In early 2007 I closed down the last blook I was working on. Deleted it, made it private, archived the posts. Ironically enough it was the same blook that had driven me to start writing Novelr, but it was a failure. I never had enough time to update it consistently, and I lost readers as easily as I gained them. When I closed Janus I had zero. They had all lost faith in me.

Reader Expectations

We all know that posting consistency is the hallmark of a good blog. Blogs that update sporadically are bad ones, and they can never fulfill their potential as far as this trend continues. Novelr is a bad blog. I’m not saying this in jest - it’s the truth and there’s not much I can do about it as long as the academic year continues. I decided long ago that it was better to publish erratic but quality content rather than yell at my schedule and let Novelr die. It’s a horrible choice to make, and Novelr is not growing as fast as it used to. But life’s like that.

Novelr is, however, a blog, not a blook. Reader expectations of blogs are nothing compared to the expectation generated from a blog novel. I followed a few blooks before my academic year started, and I’m familiar with the strong feeling of murder whenever an author misses a scheduled episode (and doesn’t explain). Blook writers know it too - a lot of them apologize when reality pushes back an update, and readers are usually forgiving enough to tolerate that. But two or three times - a month - and the readership dips for the said writer. And once you prove you’re consistently inconsistent? Well. You’ve got suicide on your hands.

I have suggested before that the best way to improve blooking (or blog fiction) would be to implement some form of editorial process on the web. This is a problem for a few reasons: 1, some people come online to escape the constraining editorial process in the traditional print world; 2, an editorial process (or a way to separate the chaff from the wheat) sounds just like something a traditional printing house would do. It is, however, an easy way of introducing first time readers to good online fiction. Editors who know what they’re doing and a website that highlights the best blog fiction out there can go a long way in solving the drought of quality blooks we have at the moment.

Now the main accusation thrown at me when I suggest this form of filtering is that of elitism. Editors?! You kidding me? And on and on. And I’m sick of this, really. Elitism on the Internet as applied to content is quite different from elitism as a political concept - it is, in fact the thing that has kept culture growing for a very long time.

Elitism As A Form Of Quality Control

Before the Internet the only way to get publish was through a traditional publishing house. These houses were very serious about editing (and they still are, thank God), and the books they published met certain minimum standards of quality we have come to be used to - proper vocab, proper spelling, (mostly) polished stories. At this point some of my friends have argued that there are crappy books published by traditional publishing houses as well, but I have to point out here that these crappy books are far less than if Penguin published every Tom, Dick and Harry without going over their books with an editor and a smoking gun.

There is a problem with this model, of course. Traditional publishing houses run very tight businesses, and they often do not publish good books that they think are not financially viable. I wonder how many publishing houses would publish Das Kapital for the first time in the 21st century - I don’t think any would considering how nonfiction today is published based on the initial proposition of an idea to a publisher before the book is written.

But that is an extreme. For the most part the publishing industry and its minimum level of entry has pushed writers and poets all over the world to constantly evolve and bring something good, or new, to the table. The editorial process may be elitist, true, but when applied to culture it is a very effective tool for solving the signal to noise ratio.

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.

I was reminded today that good writing isn’t everything. It was four in the afternoon and I was stuck at a turning point in one of my manuscripts, and it hit me that everything I’d done to improve my writing did not matter then and there. I could have just as easily messed up the entire project by tackling the scene the wrong way, even if I did write it beautifully. This wasn’t a matter of description or style or clarity of thought - it was something more. It was story.

Story is that extra something we writers don’t really understand. Take a stroll through any bookstore today and you’ll find writing titles jumping out at you: The Elements of Style, for instance. Or On Writing, that highly popular craft manual by Mr King. But pause for awhile and note that Mr King didn’t write a book called On Storytelling. Nobody has, in fact - I’m still looking for solid works on storytelling alone.

What I’ve realized is that writing is actually the easy part of the craft. The other part - the harder one - is the ability to create a mind-blowing good tale. And that isn’t something that can be captured in a book - I’ve yet to see manuals entitled How To Write Like Steinbeck, or Where To Find Story Ideas. Things like that fall from the sky, or they don’t fall at all.

I read an article last year by a writer turned editor complaining about how hard it was to filter short stories for a collection. She quickly identified two kinds of submissions - the first was by a good storyteller with bad writing (which she could work on), and the other was by the writer who could write beautifully but had nothing to say. The first needed a lot of polishing; the second, however, was impossible to work with. These 2nd category stories were beautiful on the outside, but in the end the aforementioned editor found them to be empty. Rotten apples. Hollow cores.

So I took a break from my manuscript today. I didn’t know how to go on from that turning point - the possibilities were just endless. But that’s not the point here. The point here is that I’m thankful for the storytelling department. For my storytelling department. There are people out there who can’t pull a good yarn even if it was staring them in the face, good writing or not. And I know my writing’s not perfect, but I’m working on it.

I’m just thankful I’ve got something to say.

So far I’ve been very, very impressed with the way Penguin has been doing We Tell Stories. I thought week one was a nifty idea, presenting a narrative on Google Maps, but it wasn’t something mind-blowing because I’d seen it done on a blog before. My lack of faith was exposed two weeks later, with week 2 and week 3’s stories. Both blew me away. Here’s a look at the various forms We Tell Stories has been done in the past few weeks.

Week One’s story is a thriller built around Google Maps. This presentation style allows Charles Cumming the freedom to dispense with lengthy setting description and focus on the action. It works. I found myself impatiently watching the main character moving from point to point on the map, and the snappy, sparse narrative kept me glued to my seat. There’s a plus side to all of this: Google Maps has provided Cumming with a visual element and an easy level of realism not available to normal books. I could see how the main character escapes from the police in a dinghy, I could tell how far away the locations were from each other, I could even follow the character on a (very lengthy) train ride around London. Promising stuff, this. Technology used: Ajax, the Google Maps API, lots and lots of javascript.Week Two is done in a medium familiar to Novelr: blogs and twitter. Nothing particularly revolutionary going on here - both the blogs had cookie cutter templates and weren’t very enjoyable to read, and the story wasn’t good. But the interesting thing about these two blogs were the way the characters interacted with the readers. Some twitter posts were made in response to reader questions, and comments were answered in the blogs, in character. Since Lisa (the daughter) went missing in the middle of the story we had a few readers helpfully pointing out her blog and giving suggestions as to where to look for her … which they responded to. Technology used: Twitter, Wordpress and Livejournal.