The Most Audacious Blog Post EVER

I have elected to begin my blog with a half-assed cop at a literary revolution.

It seems to me that I was born with almost perfect precision in regards to timing. Perhaps our parents' peers can claim the demon of television and our grandparents can hang their hat on the eternally versatile medium of radio just as their elders praised telephony and telegraphy, but the advent of the Internet takes the basic premise of long range communication to something else entirely. Perhaps not since the kids raising hell in the alleys behind Johnny Gutenberg's press has there been a generation so blessed. Wires, phones, radios and TVs made it possible for strangers to be talked at by boxes or with one person at a time (the further away, the costlier). The net creates a new world that can allow people to create relationships with strangers on any continent and to get their fifteen minutes on the cheap. It is nothing less than a quantum leap forward—a permanent slip into an entirely new dimension—and I saw it from the ground up.

I like to sometimes still refer to the net as “the Information Superhighway.” Remember in '96 or '97 when it was still being called that? I was a—If I can be a skotch immodest—rather bright little kid, keeping up with the news and whatnot, and I had no fucking idea what they were talking about. It was a meaningless phrase—probably why nobody has used it since knowing your way around a gopher file has been called for. When an infomercially looking piece came on PBS one Saturday afternoon setting out to explain this information superhighway, I parked my 12 year old ass down to get a grip on this magic they said was being worked.

I won't repeat what they told me—really all I remember is when they described the difference between .com, .org, .mil, .edu and .mil—but I filed that away with all the other info I was reading out of World Book encyclopedias I'd convinced the teachers to let me take home. If you need any proof of the net's impact, look no further that when I read encyclopedias for fun I was the “weird nerdy kid” but now there's a word for the intoxication it brings—a Wikihole. I got bit with the bug when I got to middle school in 1996. At my suburban North Texas institution of barrel-bottom learning we had little besides too much money and as a result a surfeit of PCs. If you got to school as early as two hours before the first bell, you could go to the computer lab and get online at a top notch 28.8 kilobits per second. I remember the daily race to grab one of the one or two machines with Intel Celeron processors, failing that the few 486s, the smattering of 386s or one of the numerous and hated 286s. I got an email address (an FCA kid, I laughably chose JesusFreak49@hotmail.com) and was off and running by age 12, right alongside the Popular Internet from the very beginning.

I'm sure some spectacled white guy in ill-fitting pants will read this at some point and scoff at my presumption, having once gratified himself off of ARPANET porn. To this gentleman (I'll save half our species the ignominy by using gendered language) I'd tell that I am talking not about technology as much I am a cultural innovation—an echelon jump in terms of communication media. There have been people getting online for a few decades now, but the presence of technologically backward folks there is as recent as 13 or 14 years ago. I am of a great age to see a media that will surely outlive me by several centuries and swallow all its predecessors along the way in its embryonic stages. Perhaps it is true that nothing put out here ever dies, so some of the people then will still have this around to read (gives a whole new reason to leave comments, huh?).

It is this epochal jump that necessitates a literary revolution. Before the printing press, creating literary art in the form of printed novels made no sense. Literacy made left-handedness look positively normative and the process of producing each copy was so intense as to render the form unthinkable. An oral culture meant that bardic epics and long form poetry were selected for—they were easy to remember and pass on. Try memorizing 1000 words of Shakespeare (in the print age, but drawn from an older tradition) and 1000 words of Dickens and see which one is easier. Rhyme and meter are natural mnemonics that impacted the possible contents of their pieces, not to mention the meaningful organization. Printing presses sped up an already present process—the advent of prose fiction and the development of the novel. This medium has produced the fiction we read, with certain inherent and typically unseen limitations. A printed novel by its very nature as a physical object has need of a beginning and end. It also must be of a marketable length—60 pages would be far too short, 2300 far too long. Further, it is a static object. At times authors will release “authoritative versions” of their signature works, but these tend to merely restore cuts called for by publishers in the original go around. This static object is the tip of a creative iceberg—the final version of a tale that has been edited, revised, excised and manipulated dozens of times from inception to publication, most of its art hidden from view. The need for publishers with access to cash for production and distribution is another limitation on what is allowed for. Finally a novel is a product of a single person, or perhaps occasionally a duo—never a community of people. You could probably think of some others (throw out some ideas in the comments for our progeny to see).

The limitations I listed also happen to be the things a net-inspired literature would avoid. To this point net literature has consisted of web-based literary journals recreating on a cheaper and less respected scale the same forms print introduced us to centuries ago. But imagine an Internet literary form as distinct from the novel as novels were from epic poetry. Imagine combining the comfortable spontaneity of blogging with the fictional world-casting of fiction writing. Imagine if you could see a long work of fiction across its entire lifespan, and imagine if other Internet writers created subplots, counterplots and related stories in the same world on their own time. You could have a form that could be as long or as short as made sense for the tale, that could reach millions without corporate interference, that could change and grow over time, that could involve a community in tightening the narrative, directing the story and creating depth and breadth impossible in the printed novel. It could even be an endless story, a fictional saga that lasted decades, characters changing and growing as they would if they were real people. The possibilities are wide and can only be fully plumbed when more people get involved.

For no reason besides sheer sadistic joy in seeing serious people using ridiculous neologisms, I coin this literary innovation a NoBlogVel. Please come up with something better.

To the end of promoting this idea, I am hereby (historian progeny producing textbooks for 25th century schools...) commence the publication of the world's first NoBlogVel. This is a cyberpunky, dystopic, post-apocalytic number I just started pouring out this week and that keeps compelling new details. Frankly, it is set a while after some rather not good stuff I'd been writing recently. I'm not saying this is good, but I feel like I have world I want to explore alongside everyone else—see what other people find in this setting. I have no title for it—the filename is Occupied, so let's go with that for a while. Over time look for updates of Occupied and I encourage criticism, addenda and parallel inspired writings from peers online. Let's see where this can go (and if you start your own NoBlogVel, let me know, I'd love to participate).

Immodest? Certainly. Silly, in light of the fact that absolutely nobody reads this blog at the moment? With no doubt. But it is called for, and whether or not I do this some new fiction literary form will overtake us alongside this media. This is an attempt to play a role in this change. Enjoy Occupied and join the cause!