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Agent James Johnson of the Continuity Integrity Agency (CIA) of the year 2300, or thereabouts, had recruited me from my own year of 2008 to stop a murder. Or, at least, that’s what he told me while we stood in a garden in that far off future.

“We’ve been tracking Zebediah for quite some time. We’ve gathered intelligence that suggests he means to kill someone from your era. We’re not entirely sure why, but just the fact that he’s involved means that we’re interested in foiling the plot.”

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I rubbed my hands vigorously through my hair and hollered for a full minute. Agent Johnson of the Continuity Integrity Agency waited patiently beside me, his hands in the pockets of his pants.

“Feel better?” He asked when I finished.

“No,” I rasped. My throat felt sore.

“I know it’s a lot to take in. You’ve been in three different time periods in less than twenty-four hours. Give yourself a minute.”

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The technician in the control booth decided to speak.

“Mr. Franklin, please allow me to apologize on behalf of the Federal Bureau of time Investigation for any inconvenience we may have caused. It is our sincere hope that you will be able to return to your own era with your memories restored. This is beyond our capability, but we have procured assistance. I turn you over to Agent James Johnson of the CIA, and bid you good day.”

“Let’s go, my man,” Johnson said. He sprung to his feet and waved bye-bye to Jameson, and then strolled out of the room. I followed, relieved to be going.

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I don’t know how long Agent Jameson and I sat in silence. I don’t really know why he stayed, either. Maybe he hated being in quarantine as much as I did, and appreciated the company. Even if we weren’t speaking.

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It appears that in the time I’ve been offline I have missed out on several big developments in the online fiction sphere. The Golden Notebook project is one of them.

Notebook isn’t really a blook - it is a novel by Nobel Lit-Prize winner Doris Lessing, and many consider it to be her most ambitious, and probably her greatest, work. The Notebook project is an ingenious one: it places the entire book online and it asks 7 readers, all women, to read the novel in real time and give their comments in the margins of the webpages that make up the novel. 

Part of me is awestruck: whoever came up with that idea must’ve been a friggin genius. But the other part of me - the writer part - is combing this project for ideas, is reading the book for the first time, and has come to the conclusion that whatever I have previously thought possible of this medium is but a pale caricature of what’s coming, of what can come.

Notebook as a novel is most famous for its structure: the work is divided into the four ‘notebooks’ of the writer Anna Wulf, each categorized by colour and each containing different aspects of her life. The story is concerned with Anna’s efforts to fuse all these disparate books together into one final, golden notebook, and the novel is set up in such a way that the four notebooks are referred to in non-chronological, overlapping manner, all excepts from the novel Anna is currently working on. The structure comments on the story, and the story comments on the structure, and it is precisely this that makes Notebook the kind of novel that takes weeks to read, and weeks more to figure out (another that springs to mind is Infinite Jest, which is structured in a circle, and where the beginning is the ending is the beginning is the ending).

What strikes me the most about the entire Notebook project is that it takes reading - an experience strictly individual - and it combines it with the living web: something inherently social and conversational, something that you really don’t expect reading to be. Now anybody going through The Golden Notebook can do so with the benefit of a host of people who are arguing, talking and who are above all, like you, trying to make sense of said and unsaid things within the novel. You no longer have to spend weeks of your life immersed in an epic, structurally intricate work of art, only to emerge from that experience going … huh. Or perhaps - and this is more likely - you no longer have to worry about leaving stones unturned while you’re reading the novel, as is often the case with such post-modernist works. 

Another thing that jumped out at me, right from the get go, was the very contemporary nature of the comments. On page 5 of the online novel (and, by the way, this is online pagination that actually makes sense) a paragraph in the margins pointed out that The Golden Notebook was one of the books listed as important to president-elect Barrack Obama. And the rest of the comment went on to say that certain books shape certain leaders in certain ways, which was all very interesting to think about and very helpful to me as a first time reader and certainly gave some idea of the context this novel occupies in modern day society, considering that it was originally written as a feminist text.

Commentary and pagination notwithstanding, I think the limitations of such a project are clear for all of us to see: The Golden Notebook works well in this format because it is written in such a way as to benefit from critique and discussion. There is, in fact, a podcast that talks about the many possible ways you might read the novel, and … yeah. That pretty much speaks for itself, doesn’t it? I’d definitely be better off with the opinion and insight of more established, familiar readers of Lessing and postmodern literature than if I’d read the book alone, and even Lessing says in her preface: “Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallization of information in society which has not yet taken place.”

There is one other problem with this format that I am slightly uncomfortable with: and this problem is that of trust. My reading of The Golden Notebook will be greatly influenced by what these 7 chosen readers say in the margins, and I believe that the quality of that commentary, and perhaps the quality of my experience, would be strongly dependent on the quality of those readers. If these readers are competent, and are within the intended audience by which Lessing writes the book for, then I suppose I am in safe hands. Though, thinking about it, I’d expect that my experience should benefit from a clash of opinion in the margins, where perhaps I can choose from views the same way a shopper might pick merchandise off a shelf; but what does that say about this form of reading, and does that mean that I am entrusting these readers to do my thinking for me?

I don’t have clear answers for that, and at any rate attempting to answer them might derail this article and push us into the territory of pedantic, stuffy, reasoning. But one thing’s for sure: the days where people can say: “No great writer exists on the web” are gone for good.

[Update]: Turns out The Golden Notebook is done by none other than the guys at if:book, who’ve been behind quite a number of digital fiction experiments to date.

[Update 2]: On a slightly unrelated note: Christine Rosen over at The New Atlantis talks about the serious implications of shifting from book reading to digital reading. Much of her concerns are similar to what the New York Times have had to say on the issue. (via Sharon Bakar)

I wasn’t going to blog on Novelr until the redesign was complete, but recent unhappy events in the publishing industry turned out to be too big for even this non-conventional litblog to ignore.

The outpouring of negativity and anger, of grief and beard-pulling the past two weeks, and over ‘Black Wednesday’, have been pretty depressing to read at best. Bookstore chains suffered: Borders, for instance, posted losses of $175.4 million, or $2.90 per share, compared with $161.1 million, or $2.74 per share in the same quarter of last year. There have been too many reports of the various layoffs and troubles plaguing agencies and publishers; one Salon.com article has a byline that reads, almost gleefully, “The economic news couldn’t be worse for the book industry. Now insiders are asking how literature will survive.”

I’m not going to comment on ‘Black Wednesday’ itself, because writers greater than me have blogged and dissected and given us their collective takes on what this means for culture, for writers, and for the reading public in general (in a nutshell: culture will survive, writers will write, and the reading public will be able to find whatever book they want in bookstores because nothing has been sold out). I prefer to talk about the changes the publishing industry are taking to deal with their problems. The good news? They’re turning to the Internet.

There seems to be growing evidence that publishers are moving, and moving with focused intent, onto the web. There are no guarantees, and there certainly aren’t any solid business models for them to latch onto, but God they’re trying. Let me toss you a personal example: sometime in the middle of this year Tor launched a supersite. I was studying for exams at the moment, and I had a short break. So I checked it out.

I absolutely loved it. I spent about 3 hours on the site, reading all the fantastic short stories and checking out the related ‘how we wrote and produced the original art that went along with that’ blog articles and the forum posts and the author-reader interaction. You see, Tor got a whole bunch of heavyweight writers in their stable and somehow got them active in the community section of the site, along with the short stories and the original art. My favourite is Steven Gould’s Shade, a short story set in the Jumper universe he created.

There are many more examples: Harper Collins recently announced that they’d be putting ebooks into the Nintendo DS; Penguin USA have released Penguin 2.0 (which are a collection of book-related apps to computers and (get this) mobile phones), plus Macmillian (click that link, it leads to Macmillian’s digital lit branch; totally cool) are pushing for their Stanza reader for the iPhone. And on an off-note: an independent designer has packaged The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the (copyright-free) short story behind the upcoming movie, as an iPhone app, for $0.99.

I’m pretty certain that all this movement is good news for the Blooking community. There might be overcrowding, and jostling, where before we had the whole net to ourselves, but I suppose that comes with the turf. A rising tide raises all ships, independent producers included. And while the recession may suck for the time being, I’d like to point out, with cautious optimism, that sometimes the worst of times provide the most unbelievable of opportunities.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

I opened the dish and found what looked like a lump of bread. It was dark brown in colour, like a rye loaf.

“What is it?”

“Food,” Jameson said. He took a bite of his.

“But what kind of food?” I was extremely hungry, and it didn’t look that appetizing.

“Food food,” Jameson said, shrugging. He chewed with relish. “It’s good.”

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Jameson explained that the lid was designed to keep water in, unless someone wanted to drink. Suction made the lid porous, and then the rest of the time it was an unspillable, unbreakable glass.

“My era is a lot less confusing than yours,” Jameson told me. “Cups don’t break. Drinks don’t burn your tongue. Food doesn’t make you sick.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“When I first visited your era, a lot of things were surprising. Coffee burned my mouth the first time I drank it. I got heartburn and bowel problems.”

“You never drank coffee before?”

“We don’t have it here.”

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Apparently, the future doesn’t have any beer. Or, at least not FBI headquarters in the year 2119. Well, at least not in their quarantined guest quarters. Either that, or their computer doesn’t understand the English word for beer. In any event, whatever the reason, it wasn’t going to let me get drunk.

I looked around my temporary quarters. It didn’t take long for me to explore. There was only the one room, the same plain white as the hallway. It was oval shaped, and the only piece of furniture was one of those fancy chairs.

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I groaned and slammed my fists against my armrests. Jameson and the tech stared at me pleasantly.

“Mr. Franklin, there is no need for hostility. The chair certainly isn’t at fault!” Jameson scolded.

“Shut up, Johnny,” I snapped. Jameson looked hurt. I turned to the tech.

“I need to know what happened on Sunday. You need to tell me, since you can’t give my memories back. You want my help with Zebediah? That’s what I want in return. To be filled in. No more being in the dark.”

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I glared at Jameson, and sat up in my seat. “We’re more than a century in the future?”

“That is correct,” the technician answered. “Our sensors have verified that your chronometric readings come from the early twenty-first century. You are, for the moment, apparently who you say you are.”

He turned his attention to Jameson. “Agent John Jameson, of the Federal Bureau of time Investigation, please state for the record your purpose in bringing Subject: Diggory Franklin to headquarters.”

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I stood in a white corridor of self-illuminating panels, breathing perfectly filtered air, pointing a gun at a man from the future. The long white hallway stretched in both directions, seemingly endless. The moment itself stretched endlessly as I put a slight amount of pressure on the trigger.

“You have about three seconds to explain that,” I said through gritted teeth. “Before I erase your memory by putting a bullet through your brain.”

Jameson turned to look at me. He had that same damn expression on his face as always, that stupid pleasant smile.

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I took a big step back from both Jameson and Johnson, raising the gun. I pointed it at one and then the other, trying to watch both at the same time.

“Somebody better answer me!”

Jameson pushed his weird goggles up onto his head, and he looked confused underneath. Johnson just stood there with a wry grin, shaking his head. He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the FBI agent.

“You opened this can of worms, buddy.”

Jameson stuck out his lip and stomped his foot again. “You are in grave danger, Diggory Franklin. We don’t have time for this.”

“Make time!”

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I had barely a second to unlock the safety and check the chamber, before I was pointing the gun at the door. Armed men spilled into my apartment, firing towards us with silenced pistols.

“Get out of here, NOW!” Johnson snarled at me. He waved for me to retreat into my bedroom, and then turned his attention towards the door.

Johnson was outnumbered. He had no weapon. I wondered what he thought he was going to do to stop them.

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As usual, stuff to check out:

• Ryan contatcted me while I was on hiatus last month to inform me that his publisher Gryphonwood Press is now accepting web fiction subs. Worth a look, and he’s recently announced that they’re taking in submissions for a new anthology. 
• This is probably one of the saddest articles I’ve seen in awhile: Aida Edemariam on sifting through the publishing industry’s slush pile. She writes that the Internet is causing a decrease in the number of unsolicited manuscripts to publishers, though people still submit them, praying that one’ll eventually be picked up and put to press.
  

  The internet, of course, means that more and more people publish straight on to the web, either as is, or to get peers to comment on it. Ten years ago Hamish Hamilton was getting 20 manuscripts a week rather than four, and Prosser puts this decrease down not just to active discouragement, but also the ways in which writers are learning to circumvent the traditional machine. “I do think there’s been an opening up,” says Swift. “A lot of writers are taking things into their own hands and publishing online.I think sending things in blind now is about the most stupid thing you can do.”

  Watch out for the article’s ending - it made me sigh.

• I’d also like to direct you to Amber Simmon’s web fiction project A Timely Raven. I gave it a 4.5 on Web Fiction Guide, and I really recommend you read it. This is non-linear fiction at its best, and Simmons has also leveraged design to present a truly compelling story.

I sat back in my chair and blew air from my mouth in frustration. Old Man White stared back at me, grinning.

“I know it sounds ludicrous,” I said, “But it’s so deliberate. With uncanny timing, my father rode waves of profits until just before the bubbles burst, and then pulled out. Every time. Not one risky investment, one loss, over the last year. Why do I get the feeling that I’d see the same thing if I looked over last year’s books, or the year before?”

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In Japan there exists such a thing as keitai bunko, or keitai fiction. Writing for keitai is the practice of writing a mobile phone novel: published, distributed and read on screens no larger than a playing card. It is consumed where all good books are consumed: in Japan’s overcrowded trains, in waiting rooms for doctors and dentists, in toilets and bedrooms and sitting-room couches. Their model is similar to that of blooking - an author (and any author, really, for there are no slush piles) starts a novel and slowly gains an audience as the novel rolls on. And here’s the surprising thing: keitai is closer to mainstream than we are.

The most famous keitai shosetsu (mobile phone novel) is probably Koizora, a semi-autobiographical love story about a girl and a cancer-striken boy. I can say with utmost confidence that it is a big success, because I watched the movie myself on a TV screen in Malaysia. Japan’s cultural exports come in the form of film, music and manga, so I suppose it’s irrelevant that the film started off as digital fiction. But yes, Koizora is a bestseller, and yes, I think it’s sappier than The Notebook.

But Is This Exportable?

The answer? Well I’m not sure. On one hand Japan is famous for its cultural exports, but we have to admit that not everything makes it out of the country. Anime and manga did, but whimsical robot helpers and talking toilet bowls didn’t. Plus we have to remember that Japan has one of the highest mobile phone and broadband penetration rates in the world. Whether or not we can use Japan as an indicator of our digital future remains to be seen.

What I can tell you, and tell you confidently, is that the mobile web is set to explode. Let’s take a look at the numbers: global mobile penetration is at 3.3 billion, or 50% of the world’s population, compared to 21.9% for Internet penetration. I can argue that this number is misleading, because most mobile phones don’t have access to high speed data networks, but then again the point of those numbers is to show you how much more assesible mobile phones are as compared to computers. Taking this down to a personal level: you’re more likely to be with your phone than you are your computer, especially if you’re commuting from one place to another. And if you don’t have 3G access, or your phone doesn’t, then it’s only a matter of time before you buy a new one, or your telco upgrades its infrastructure: the life of a phone is much less than that of a laptop.

The clincher here is probably the amount of larger companies circling this segment of the web. I can point to Apple’s iPhone, RIM’s Blackberry, or Nokia’s app store initiative, but I believe Google’s presence makes a far more compelling case. Google is an ad company. Their business isn’t mobile phones, nor is it open source mobile software. What they’re doing with Android isn’t to snatch the phone market away from Apple or Nokia or the rest: the whole idea behind Android is to control the advertising on the mobile web. And if Google is willing to put so much into a mobile web initiative, then you can bet that they’re expecting big things to happen in that sphere.

What Does This Mean For Us?

Quite a few things, really. An explosion of the mobile web presents an unprecedented opportunity for web fiction. Mobile phones aren’t very powerful devices, and a limited battery life means they won’t be on game/music mode for very long. What they can do, and do well, is present text - they’re made for SMS, aren’t they? And with the advent of mobile Safari and Opera, these phones are now better equipped to surf the web - with limits, of course. No youtube and live media streaming, and that plays right into the hands of the text smiths.

How this comes about and how mobile phone novels can be distributed are a mystery to me. And there’s the same old problems with digital fiction: what formats do we use, and what operating system would it run on? But I’m fairly certain the answers won’t be very far away. Look sharp and keep an ear out. Things might get interesting.

My exams ended on the 4th of December, and I was suddenly left alone with my newfound freedom. I surfed the Internet a bit, clicking about in random directions, in much the same way a criminal may run in circles after being released from prison. His freedom renders him purposeless after years of confinement, the same way I was rendered purposeless after 3 months of crazy studying. I think it’s quite possible for one to equal the other.

I’m back, and I’m sorry for not updating Novelr earlier. My exams have left me frazzled and a little woozy, and it’ll be some time before I can get back into gear here. It doesn’t help that I’ve got quite a few other things to do - I have been spending the last couple of days reading up on PHP, because it’s about time Novelr got a redesign. And there’s design work to be done on Web Fiction Guide (WFG) as well. But that’s getting ahead of myself.

This post is a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to be a WFG editor. The editors, if you don’t already know, are the people in charge of reviewing and rating the 144 or so blooks listed on the site. I’ve not been a very good editor: WFG was started months ago, but I’ve almost never reviewed anything there. Put it down to my academic schedule, I guess, and bang me on the head with a wooden spoon.

Behind The Scenes: The Art (or torture) of Reviewing

What, you think we randomly choose what we review?

A review assignment usually begins as such: we hop into the Editors’ private forums and skim through the latest discussions. The topics here run the gamut from serious to nonsensical: one might be about a delisting request (the editors decided it was against WFG policy), while another might be about how we’ve been called semi-professional (go check them out!) by a StumbleUpon user. Very often, however, our personal lives slip through and colour our discussions: Gavin Williams had a baby a few months back, and we paused our discussions to congratulated him and the missus.

The chief reason we log into the discussions area is because of a spreadsheet Chris Poirier updates. It contains all the new listings and it tells us who’s reading, or reviewing what. The unreviewed listings are marked in bold, and the editors place R, W or X under their names to mark the various stages they’re going through, with regards to that particular work. An R is for Reading, W means ‘Writing a review’ and X marks a completed assignment. R sometimes last two weeks, if the blook in question is boring as hell.[1]

Review Systems: Should You Read Everything?

There’s been some discussion in the WFG member forums as to what system to use while reviewing a blook. A rule of thumb that many use is to read and write a review based on the first five chapters. The reasoning goes as such: after five chapters, “the story’s had its chance to draw you in, and if it hasn’t it might simply not be your cup of tea - in which case you might as well jump around at random and see if things change.”

I’ve had some time to mull over that system, and I have to conclude that whatever system we use is often created out of necessity rather than personal preference. WFG posts up to 3 new listings a day, many of them novel length, and to keep up with all these listings is nigh on impossible if we’re to read through everything. Part of our problem is that most of these works don’t even deserve a review in traditional critical establishments - they get filtered and are left in the slush piles of publishers. There’s actually an agency that provides professional assessments of unsolicited manuscripts, but there’s a catch: you have to pay good money for that service (and they will read everything, and pass it on to a publisher if they think it’s worth a shot). WFG editors aren’t paid anything, and so we have to make do with what we have.

My view on reviewing systems (and we all have different ones) is that I will read as much as is needed for me to write a fair review. Some works, the good ones, I’ll read through from first to last. The lousier ones, however, I’ll pass after 1 or 3 or 5 chapters. My job is to tell you if it’s worth your time, and the best way to do that is if I’m honest. Forcing the editors to read through everything, particularly if that story is bad, does nothing for either reader or editor: you’re not likely to appreciate a work for its themes or ending if you can’t get past the first few chapters.

It’s a fine line that the editors walk. We have self-imposed deadlines, so the backlog won’t get out of hand; but at the same time we realize that the people we write the reviews for aren’t the authors, but the readers. This balance between speed and fairness has been highlighted once or twice in the editor forums, and I will say as much: as dedicated to the community as we are, we won’t be able to cover everything in the near future. If we take what’s happening now (3 new listings a day occasional lulls in between) and scale it with what we know of the increasing importance of the Internet, then it doesn’t take a genius to realize there will come a time where listings will outstrip the editors who can review them.

The solution? We have no idea. We’ll work on it, though (because we’re semi-professional). Till then, however, we’ll read, we’ll review, and then we’ll read some more.

1.The RWX term usage is also a geek joke only Chris, Jim and the Unix programmers of the world would understand.↩

After confirming with Matt that he’d had no trouble dropping off the money to the Squid, I hustled downstairs to catch a taxi and head over to Mr. White’s house. I tried to concentrate on the matter at hand, running my father’s business, but I found myself distracted.

Why did that dream bother me so? It wasn’t even totally comprehensible. But I was still certain it had taken place in the warehouse. And Calla clearly remembered events from last night that I couldn’t recollect. Something was wrong. But what?

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“You… had a good time?” I asked, sliding into the seat across from Calla.

“Of course I did! It was amazing. Thank you so much!” She grinned.

“Anytime?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

Calla giggled. I’d never seen her so enthused, she usually seemed a lot cooler than this. She was almost giddy, like a kid at Christmas. Whatever I did, it seemed like it had been awesome. The problem was, I couldn’t remember most of yesterday at all.

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