Turning and Turning the Widening Gyre

...the author cannot hear the reader.

For years, Yeats' "The Second Coming" has echoed in my head as the drumbeat of the ontological shift, the slide into the postmodern. Perhaps, this constant [mis]reading of the poem will aggravate some, but it's my battleflag. A battle flag rooted in a British Literature Survey class with Doc Marsden back in 2000. Back then, John Barth was about the coolest thing I'd ever read, and 'epistemology' v. 'ontology' was a war I only vaguely understood. But the visceral image of Yeats' poem--"the widening gyre...the center cannot hold" drove me to imaginings of black holes, to the embrace of plurality's structured chaos, and now a decade later, I still hear the echo of this poem, but it's feel is changing.

I'm teaching a comp class focusing on the death of the newspaper, but it's not too far to see a similar corollary in the literary journal realm. This isn't the first time I've visited the topic, but recently if:Book ran an article on Ted Genoways' essay in Mother Jones recanting "The Death of Fiction?" Barring the fact that the notion of fiction dying is probably the most overqualified argument ever--Barth covered it back in the 60s, and if I were to dig, I'm sure I could go back to the beginning of the written word and find someone who proclaimed "everything that can be written has been written." (But as a thoroughly postmodern aside: Doesn't everyone have to eventually in one of their infinite versions of themselves proclaim that fiction is kaput?)

Despite the tiredness of Genoways' argument, he wrangles some truly frightening numbers:

Last summer, Louis Menand tabulated that there were 822 creative writing programs. Consider this for a moment: If those programs admit even 5 to 10 new students per year, then they will cumulatively produce some 60,000 new writers in the coming decade. Yet the average literary magazine now prints fewer than 1,500 copies.

That's a recipe for a whole lot of letdowns. And while I think it's both sobering and important for all aspiring writers to face such facts, Genoways like many doomsayers, doesn't really give us much hope for change. He concludes:

To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes—and quick. With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm not calling for more pundits—God knows we've got plenty. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ's sake, write something we might want to read.

To which I say, No shit Sherlock. Genoways' solution echoes many others I've seen, and it really does very little to help solve the problem. Ok. We get it. Too many writers writing things no one wants to read, and not enough readers reading in the first place. Personally, I see contemporary realism's inability to compete with visual media as one of the cornerstone problems surrounding today's fiction industry. But my problem isn't necessarily your problem, and to sit here and whine about perceived problems with the industry isn't going to really drive any sort of solution from anyone.

So let's do something.

For hundreds of years, since Gutenberg actually, we've relied on the printing press. But now we have the Internet. And despite what the technological curmudgeons, the Neil Postmans, the Sven Birkerts, might say, our wired world is here to stay.

But it's a young, angry baby. It eats everything in its path. And it grows, oh it grows so fast that you can't keep it in fitting clothes for more than an eyeblink. But it's our baby. And as parents, we are beholden to it, and it to us.

It's time to start modeling, molding, shaping. The Future

Relying on the printing press for anything is increasingly antiquated. You won't find many arguments touting increased reading rates for kids these days, unless such arguments are about reading Facebook walls, fashion blogs, and online news.

Which brings me back to Transmedia.

As the Internet grows, so too do the number of writers trying to make it big. More of us are getting published online, and more journals are either going straight to online only or offering a hybrid between print and online. While print fiction still offers more clout, conceivably this could change. And Transmedia fiction can help usher that change.

With so many new writers emerging onto the scene, and publishers literally buried under a slushpile of [bad] fiction, Transmedia fiction offers perhaps one of the best solutions for our growing problem.

Let's examine its boons:

1. It fosters a community of writers -- As writers, we don't operate well in a vacuum. The more people we have to discuss our works with, the better said works become.
2. As a community, Transmedia groups would build thematic collectives, which would easily cater to a wider audience -- Think about this. I've spent considerable time trying to find literary journals that write what I want to read. It's hard work, especially if you're on a budget. But online Transmedia collectives can easily be controlled by tags and keywords. Looking for some metafiction? There's a tag for that. How about post-apocalyptic salon/day spa drama? There's a tag for that too. Very easily like minded people can gather and produce consistently interesting and tightly focused fiction. This is far harder to accomplish in the print world.
3. There are no boundaries on the internet. We don't have to deal with pretension. An ass-good 14 year old can be giving constructive criticism to captain three-PHD and be none the wiser. The abstraction of the Internet facilitates fierce collaboration without traditional stigmas of race, education, age, nationality, and gender.
4. People like free things, and Transmedia exercises should inherently be Creative Commonsed and more or less free to be consumed. Most emerging writers aren't making money on their fiction anyway (as most publishers just do the contributor copy thing these days), so it shouldn't be a hard leap to make your content available free of charge. Plus somewhere down the road, if/when you do get real popular, I'm sure someone (if not just LuLu) will want to sell your internet-published serialized book. And then you'll have your $20 monthly royalty checks.
   
5. Such communities can operate/become part of your favorite social networking application. Why not have a Facebook group dedicated to writing stories about people with chronic nightmares about having a bad case of Pickle farts?
6. And when Joe Average starts reading these facebook stories, perhaps, he too will join our ranks and churn out his own pickle fart nightmare. Even if Joe's story isn't destined for a Pushcart, it's a lurch in the right direction, a win for literacy.

No, Transmedia isn't perfect. There are lots of potential pitfalls here as well. But the scope of our problem with fiction isn't that it's dying, rather the format we are used to is starting to break down. Too many people are too connected to the Net to be bothered with print reading. Fiction isn't dying, but a change in gameplan is needed. And as I continue to mull over the status of my own writing, and where I want to see myself as an author, more and more the thought becomes--Transmedia is the only way to go.

Reporting that can be lost

This past week my ENGL004 class took a look at Gary Kamiya's "The Death of the News." In it, Kamiya takes on the now "old news" (to steal the aptly bad pun) that the newspaper/print media world is dying, but he does so from a slightly different angle, saying,

What is really threatened by the decline of newspapers and the related rise of online media is reporting -- on-the-ground reporting by trained journalists who know the subject, have developed sources on all sides, strive for objectivity and are working with editors who check their facts, steer them in the right direction and are a further check against unwarranted assumptions, sloppy thinking and reporting, and conscious or unconscious bias.

And so when Kamiya aptly says, "If newspapers die, so does reporting," we're left with a scary thought, or are we?

It's no lie that here in the logorrheaic mire of my mindspace that Kamiya's threat of an anti-reporting distopia becoming "a postmodern world right out of a seminar taught by Jaques Derrida...[where] Nietsche's credo that 'there are no facts, only interpretations' will become our epistemological motto" is one that I would whole-heartedly embrace simply for the sheer interest such an plural version of our reality would bring to me. But then again, good god it'd be hell to win an argument.

But I digress,
Kamiya says that newspapers and reporting are intrinsically linked. And to that I agree, but Kamiya is a professional, a journalist, and someone who knows the industry from the inside. His definition of a reporter is one that is perhaps too specific for "real" world application.

On the beat, reporters to all us gloamish nodes can range from true newspaper journalists in all their monochromatic glory to the tv pundits that irk Michale Lind so much (mentioned in my last entry here). So while Kamiya may be on to something, he's fighting the good fight.

I don't fight the good fight. And I don't think all reporters need saved. Newspapers aside, there's some sneaking shit that needs a severe kai-bosh. And what irks me the most (for the moment) is this whole process of growing speculative journalism.

Let me set the stage.
Wednesday, I turned on NBC to watch the State of the Union at about a quarter after eight, mainly because I couldn't remember if Obama's speech started at eight or nine. I was greeted with a craptacular "pre-game" show for the president's speech. I know this has been going on for a while, but what the fuck? Have we as a population become so incredibly bored that we don't even want to watch some shitty syndicated sitcom from the 90s until the State of the Union comes on? Couldn't NBC find something, maybe the Slap-Chop infomercial to air before Obama took the stage?

Yes, I could have changed the channel. But in my defense, I was only half listening (thank god for that), and I was chasing my daughter, so by not changing the channel, I could keep a lazy eye in the direction for the speech to commence whenever that was supposed to happen.

In my half listening, whatever hack journalist/pundit/guest/whatever happened to be talking began to go into this analysis of Obama's speech before it aired. Now, everything I've ever learned about cutting someone down revolves around the idea that you at least let the person you're attacking get an opportunity to make an ass of himself first.

Instead, I heard this jerkoff pundit going on and on about how Obama's speech is too long, and how the American public does not have an attention span for anything beyond 40 minutes or so. Now, without having seen the speech, which I'm guessing this guy hadn't (I'm sure the president had to release the timing so the networks could set up their scheduling, but I can't see why he'd say a whole lot else about it), how can anyone speculate on whether or not the speech will hold the collective attention of the country? Especially when Obama is relatively well-known for his ability to actually speak in front of an audience (unlike his predecessor). Secondly, the lesser masses of our country, upon hearing that 1. the speech is long and 2. they can't stand listening to something that long are going to take this guy (who has to be both smart and correct because he's on TV) as being generally correct, and thus tune out to the State of the Union.

This is a huge disservice to the American Public. Not only is it advertising a subversive bias against Obama and his agenda, but also it's undercutting our population as being both ignorant and too stupid to be able to make our own decisions.

This sort of journalistic speculation, of course, isn't limited to just the State of the Union; it happens all the time. Think about it. How many times have you heard reporters saying something like "President Obama is expected to announce X, today?" No harm in that. It's objective, and newsworthy, but often what follows is speculation on how whatever X may be will affect us. This, while perhaps ok for some talk show, isn't news.

But that's kind of the problem anymore, isn't it?

The news (on TV at least) has morphed into this monster, where every fact must be vetted through an unacknowledged bias before fed back to us. Can you imagine turning to any news network and seeing only objective stories for more than 15 minutes? Oh wait...that's CSPAN. But no one watches CSPAN.

So as I'm rambling here, let me cull things down to a single point: Kamiya wants to save reporting, but we need to make some distinctions, because the speculative crap on TV is some of that bathwater that needs thrown out. It's like a parasitic Siamese twin to real reporting...you know one of those things that's nothing but a heart, an empty brain case with teeth, no eyes, and a whole lot of hair growing inside your stomach like you're pregnant, but it's your twin, and it's eating you.

But perhaps, thinking back on Kamiya's argument, this is exactly why he he fears for the loss of the real journalists. The newspaper doesn't allow for this kind of inane speculation, as newspapers are generally behind the times, reporting on past events. Their analysis then can be based on objectivity, on some sort of traceable facts.

But it sure would be nice to turn on the State of the Union and not, even if you're half-paying attention, have to hear some jerkoff droning on about how much the upcoming speech is going to suck without any real proof to back it up.

And the speech? Obama's a charmer. I'd be real happy to see just about everything he said happen. But I'm jaded to. We need more than two parties to get any real change in government. I'm looking forward to some good times ahead, but I'm not holding my breath.

The Partisan Rant and Why Paywalls Suck

Backstory

Back around Thanksgiving, right when I was starting to plan out this class theme of News and the Age of Information, I remember hearing that Rupert Murdoch wanted to delist all of News Corporation's holdings from Google and put them behind some kind of paywall. To which I immediately said, "Awesome. If that keeps Joe Average from reading [un]Fair and [un]Balanced Fox News on teh Intarnets, score one for the world.

And before everyone goes off the handle calling me a pinko leftist commie, lemme say this: While I may disapprove of most conservative politics, I have no problem with conservatives. I DO however have a big problem with partisan news labeling itself "Fair and Balanced." You can't be fair and balanced and push a Republican agenda at the same time. And this is a long standing problem (dating back to Walter Lippmann's journalistic revolutions in the 1920s) with news media--they claim objectivity, but party politics always sneak in. My advise: broadcast your bias, and be proud of it; let the readers decide whether you're right or not. Hiding behind a mask of objectivity makes you look like a douchebag when someone (like George Carlin on O'Reilly) calls you on it.

On an increasingly off-topic parallel, Michael Lind posted this about the growing problem of political media pundits on cable news. His problem: "Most of the representatives of progressivism you see on TV are not really progressives. They are what might be called 'Democratists.' Most publicly prominent conservatives are not principled conservatives at all. They are 'Republicanists.' With the problem being more or less not the political spin, but rather the fact that these pundits spend their time defending their respective parties' actions, rather than actually preaching/believing/acting according to their political affiliation.

So perhaps moreso than a lack of journalistic responsibility in being forthright with your political bias, perhaps the pundits, as described by Lind, are the real downfall in newsmedia.

But I Digress

All of News Corp's holdings haven't yet fallen behind the paywall scheme kicked around by Murdoch in November (though the Wall Street Journal is already there). So for the time being, we can still celebrate the relative freedom as net surfers to choose just about any media-outlet-online-news-poison we want. But, as of Monday, this News Corp talk of Paywalls seems to be a growing fad. I caught this article in the New York Magazine about the good old New York Times starting to reconsider its current situation and undo the free state of the newspaper that's existed since 2005 when they realized no one wanted to pay for electronic subscription (the 2005, sorry, charging you was a bad idea letter to the readers is here). So here's their reasoning:

The argument for remaining free was based on the belief that nytimes.com is growing into an English-language global newspaper of record, with a vast audience — 20 million unique readers — that, Nisenholtz and others believed, would prove lucrative as web advertising matured. (The nytimes.com homepage, for example, has sold out on numerous occasions in the past year.) As other papers failed to survive the massive migration to the web, the Times would be the last man standing and emerge with even more readers. Going paid would capture more circulation revenue, but risk losing significant traffic and with it ad dollars. At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."

While I understand the need for any business to want to push forward, turn a profit, and stick around, I have a hard time buying into the idea that some sort of "metered system [similar to the one] adopted by the Financial Times, in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe" is the way to go.

When I search for news online, I like to browse headlines. Some days I won't get much deeper than headlines, others, I'll drill through several articles. The second that some form of paywall stops me, I'm gone. News isn't that important for me to buy an account--especially when I know that I can probably find something similar elsewhere, or as a last resort, use my university account to pull it out of a newspaper database from the school's library site. While every news source will have a different take on the news, there are certainly enough out there that are still free. Drop one behind a paywall, and another online paper that's free gets a spike in traffic. I see Salon, Huffington Post, Smoking Gun, and The Drudge Report all making out like kings from this.

Sharing is Caring

One of the big cornerstones of the net today is the ability to share. Almost every site of any import has connectivity links to all major social media outlets (facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc), in addition to aggregators like Digg. If you block something behind a paywall, you just shut down all the additional traffic you're netting through social media. Why throw away potential readers? That sounds suspiciously like something Verizon would do (damn the customers, damn the employees, worship the profits).

However, all my whining and reactionary thinking against this paywall idea will mean nothing short of ranting unless I offer something up to remedy the situation. One of the best things I learned about whining is that people tend to accept your whining a little more if you try to pair your problem up with a solution. Back in my Verizon days, it united our department, when my boss made us carry around little notebooks that said "issues" on one side and "resolutions" on the other. We couldn't bitch word one until we had thought up some sort of resolution to the problem we had. But with resolution in hand, we had the floor. So, I've gone on and bitched for several paragraphs about this whole paywall idea. Here's my solution: If you want to generate revenue of some sort off of your online news content, and somehow advertising isn't cutting it, take a note from the music industry (and I don't mean those assholes over in the RIAA. I mean NIN, Radiohead, Madonna, Oasis, and all the other musicians who've cut their record company ties and gone solo), and put up a tip jar. When In Rainbows came out in 2007, Wired.com estimated that Radiohead pulled in as much as $10M on their CD, where they allowed fans to set their own price for the album (Van Buskirk). (I payed £10 for my copy, btw.). In any event, letting users contribute what they can when they can, still generates revenue, but it also generates respect and follows along with the sense of "giving back" (isn't that one of the great buzz words of the times?) to something you believe in. Sure, you won't be raking in bucketloads of cash, but for intangible content that people can already get for free, what more can you ask for than a tip?

New York Times, you have some good content. I've used your articles before in essays, but if you ask me to pay, I'll go away, and I won't be the one crying the river. I still have my Slashdot, BBC, and Salon (which I did start reading more regularly as opposed to what my last blog entry said [at the very least, I put its headlines on my iGoogle homepage]).

Somewhere off the Face of the earth

So in Early December, I posted here saying that I won at teh NaNoWriMo. And since then, it's been pretty quiet here on this blog. Sorry about that.

Call it a New Years Resolution, or perhaps a Interesting-challenge-because-it's-also-an-assignment, but my goal is to blog weekly for the next fifteen weeks in hopes that I get back into a more regular swing in updating the currently lacking ramblesnatch in this pitiful blog's existence.

Either way,

Here't Goes:

Between watching my now thoroughly insane (as in Holy-shit-kids-have-way-too-much-energy-and-why-can't-I-have-a-tenth-of-that insane) daughter sugar herself up into a Christmas frenzy (the first such frenzy [being the first year she was cognizant of holiday fun] of several impending frenzies, I'm sure), and trying to ease the discomfort of Sue's pregnancy (apparently all boys are Assholes [my term not hers] in the womb--I'm sorry mom), and revising the Shadowman project (I finished a solid pass just this past week -- W00t), I've been talking and thinking and prepping for classes, which started yesterday. (I just realized: In the above I listed a bunch of stuff, but not anything about work. It was there too; but that's the ignorable bit; it's like sleep, I guess--an interim between the other, more important stuff. Not that work is bad like it was in the Verizon days, but thankfully and blissfully, contracting has been relatively stress free, and thus totally ignorable like the fifth child out of six).

This time around I've picked up two, a Rhetoric and Comp and a Basic Writing. And it is because of the Basic Writing Course that I'm challenging myself to blog regularly, because that's exactly what they'll be doing. Specifically, I've beet talking to my friend Grace a lot about various topics related to my course themes. Most of our discussions have revolved around a mutual dislike towards Facebook (which started out with Grace mocking me for joining fb back in June or July, and ended with Grace saying "see I told you it was Evil" when I quit in early December). We've also spent a goodly amount of time talking about newsmedia and the current shift that's starting to happen between print and online content.

Personally, I never read a newspaper. I've always found them boring, and the size, formatting and layout annoys me, not to mention the cost. However, slashdot, Google News, and for a good long time BBC news have all replaced any sort of need for reading traditional newspapers. Granted, I'd like to pick up some more sources; in researching essays for class, I've found that online content on Salon, The Atlantic, and a couple other places is really top notch. But I am the king of taking on too much, so while I have good intentions, I don't really foresee my news reading circle expanding much (especially in the face of how much I've been lagging in reading fiction).

So with that said, I think online news is the way to go. I'm sure I'll cover my take on the whole Rupert Murdoch/News Corporation vs. Google bit here soon, probably next week, but I think print journalism is dying, and no one is really going to miss it. While I sit far enough into the tail end of Generation X to not fully understand the usefulness and ubiquity of Twitter and Social networking (perhaps because I'm just not that social--I like my cave, and I don't like to leave it), but I do think that them kids with their cellphones and twitter feeds will be getting most of their news from that. With each successive generation we become more attuned to multi-tasking. And as that becomes more of a necessity, doing things like sitting down to read the paper will become increasingly preposterous. More likely, we'll catch a bit of news in a deadspot between text messages, while waiting in traffic on the road, or have it shipped to us, pre-filtered and set up to our desires via Twitter, RSS and all that other fun Web 2.0 stuff that makes teh Intarnets useful to us.

NaNoWriMo, A Month in Review

It's hard to believe that November's over. After a month's worth of scrambling to write or think of what I'm going to write next, I'm both exhausted and feeling strangely empty. Empty in that there's no deadline hanging over my head any longer. Guess what,

I love deadlines.

But,

Statistics

• 50,899 words
• 52 Chapters
• ~ 150 Pages in manuscript format

Overall Plot Structure

I originally planned to cover Nigel's life from age 9 to about 15 in the span of 50k words. I ended up covering from 9 to 10, or about the first 1/3 of what I was looking into. This leads me to Lesson learned #1:

• I am a wordy bastard. And as such, I expect to cover about 3 times what I actually cover. And that's not a bad thing. (Let it be known though, that My wife, who also did NaNoWriMo, Covers exactly as much as she expects to cover in the range of words she's working with, which is something that I find both awesome and amazing [We'll talk about that more in a bit.]).

So the story if you break it down covers the time from when Nigel leaves his decaying family behind and goes out into the world to make it on his own. Almost immediately, he meets up with smuggler and revolutionary, Robert McKee, who takes him under the ole' wing and teaches Nigel to read all the while filling the boy's head with ideological dreams of a better future.

Nigel then breaks McKee's friend Aleistar Tweedy from prison, a man reknowned for his ability to read any text. With Tweedy out, they steal an elven tome containing banned magic (The Diruleans don't do magic, or elves for those of you not up on your Ae'rinus lore). Their plan, cast some spells and wreck up the town. But,

Nigel gets captured by Leicaster Dunnovan, the noble (and apprentice Necromancer) that Nigel stole the book from in the first place. Nigel spends a good bit of time in the dark, being tortured, before eventually breaking free and killing Dunnovan.

In the process he finds out that there is a second book, which is in possession of Dunnovan's master, William Blakesley. Nigel goes after the book, spends ten days in a shipping crate crossing the Portsmouth bay, and rides back to Darkepoole with a bunch of Na'Claad gypsies led by Quick Jonny Quink.

Upon returning with the second book, things are starting to look good, until town guards attack the tavern where McKee lays out his plans. [details of the climax omitted] Nigel barely escapes with his life, and is forced to flee to Rae'lan.

Flavor of the text
If you've ever read my stuff, you know I'm annoyingly postmodern with orientation--footnotes, metafictive elements, plurality, blah blah blah. This book doesn't have much of that at all. Overall, what I thought of when approaching the writing was two things: Grit and language. So I channeled a lot of what I learned from Ann Pancake's glorious use of language together with a bunch of good dark grit ala the kind I get from reading Kilean Kennedy and all his recommendations, and came out with something that's full of clipped incomprehendible (possibly to some) dialog, and lots of teeth getting knocked out amid spraying blood and gore. I tried very hard to vocalize the differences in accents spoken by the characters in the story, and even varying accents from the same localized area based on age and experience and what not. According to Sue, I was successful. Once it's publishable (word on that below), we'll see how it flies in the wild.

Sound of the text
Music is a requirement when I write. And usually I get some sort of playlist going that builds the mood of whatever I'm working on. This project was a bit problematic with music in the beginning as nothing really seemed to drive the narrative inspiration for me, but once I got up around 20k words, I found myself constantly hopping onto YouTube to watch a quick video or two for inspiration. I ended up making a playlist of them, which is now up to 51 songs. Here's a feed:

Overall though, I think the most influential song was Handlebars by the Flobots (thanks Rod for turning me onto that song way back when in Grad School).

The Highlights
Perhaps one of the best things of NaNoWriMo wasn't the writing so much as the fact that my wife, Sue decided to join in the fun with her own NaNoing. She started out by hand, writing her Cersee stories, but then eventually switched online and managed to hit 30k by the end of the month, which considering that she spent a good chunk of the month rewriting what she wrote by hand, and the fact that she, unlike me, values sleep she did a super job. It was truly a great month for us to be sitting side by side creating things together. And since she isn't done, I'm looking forward to this month and future months of us working on finishing her story, and building new ones. I think this writing process might be a real great replacement for D&D, which with real little kids right now, is very hard to pull off.

I'm also very happy to have finally gotten back to my roots by writing fantasy. Back in college, I felt pushed to bury my love for genre fiction in favor of literary writing...which was probably a good thing, but now it feels awful nice to decend into fantasy again. The Nigel cycle is far from over, and in the coming weeks and months, I plan on building a transmedia experience out of it using a combination of background information-like blogs on my Ae'rinus blog, as well as even more in-depth stuff on the Ae'rinus wiki. As for the actual text, I plan on serializing it and releasing direct to teh Intarnets as soon as it's revised enough for release.

So that's more or less where It all stands. Here's to more stuff in the future!

I win!

50,899. We'll talk later. Mmm K?

Novels, November, and TransMedia

Back in July, I posted this bit on TransMedia and fiction. Since then, I've continued to mull on the subject, and much to my happy surprise, I got into a pretty cool email conversation with Scott Walker, one of the founding members of BrainCandyLLC, an online startup that does exactly what I was talking about--facilitates world-building for all sorts of media, and unlike the Harry Potter fanfiction type stuff referenced in the Henry Jenkins essay that kicked my mind off on this whole thing in the first place, Walker's flagship at the moment is a custom fantasy world, Runes of Gallidon, with a surprising breadth of detail and contribution. So from what I can see, this sort of collaborative setting is working out to be a very successful force even outside the already successful fan-fiction realm. And this is a good thing for fiction. Good because:

1. In an increasingly electronic world, classical literacy is decreasing, so an increase in these types of sites, fan-fiction, or not, will help combat this loss of literacy.
2. I'm deeply bothered by people who casually say, "I hate writing." Often I think this stigma is created by bored teachers in the public realm, who lack either ability or energy to properly motivate students to write. Online collaborative communities change that.
3. If traditional print fiction is languishing, fan-fiction, and now other types of fiction are demonstrating that a new collaborative home on the net, may be the spark to kick things into a new renaissance.

So, coupling in with National Novel Writing Month next month, I've decided to start pushing my own brand of collaborative openness. Here's how.

I've been a D&D gamer since way back when. 5th grade maybe. And in those many many years, I found that as a DM, I've always gravitated away from official gameworlds to my own, Ae'rinus. I have a wiki: http://aerinus.wikispaces.com, and an Ae'rinus related blog, neither of which have been all that active in recent years, but I've always wanted to do something with them. So here's the gameplan: I'm going to start writing the fantasy novel I've always wante to write. The one that I've forever put aside for the silly notion that literary fiction was what I needed to do. And while I won't be posting it as I go (because good god, my early drafts are bad), but I do plan on posting both environmental information about Ae'rinus, side stories, as well as other relevant material as I develop the main novel. When the novel's sections reach "publishable" form, I'll post them in serial, and hopefully one of two things will happen:

1. People will read and enjoy what I've written
2. People will feel motivated to start adding to this ontology of Ae'rinus.
3. (with a 3rd pipedream goal of: I become a rockstar D&D DM/writer and get to tour the country running gaming sessions, writing books, and having plenty of time with the family without having to have a soul-sucking dayjob..oh and medical benefits too [hey If I'm going to dream, might as well dream big.]).

Here's a blurb of what I'm working with. A sort of half-assed preface if you will:

Deep-seated in the heart of history there is always the blemish of darkness, dark times, of painful memories and hearts hardened—winter for the soul. Every age knows these stories, of overcoming darkness, transforming a landscape, but stories embellish—they forget the depths, the lows we sink to when faced with demons on all sides. They celebrate the outcome as an inevitability, as if men and women are born heroes destined to save us all. Stories are a point of convienience; they have the vantage to see the whole process from afar. But sliding within the morass, buried in the deep-gut-drop stink where your life is entrusted to a dagger blade so chipped and stress cracked you're pulling your thrust a bit and hoping to hell you don't catch it off a rib or hidden hauberk.

To a great many, Nigel Caedman was a hero—involved with bringing the gods back to the land, becoming one himself, slaying demons. Spread the growth of independent guildhalls, which led to safer roads. He fought in the civil war to overthrow the corrupt Dirulean crown. He traveled the planes. Found lasting love, married, and raised seven children. How could he not be a hero? Unblinking, he murdered men, women, and children if they crossed his ideals. He lived by gypsy code to point of fault; respecting nothing, taking everything from food and lodging to sex. He raped. Pillaged. And even despite the grandeur of ascending to the role of deity, this two he has squandered again and again, opting to cast it all off for a few more years wandering a land that he loves. A land where he has no permanent home. Surely no hero does these things. Heroes are just and pure. They stand for light and hope. Faith, humility, honor and love. Heroes are legendary and celebrated, like Cersee Nailo Caedman—Nigel's wife. But this is not the tale of a true hero. This is the story of that which creeps in the shadows, the bloody knife blade, the stink of whiskey-breath in the morning rain wet from another night under the stars. Doing what needs to be done, whether or not the people agree or realize what horrors are kept at bay by his stained hand.