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!

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[Update]: I have upgraded the hosting package and Novelr is above the waters once again. I am humbled by the support and goodwill you guys have shown. Thank you, all of you.

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.

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I’m happy to announce that Novelr is now a part of 9rules.

9rules is a blogging network that aggregates the best content from the blogosphere. It is many things to many people, but at its core 9rules has always been about quality. Finally seeing the 9rules badge on this site is - I must admit - a very fulfilling experience.

What Does This Mean For The Readers?

Becoming a part of 9rules is a milestone for any blog, and I promise you that Novelr will maintain the same level of quality that got it into the network in the first place. Updates will be slow in coming for the next few months, but whatever posts that make it through will be well thought-out, highly polished affairs. Novelr is and always will be for the promotion of Internet fiction. We’ve still got a long way to go on that one.

Being part of 9rules will not affect the way you interact with me or the site. The blog functions as before, only now Novelr’s content is aggregated on the 9rules homepage and writing community, and you get to see that cute little badge in the header of this blog. Writing, reading and commenting is business as usual.

If you’re new to Novelr: welcome. I hope you enjoy the thoughts I’ve collected over the past year, and I look forward to meeting you in the comments section of this site. Feel free to argue, to question, or to hit me over the head with an umbrella - you’ll find me mostly a reasonable person to clash with.

Special Thanks …

To the triad - the people behind 9rules: thank you for accepting Novelr. It’s been great knowing you, laughing with you, arguing with you.

To my friends in Chawlk: thanks for all the encouragement you’ve given me over the past year. I am particularly in debt to Norbert ‘Gnorb’ Cartagena - not too long ago he took the time to go over one of my short stories, and edited the whole thing almost word for word. That herculean effort is still fresh in my mind, and it’s a sterling example of the kind of passion and the kind of people you find in 9rules.

Most importantly, however - to the readers who have followed Novelr: thank you. You’re the guys who matter the most in the end - the blookers, the writers, the thinkers. We have much Internet storytelling to do, and only so much time to do it.

Onward.

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The concept of a story within a set period of time has always interested me. Readers know how many chapters there are going to be: rather than keeping them guessing on how long before the story is concluded they have a sense of urgency as the events in the story unfold.

Take 24 (the TV series) as an example. The concept is pretty simple to grasp: each episode is 1 hour (of a day), and 24 makes up the entire season. This makes for pretty interesting plotting: you have the end in sight, now what is going to happen within those 24 hours?

Another example of this is Life Of Pi. Early on in the novel Yann Martel tells us he would give us Pi’s amazing story in exactly 100 chapters. As the book went on I found myself wanting the book to last longer, and I used the chapters as a yardstick for how much story there was left.

This has an interesting effect. In 24 the characters are plunged into a crisis, and the writers throw complication after complication at them. In writing, set periods coupled with non-stop hurdles prove for very interesting stories. When your characters are in deep, deep trouble readers are probably wondering how you’re going to get them out again … which is very good if you’re writing with a need of holding the reader’s attention.

Like, for instance, the computer screen.

I wonder how far I can push this concept - really short storytelling in … 25 chapters? Should be interesting, don’t you think?

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Chalk up another reason why the screen will never replace books: your nose.

It didn’t really hit me until today when I picked up one of those new Penguin Popular Classics, rejacketed in a lovely green skin. It was made mostly out of recycled paper, and it smelled sweet. As in honey sweet. I stopped every few pages to hold the book up and breathe in its heady scent.

Well, acting against this experience is Bill Gates - who once made a prediction that reading is going to become completely online.

“We believe that as we get the smaller form factor, the screen has gotten good enough. Why is reading online better? It’s up to date, you can navigate, you can follow links. The ads … are completely targeted as opposed to just being run-of-print, where many of the readers will find them completely irrelevant. The ads can be in new and richer formats. In fact the only drawbacks of the digital form are the things associated with the device: how big is it, heavy is it, how many hours of power does it have, how much do I have to spend to buy it? But those are things that once you achieve that threshold, in terms of the convenience and the cost, then you see a dramatic change in behavior. Today, for people who read newspapers and magazines, even the most avid PC user probably still does quite a bit of reading on print. As the device moves down in size and simplicity, that will change, and so somewhere in the next five-year period we’ll hit that transition point, and things will be even more dramatic than they are today.”

For some reason I imagine a little iPod-like device with holes … from which we get little chemical particles that smell just like a new book. And as the file fades away (or gets corrupted) we smell mildew and dust and (gah!) rot. And soon we’d be all saying to each other: “Gosh! It’s got that new eReader smell!”

I understand that the way things are going books may very well be phased out, a direct result of commercial interests. And I don’t want to speculate. But I dearly, dearly don’t want books to go - if not for the feel of the page, the smell.

Like my copy of Silence Of The Lambs: smokey, old socks.

Want to take a sniff?

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