it to mature is for its leaders and practitioners to push themselves to make better work, which will, in turn, reach a larger and less insular audience. If the work is purely technological, it will be less likely to reach this larger audience, for it won’t resonate with as many people. If it connects on a more human level, on the level of ideas, it stands a better chance of touching people deeply and spreading widely, like a Toni Morrison novel or a Steven Spielberg movie. My reasons for wanting all this are partly selfish – it is my medium and I want it to flourish – but also inherently communal, as rising tides raise all ships.

  His presentation is worth a read. Also, go check out his portfolio, which has an unusually high spattering of online storytelling experiments. My favourite? The Whale Hunt.

[Note]: I’ve reenabled comments for this post, and I’ll pop by when I can to see what you think. Tell me if anything’s new.

I’ll be taking a study break from Novelr until late December, which means my posts here will be fewer and further between. Yes, I know this sounds quite awful, but I’m currently studying about 4 hours a day and it’ll only get worse as my Finals approach. Guest posts and community alerts are welcomed – I can come online, but only in very short bursts – so please shoot me an email if you’d like to write something for the blooking community.

I’d like to do an open mike before I vanish. An open mike is a post where you take the center stage, be it in the commenting section below, or back in your own blog, about a topic I’ll be discussing today. Brains turned on, then? Alright.

Here’s what I’d like to know: would you rather censor foul language for the sake of your audience, or would you keep it in your story, because that is telling the truth? Where do you stand when it comes to vulgarity in fiction?

This is an argument I’m pretty unsure about, because there are very valid opinions on both sides. On one hand we have Stephen King, who defends his use of the f-word because he is writing about common, working-class people, and they say fuck more than they do foie gras. On the other hand (the cleaner one, you’d suppose) you have the argument that it is just impolite to litter your prose with, well, impolite language. The most creative treatment of vulgar language I have seen is by children’s writer Diana Wynn Jones. Yes, you got me right – a children’s author. In her book Wilkin’s Tooth the neighbourhood bully is a particularly rude child, and he frequently uses (in her words) ‘colourful language’. Jones treats this quite literally – her dialogue from the bullies is filled with “orange” and “black” and “you purple red green boy you!!” Witty stuff.

Where do you stand on this issue?

I recently came across a critical piece on two Novelr articles (this one and this one), published in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large, Volume 8, Number 9 (a journal of libraries, policy, technology and media). Overall, I thought the entire thing to be well written, witty at parts, snarky at others, with a respectable open-ended conclusion about the state of e-book readers at the end. There is just one part that is bothering me, though: in his analysis of my post on the Long Tail he alleges that I make something he calls ‘the classic .com mistake.’

Ah, but the blogger makes the classic .com mistake, one Jensen doesn’t make:

Our target audience shouldn’t have to be just people who are willing to sort through the dross: if that’s the case online writing will forever be in the dark, pushed into the corners of the web by other bigger, better, more instantly gratifying web distractions. If, say 1% of web surfers are actively finding/reading online fiction, the ideal solution shouldn’t be just to find that 1%, but to expand upon it. In other words, we should not find a target audience—we have to create one, so the 1% becomes 5%, or more.

“If we can only get 5%…” That’s propounded by another problem—one that’s characteristic in this blog. Namely, the writer assumes traditional media are dying. “Newspapers are dying out, losing to online news sources…”—and in an unrelated post, “We know that the traditional publishing industry is upon dark times.” Ah, but never mind. We learn that “collaborative filters” are what we need to make online fiction more accessible for others—but, and it’s a big but, you have to get people to look at those filters before they’re of any use. The writer mentions a website, Pages Unbound, that can provide the collaborative filtering. I visited briefly. Wow. Ugly white sans text on a dark-gray background, making it hard to read. A front page that seems more manifesto than invitation—and the claim that readers may need mental adjustment to read web novels. Let’s just say that, as one who might be willing to read online fiction, I’m decidedly not bookmarking this site.

Here’s my question: what is the classic .com mistake? I have absolutely no idea – and his article doesn’t really explain – but let’s hold that off for awhile because I’d like to dissect his analysis to see if I’ve missed out anything.

He opens with a rhetorical question: “if we can only get 5% …”. He then follows this up with an attack on credibility (that I’m assuming traditional media is dying, when he thinks it’s actually not) but reminds his readers that this is a minor digression – the true problem is that our current collaborative filters are too ugly to be of any use.

There are three reasons why his analysis is flawed.

Firstly, the amount of people writing and reading blooks has grown two-fold over the past year or so. When I started covering blooking on Novelr the majority of blook writers were the blook readers (prompting, incidentally, this guest post by Gloria Hildebrandt). This has changed in recent times – the number of writers have grown, certainly, but the number of readers have grown even more. Two works, An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom and Tales Of MU have significant communities built around them, mostly drawn from LiveJournal, web comics and strategic advertising. The writer of said commentary has overlooked the simple fact that our 1% has grown into a 2%, and is set to hit 3 and more over the next few months.

Secondly, while the writer is correct in saying that Pages Unbound is ugly and non-functional this comment no longer applies for two reasons. Firstly, PU has closed, and a better filter (or filters, if plans for another one takes off) have replaced it. Secondly, much of the growth has been because of PU, and its close integration with the community could be felt in the outcry that followed its closing. Many readers and writers got their first start through PU’s review system – which despite its flaws managed to spark off a number of new, high quality blooks.

Thirdly, and lastly, my belief that traditional media is dying out has no logical connection to the ‘classic .com problem’. Why the writer included it there is beyond me. Whether they really are dying is open to heated debate – the said writer points out that local newspapers, for instance, are thriving because they provide local content, whereas only the large dailies are suffering. I do believe, however, that a good example does not a good argument make – while we can say that radio has not died with the emergence of television I’d like to point out that its significance has been greatly reduced. We no longer hear of people being glued to their radio sets for football commentary or nightly entertainment. The same will probably happen for traditional media – they won’t die completely, for sure, but they’ll certainly exist in a semi-significant state, less relevant than they were before.

PS: On the writer’s comment that 1000 True Fans is a gimmick – I point to Tales Of MU, amongst other works. Alexandra Erin’s full time job is writing it.

(Image from XKCD)

Right. Just a short shoutout here – Novelr’s forums, aptly titled NovLounge (yeah it was a hot afternoon and I wasn’t very feeling creative, so don’t clobber me) is up and running. There’s a handy button on the sidebar that I put together on the run – it’s made out of various image scraps I’m got lying about the computer and you can use that to visit the forum too.
I know I should give a long and inspiring speech about how I hope everyone will get together and build community and write well but I’ve been doing that for some time now and I think I shouldn’t push it too hard. Well, not in this post, at least. But I started NovLounge to gather a small team of people for a site launch we’re going to do next year, and since I’m going to be offline soon the team and I have decided to open it up to Novelr’s community.

Now I’d like to admit here that I’ve no particular vision for NovLounge – I’d like you all to do whatever you want with it, so if you want to compare notes on the best ice cream flavour, go ahead; if you’d like to talk writing, do that as well. We’ve got plenty of places doing intellectual, so it’ll be nice if NovLounge is a little different: a kind of a laid-back bar for Internet writers. Whatever it is, though, it’s up to you. No, really.

That being said, here’s a brief introduction to the forum: there are four categories: Voxpop (for random stuff), Commentary (for discussion of the medium and the craft), Off Tangent (for forum games) and Lounge News (covers forum news and issues). Interaction guidelines can be found here, and the administrators are, in alphabetical order:

• Gavin Williams (writes No Man an Island)
• Grace McDermott (otherwise known as Stormy, from Mirrorfall)
• Jim Zoetewey (writes The Legion Of Nothing)
• Sarah Suleski (writes Alisiyad)
• Sonja Nitschke (writes The Mutants)
• Stephanie (otherwise known as Windvein, from Scary Mary)

If you know them then you’re probably in for a bang of a time. Head over there now, have a cup of coffee, and enjoy!

I don’t think there’s anyway I can approach this other than by talking straight: Novelr ran out of bandwidth yesterday. As of writing there are 55 active visitors on the site, with 162 visitors within the past hour. Most of them are from stumbleupon and they’re nice folk, for the most part. They are, however, bringing this site to its knees.

Why am I writing this post? Simply put: I might have to upgrade the hosting plan Novelr runs on. I’m aiming for a $5 a month package, which provides the site with 10 gigs of bandwidth. At the moment I have 3 gigs per month, not much certainly, but I wasn’t expecting 3k spikes of traffic back when I first started. Novelr does not make enough with advertising to cover the bandwidth it uses up at the moment. At midnight last night I rushed online to purchase extra from my host, and at 10 this morning I was told that the extra 2 gigs I had bought were running out as well.

Helping Novelr Out

Now, before I get into the nitty-gritty of how you can help I’d like to explain to you where I’m coming from. Some of you may ask why I’m asking for donations, instead of paying for this with my own credit card. The truth is that I don’t have one – I’m still studying, and I’m not ‘earning’ anything other than knowledge. Novelr is passion, a hobby, or perhaps a part-time job if you’d like to call it as such, and I can’t pay more from my own pocket than what I did at the start of the year. Most of my time is spent studying, writing, and reading; a significant portion of my week is used to sharpen the ideas that I post here.

There are two things you can do to keep Novelr running. The first is to donate to Novelr by clicking the shiny donate button below. The minimum for a donation is $3, and if you have a little time, plus if you enjoy the stuff I’m writing here then please consider helping Novelr out. The donate button uses Paypal, so I hope it won’t be too much of a hassle.

The second thing you can do is to purchase advertising on Novelr. Novelr offers both Text Link Ads and image ads, and both cost $15 a month. There’s a prime spot in the sidebar for both.

I believe people reading this would be divided into three groups – the first wouldn’t mind tipping the site, the second would move on to other articles, and the third (which I believe is the majority) will think about it. And I’ve no problem with that, really. I thank all of you for reading what I’ve got to say, regardless of whether you comment, you donate, or you lurk around reading.

I’ve put a lot of energy into Novelr and I hope you enjoy it. Please help me keep it running.

“Hello Marcus!”

“Madeleine, dahling!”

“Jack, this is Marcus Sphincter. He’s one of the writers short-listed for the prize this year.”

“Congratulations,” said Jack, extending a hand.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you – most kind.”

“So what’s the title of this book you’ve written?”

“The terms ‘title’, ‘book’ and ‘written’ are so passe and 2004,” announced Marcus airily, using his fingers in that annoying way that people do to signify quotation marks.

“It is 2004,” pointed out Jack.

“So early 2004,” said Marcus, hastily correcting himself. “Anyone can ‘write’ a ‘book.’ To raise my chosen art form to a higher plane, I prefer to use the terms ‘designation,’ ‘codex’ and ‘composed.’”

“Okay,” said Jack, “what’s the appellative of the tome you’ve created?”

“The what?”

“Hadn’t you heard?” asked Jack, hiding a smile and using that annoying finger-quotes thing back at Marcus, “‘Codex,’ ‘composed’ and ‘designation’ are out already; they were just too, too early evening.”

“They were?” asked Marcus, genuinely concerned.

“Your book, Marcus,” interrupted Madeleine as she playfully pinched Jack on the bum. “What’s it called?”

“I call it … The Realms of The Leviathan.”

“Ah,” murmured Jack, “what’s it about, a herd of elephants?”

Marcus laughed loudly, Jack joined him, and so did Madeleine, who wasn’t going to be a bad sport.

“Elephants? Good Lord, no!” replied Marcus, adjusting his glasses. “The leviathan in my novel is the colossal and destructive force of human ambition and its ability to destroy those it loves in its futile quest for fulfillment. Seen through the eyes of a woman in London in the mid-eighties as her husband loses control of himself to own and want more, it asks the fundamental question ‘to be or to want’ – something I consider to be the ‘materialistic’ Hamlet’s soliloquy. Ha-ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha-ha” said Jack, but thinking, Clot. “Is it selling?”

“Good Lord, no!” replied Marcus in a shocked tone. “Selling more than even a few copies would render it … popular. And that would by a death knell for any serious auteur, n’est-ce pas? Ha-ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Jack, but thinking, Even bigger clot.

Jasper Fforde is pure genius. God I love him.