Hello Internet. Your attention for a moment please. This is announce the beginning of a new project that needs your help.
There is fiction happening online, right now. It is small and niche, and has somehow become even smaller, relatively, in the last five years or so. I’m not talking about novelists publishing their novels in pdf, which is what the media usually means when they refer to online fiction. There’re also rich seams of fiction-blogging, short-form fiction, self-caricaturisation and lying-for-fun. And about 100 different formats I haven’t mentioned. That’s why it’s really difficult to talk about, because its so diverse and ofttimes disparate, as a concept.
So yeah, we’re doing this thing! It will be an interesting experiment. When I started writing online 10 years ago, I envisioned it as big ongoing continually-mindblowing art exhibit. Things did not turn out as planned, and it’s often more difficult than it should be to find people (writers!) (bloggers!) doing interesting, creative things. We took a wrong turn somewhere around OK Computer, best as I can figure. And maybe that’s our fault. Maybe if more people are more actively encouraging people to do interesting writing on the web, it’ll start to take hold. You have to be the change you want, you know? So OK.
