Marlon was looking up at me, gaping mouth wide open.

I ignored the frantic gulping that his lips made. Open close open close. How annoying; swimming about in the distorted glass.

I had spent two days making sure everything was ready. A trip to the bank to make sure all my finances were in order. I wouldn’t want the government to slam down on my money just as I was about to pull off the greatest act in my short life, would I?

She would receive my greatest manuscript ever, made great not by the quality of prose - (which she insisted was not on par with ‘The Work I Usually Publish’) - but the tragic beauty my final act would give to it. Just as Van Gough’s story was made beautiful by him sawing off his ear, mine would be defined by the selfless acts I do, or am doing now.

I wonder if Oprah will feature me in her book club?

The belt is there, leather gleaming in the afternoon sun. I test it, pulling it down and letting it snap back up towards the ceiling. Strong. Elastic. Would it break my - nevermind, Marlon was swimming to the other end of his bowl and making annoyed swishes at me. No time to think no time to doubt. Out of sight out of mind.

I step up onto the plastic chair, placed my head into the loop of the belt. The buckle felt cool against my neck. Marlon was swimming back towards me. When he stopped, having reached the edge of the fishbowl, I would …

Ack.

[H]e [the aspiring writer] should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with. (The Paris Review, Spring 1958)

-Ernest Hemingway

Yes, I chose to interpret the quote literally and did it as a writing exercise. Thoughts? It was very fun, considering Hemingway made that remark with tongue stuck firmly in cheek, and with a totally different meaning to it. But if I am to be cut down by fierce literary critics then I should at least write about a fictional hanging … just for the heck of it.

Writing should, after all, be fun.

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I’ve just received one of the biggest shocks of my (online) life.

Let me clarify a little. I’ve been writing and posting and having exhilarating conversations on the internet for four years. At first it was just forums, discussing writing, theology, and code (I was learning CSS back then). Then I started blogging, writing about things that affected me personally as well as the little gems that make all our lives worth living.

So two days ago I posted a simple 9Rules Note, reading:

I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but lately i’ve been forcing myself to capitalise my ‘i’s while posting in blogs other than my personal one. Do you write with a big I, or do you write like the ‘i’ like I did in my first sentence, where only the ‘i’ at the start of a sentence is capitalised?

Does it even matter online?

Within half a day there were 39 replies from various 9rules network members. It was frightening.

Gnorb said: Always capitalized. Always. Not seeing it capitalized (unless obviously accidental) almost always ensures that I never return to that site. I understand if grammar is not the writer’s strong suit — (s)he may not be a native English speaker — but not capitalizing the “I” is just plain lazy. Right up there with never capitalizing anything or capitalizing everything, all the time.

Phantomdata said: I enjoy people who believe that when posting online, all writing conventions fly out the window. Truly, I do. It provides for me a way to separate the idiots from those who have something worth saying. If you fail to capitalize or like to convert such simple words as “to” into “2″* then your laziness and recent discovery of the internet tell me to ignore you.

So, please continue failing at capitalization. Once the throngs of idiots learn to write, I will have to find a new way to filter them out.

* Outside of satire, of course. lulz.

Of the 39 replies (now 44, actually), only two supported the use of non-capitalized ‘i’s. Reasons given: “…’s pretty“. However, the vast majority relaxed the ‘Capitalise ‘I’. Always’ rule in informal settings such as in IM conversations, or IRC channel chats.

I was … perplexed, to say the least. Why was there such a big storm of opinion about something so seemingly insignificant? Perhaps my background in online writing (forums in the beginning, remember?) and treating my personal blog as an informal medium for my thoughts led to this habit of mine to miss hitting the shift key. On paper I write just the way I was taught: with capitalised ‘I’s and complete, whole words.

The impression I got of ‘Capitalise your ‘I’s, because this is English’ made me think twice. To me reading a non-capitalised ‘i’ online wasn’t as bad a mistake as mixing up ‘affect’ with ‘effect’, or typing ‘thought’ as ‘tot’. Those words make an otherwise professional-sounding article seem amateurish, since readers have to replace the abbreviations mentally while reading and this interrupts the flow of ideas.

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I came across a post two days ago in the blogosphere (specifically, posted in Vox and found here), and it started me thinking as well drafting a response in this blog.

Ed-infinitum’s post is an answer to the question: Do you think that ‘blooker’ prize winners would have won the ‘Booker’ prize? If not, why?

His post is a remarkably well thought out affair, with references to the articles that may or may not have sparked off his reasoning. It took me two days before I started writing this reply, because, well, it requires some thinking.

Ed-infinitum’s post is in essence saying: no, Blooker prize winners cannot win the Booker prize, simply because blooks are part of the Blogosphere - an ‘amateur medium‘. So what the Blooker prize does is to award the best of the amateurs, and creates a category of what he calls ‘professional amateurs’ who do not aspire to be ‘intellectuals’.

“Blooks are the new books, a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology,” said Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu which organised and sponsored the prize.

What Bob Young actually means is that ‘blooks’ are ‘a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of’ non-upper (intellectual) class literature. How, pray tell, can the ‘intimate diary of a prostitute’, or a ‘guide to ’s best greasy spoon cafes’, or ‘misadventures in the kitchen’ be considered to be located on the ‘cutting-edge of literature’? How do they compare with, for instance, Evelyn Waugh, Virginia Woolf, Ngugi wa thiong’o, Rousseau, Marx, J.S. Mill, Marcuse, and so on?

He sums up by saying that the best kind of awards spurs nominees along a ‘vertical development path’, to make them be the best they can possibly be, and to break past the barrier that separates amateurs and professionals.

Now, what he proposes may be elitist in its stance, but I can’t discount the fact that he is right, and he’s not the only one who has made such an observation. In a ZDnet article entitiled Reflections On The First Decade Of Blogging Dan Farber quotes Andrew Keen’s new book The Cult of the Amateur:

…instead of creating masterpieces, these millions and millions of exuberant monkeys [Internet users]–many with no more talent in the creative arts than our primate cousins–are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity.

Yes, it may sound offending, especially to you and me, mere mortals on the internet.

But there lies my counter argument against Ed-Infinitum’s post. The blogosphere is new, it is raw, and it can be described as The Madding Crowd. Using it as a medium to publish books (blooks) is still very much experimental.

But who is to say that the next Hemingway or the next Faulkner would not have online origins? The internet is ’social’ and is getting more and more ingrained into our daily lives. I’ll be willing to bet that in a few years most of us will feel like we’ve had a lobotomy the instant we go offline, and that means the most of the next wave of ‘professionals’, no matter how elitist that sounds, will have an online presence of some kind.

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Cory Doctorow has posted an interesting article at Locus Magazine about why reading ‘long-form works’ off the screen will never succeed - not that there’s anything wrong with reading off the screen - just that novels aren’t written or made to be read in a digital environment.

His article goes on to say the various problems facing reading novels online: the multitude of distractions available with a click of the mouse (oh wow - i need to clear up my spam folder!), and the fact that pleasure reading on a computer is in a splintered, scattered form.

The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.

His observations are true, for someone who has published 3 books and then released the entirety of all 3 books on his blog. In unbroken text, under a Creative Commons License, no less. So let’s ask ourselves, is it possible to release fiction online and attract a sizeable audience doing so?

I believe it is possible, but very difficult. Writing a novel in blog form to me has always been just another way of writing a book. There may be readers, and then there may not be readers. But putting your novel in a digital format allows for a lot more flexibility (and a certain degree of interactivity) that writing in, say, a spiral bound notebook.

So what works for online reading at the moment?

1. Really Short Stories (RSS?) - Millions of people read blogs everyday, and if there are people reading personal blogs like Dooce and An Unreliable Witness then it is only safe to assume that people will read fictional accounts of the lives of fictional characters. So while we can have fiction on the web, the stories presented cannot be as long as Lord Of The Rings, or even War and Peace.

2. Sharp Writing - We deal with words on the web. There is no escaping that, even with the proliferation of broadband and the rise of streaming (music and video). People still communicate with each other through words, and it is in our best interests to devour sharp, witty, high quality writing that comes in bite-sized pieces. Which brings us to our next point:

3. Bite Sized Pieces - There has to be a system for delivering your story in acceptable portions (not too often, yet not too spaced out) and each portion must be of an acceptable lenght. How can this be accomplished? Blogs may have RSS feeds, but there is the inherent problem of the reverse chronological order that its posts are presented in. Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town has a service that delivers chapters (from chapter 1 to chapter 2 and so on) to your favourite RSS feed reader every few days. And I’m very interested with an experimental online book form that can be found at the Institute for the Future of The Book (link).

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I’m composing this post in Windows Live Writer, a novel experience indeed. Take a look at this post in a screenshot!

If you’re a writer and you deal with blogs, or you’re writing your book in blog format, Windows Live Writer is one tool you shouldn’t live without. I’m completely in love with it. Head over heels. There are absolutely no reasons for you to lose your blog post to a buggy internet connection again. While Wordpress has an autosave feature, there are occasions when your internet connection dies (rare, but very common where i come from) when a good two thirds of my post just dissappears. And of course any good writer knows that the flow of ideas being cut off and interrupted simply puts you off from completing what you’ve started.

Features That Make Me Swoon

Apart from the inherent advantages of composing posts offline, Windows Live Writer has another big thing going for it: Ease Of Use.

The entire software is so straightforward and seamlessly integrated with my Wordpress platform I’m actually finding it hard to believe this was made by Microsoft. Really, the interface and feature set is something we’ve come to expect from Apple (it rocks almost as much as iTunes!) and i’m just about jumping around with how easy it is to post, to insert pictures and maps and links and styling elements, and to actually see how my posts looks like in my blog in real time, since the program pulls my style sheets down and applies it to my words.

There’s even plugin functionality, where you get extended features for specific blog platforms released in a community-like page, (a lot like the Wordpress blogging platform and their plugins). Is this even Microsoft we’re talking about?

Amazing.

Setting It Up

Is a total breeze. You enter the address of your blog, your username and password, and Windows Live Writer handles the rest, pulling your style sheets down, finding out what categories you have, and generally making sure everything you need while posting is available to you within the program.

Note: you do need the .Net framework to run Windows Live Writer, but this shouldn’t be a problem at all.

Possible Problems

I’ve only tried it with (this) Wordpress blog, and my experiences with making work with Blogger differs considerably. I got various errors and i couldn’t post or put up labels. Then again it could be temporary, since i’ve not downloaded plugins that could make this piece of software rub well with Blogger, and i have to remind myself this is still a beta version.

Nevertheless, i’m happy with it. It works well, you get to insert Maps, Pictures from your hard drive, and everything from an easy to understand Word-like environment. It rocks? You betcha.

Download it here.

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