A Part of a Balanced Breakfast

I've been reading a lot of Alexandre Dumas recently. Well, up until I started reading Louise de la Valliere, which is a court novel and absolutely boring.

The fact that the novel is boring isn't quite my point. Dumas wrote all of his major novels (The Three Musketteers, The Count of Monte Cristo) as a serialization in one of the Parisian papers. This brought me to wonder if there was a place for this type of fiction in the new medium of blogs.

(An aside on the word blog: I'm not sure I'm a fan of the new word. It seems a bit crude, but I suppose that words that are basically slang usually do.)

I first I thought that perhaps I had come up with something rather new (almost slipped into a pun). But I immediately rethought this idea as it is the 21st century and therefore there is nothing new. So I did a brief search on Google to find out what's out there.

Here's a few (I've only read the authors' introductions to their works, so I can't attest to the quality of the works):

• American Invisible
• Plan B
• Transplanted Life
  
• Monster Nation

There are, as well, a few sites out there that blog about blog related fiction (again, that word).

• Blogfic - which has much more interesting things to say than I do
  
• BlogNovel - which is like that guy at a party who the only thing he does is introduce himself, otherwise he seems to shy to interact. Maybe he'll warm up.
  

There are other forms of blog related fiction which may seem a bit more creative. This is the use of the blog as fiction in the form of a blog. There are similarities to the use a letter as a way to advance the story; Mary Shelly's Frankenstien is one good example. The story proceeds in what might feel like real-time to the reader. The author, on the other hand, probably has a pretty good idea.

One thing about writing in this fashion is that, in order to publish on a regular basis, posts are short and first-draft-like. I consider this a downside. I think there needs to be a reasonable amount of polish on a work. This allows the author to tell a complete story. If it is serialized into very small chunks, as a real-time blog would appear, it becomes difficult to keep track of. Again, Blogfic puts it better:

Serial fiction can get harder to write as you get further in, with plot threads left dangling and more characters than you can remember without a Rolodex. It can get just as hard for the reader – especially the non-dedicated reader who doesn’t want to start at the beginning and read a year’s worth of blog entries just to catch up. If your blogfic sells itself on the strength of an ongoing story, you’ve got challenges in making that story clear to the reader, and making sure that any given entry will hook them enough to want to read more.

The more I look at this subject the more interesting the area becomes. The medium of hypertext alone provides interesting ways to right a story. The concept of hyperlinking a story is something I haven't seen before. Parts of a story could be leaped, skipped, and repeated simply by the way the author uses these links. It like the "choose your own adventure" novels. There definitely could be some interesting ways to use the technology.

I don't plan to leap out into this new and uncharted fictional medium. I'm still a pretty crappy essayist. No sense in becoming a pretty crappy fictional blognovelist.

I revised my search in this subject, thanks to Ten Reasons Why, and The Synthetic Cafe.