Ten-Sided: Dissecting a Disaster Part I

Ten-Sided was supposed to be a blog fiction written by 10 writers with 10 characters using a many to many format. It was commisioned by the New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. When I first found it I thought that it was just tedious. Now that I've forced myself to read all of it, I realize now that describing it as anything short of "total bloody clusterf***" would be an understatement. So, why did I force myself to read it? I wanted to see if I could figure out what went wrong. Sometimes figuring out what doesn't work can be as important as figuring out what does work.

One thing I wanted to point out. I really wanted to see if I could point to an alternative opinion on the piece. I wanted to end the whole series with:

But don't listen to me. I'm just a white collar worker with delusions of being a literary critic who thinks Moby Dick sucks. The whole thing could've been the deepest, and genius work of art since Hamlet. After all this person(s) thought it was great.(insert link here)

The reason I can't end with that is because I couldn't find anyone who wrote something favorable about the project. In fact, I couldn't find anyone who had written anything about the project after it started. I found tons of articles announcing the beginning of the project(see here, here, here, here, and here) and one announcing the related fictohedran project, but not a single article written about the project once it completed. I'm forced to conclude that either A.) Everyone learned from their mom that, "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all" or B.) I'm the first human being that forced myself to read all of it. Based on my experience with most internet forums, I'm leaning towards option 'B'.

Moving along now... let's get to the dissection of this thing. Let's start with the rules the writers were to abide by in creating their blog fiction:

Ten-sided explores a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the decentralized nature of creation through blogs. Ten fiction writers collaborate with one another using a simple set of rules:

• Each author creates a fictional character for use during the project. There are no limitations as to what these characters might be.
• Each author is responsible for creating and maintaining a blog in the voice of that fictional character, and is required to employ RSS or Atom or both, so it will be easy for readers and the other authors to follow along. This blog will last for three months, from March 18, 2006, to June 18, 2006.
• All ten fictional characters are somehow connected, but the nature of those connections cannot be decided beforehand, they can only be discovered, or perhaps asserted, during the process of writing.
• Any sort of pre-planned coordination regarding the narrative is forbidden. Authors are supposed to only take their cues from the public writings of others.

The website also tried to predict the end result.

The resulting improvisation resembles a jazz performance or a session of exquisite corpse, but in a new form of creative practice that comments on and employs the multivocal nature of blogging communities.

Personally, I think the jazz performance was a bad analogy. At a Jazz performance everyone agrees ahead of time that they are playing jazz. Ten-Sided was more like a punk rocker, pep-band drummer, country banjoist, and Broadway singer trying to improvise. No matter how good they are, they have very different styles and interests.

One rule was that all of the characters had to somehow relate to the other characters. The problem is, how do you get the following characters all to relate to one another?
A member of Mi6,
A Homeless New York Musician,
A Depressed Gambling Addict,
A Cat Killer under house arrest,
A doll maker,
A nerdy scifi author,
A guy who lives with his mother that can't tell the difference between dreams and reality,
A bi-polar pack rat,
A father who's daughter is missing, and
A psychotic under house arrest.

I don't care if you're Henry David Thoreau, you're going to be hard pressed to force all of these characters into a relationship. So did the writers of Ten-Sided. Many of the relationships were very light and just barely mentioning each other. One of the characters pretended to be a singer. Poof, everyone's character "connected" by listening to his music. Problem was, that wasn't really interacting with that character - and not that interesting. No one even used going to an Ezra Kire concert as a method of meeting someone.

So let that be the first goal of a multi-character blog fiction. Find someway for the characters to quickly establish a relationship.

The problem with Ten-Sided was the rules were the perfect blend off being, at the same time, too harsh and not harsh enough. The rule saying they couldn't collaborate outside of the narrative meant that they couldn't plan any meetings between their characters. Therefore, no one knew how to get their characters to meet one another. Nobody could say, "hey, my character plays online video games. If your character does the same, they could meet online". Or "My character is going to an Ezra Kire concert, if your character goes they can meet and... who knows!". One way to fix it is that they could've eliminated the no outside interaction rule.

Another way they could've fixed the problem was they could've been more restrictive and added a rule. A rule could've been that each character must already know at least 1 or 2 of the other characters. That way 10 writers don't have to worry about how they're going to connect with all of these different people.

That's enough for now. In my next post, I'm going to try and tackle the "plot", of Ten-Sided. I think you'll be amused. If you're a fan of the TV show Lost, you might even like it.

12 Things to Note When Reading Fiction Online

As I mentioned before posting has been light here as I try to finish up a long and difficult to read blog fiction. However, I'm noticing some more things as I'm spending pro-longed times reading these blogs.

First of all, it's true, your eyeballs really do get tired reading all that text on a computer screen.

Second, unlike most web surfing, you can't read blogs while the tv is on. Even if it's a thinking-absent reality tv show. The commercials will still distract you.

Third, Laptops get hot after you've got one on your lap after an hour of blog reading.

Fourth, Laptops aren't good for reading in bed

Fifth, Laptops aren't good for reading in the bathroom either

Sixth, I wonder if an iPhone would be good for reading blog fiction. If they are, I want an iPhone

Seventh, Even if the answer to number 6 is "no", I still want an iPhone

Eighth, I should've made this list a numbered list

9. If someone interrupts you while reading a book, it's okay to hold up a finger to stop them while finishing a paragraph. If you're reading from a computer screen and you do this, you're a "jerk".

10. It's easier to get away with reading fiction at work if it's published on a blog rather than carrying around and reading a book.

11. I still want an iPhone

12. Eleven is too weird of a number to end on

How to Save Your Spot When Reading Fiction Online

Posting around here has been a little light for the last few days. The reason is that I've been reading a rather large and difficult to read blog fiction. I'll be writing all about soon. There's something else I wanted to talk about in this post. How does one "bookmark" his\her progress when reading a blog fiction?

Here's what I mean: Say you're reading through the archives of a blog fiction, but the archives are much too large to read through in one sitting. How do you mark off where you left off? You could just use the "bookmark" feature of your web browser. Although, if you do that you have to remember to delete the old one after creating a second one. The second problem is that if you aren't viewing the content one post per page, instead using something like the date ranges to display multiple posts per page, you'll still have to remember which individual post on that page you last read.

If you're reading a blog fiction that has multiple characters, it could get even more complex. If you're reading one character at a time you have to keep track which ones you've read. If the posts are stored on different blogs, now you gotta have a bookmark for each blog. If you're reading in chronological order, that means you have to delete and create multiple bookmarks every time you have to answer the phone, or yell at the kids because they don't know how to share their wii.

All of this is just a long winded way to point out another way that reading a book is easier than reading a blog fiction. "Saving your spot" isn't always as easy as sticking in a bookmark or folding over the corner of the page.

This may seem like thing to complain about, but I assure you I'm not above complaining about the little things in life. If I'm taking a 15-20 minute break from something (say my day job or honey-do list), I don't want to spend 5 of those minutes trying to figure out where I left off. That's like a quarter or third of my break. If I was reading a book or magazine instead, I could've spent that extra time reading the end of a long article or one of those tiny little chapters in The Da Vinci Code.

I don't suppose any one has a simple way to solve this problem that I didn't think of?

Interview with a Zombie Lawmen

A couple weeks ago in my post, Zombie Lawmen? Where the heck did this come from!?, I wrote about a weird ad that brought me to the site zombielawmen.com. With a only a little effort and a kind webmaster I was able to get in contact with the creative director of Zombie Lawmen. His name was David Gregory and was gracious enough to take some time and answer some questions about the project:

What was the idea behind Zombie Lawmen?
Gregory David: Zombie Lawmen was first conceived of in 1997 by John Lucas and myself. At the time we were both working at Media Station, a company that developed CD-ROM games for children. The theme of Zombie Lawmen was decidedly more adult. The original concept came from a drawing John Lucas did of famous gun-slingers from the old west brought back to life as zombies. I developed the first back-story.

The project stayed on the back-burner for nearly ten years when I came up with the idea of using the story to create a blog fiction. The idea was that there would be three separate bloggers each telling the same story but from a different perspective. Readers would need to read each of the blogs to get all of the details. Each blog was to have a drawing that depicted the dramatic action of each entry. The goal was to create a serial story like Jules Verne's or graphic novels.

Who was your target audience?
GD: The target audience was adults who were interested in horror/fantasy/scifi.

How would you summarize the story?
GD: The story is about a fictional future where lawlessness rivals that of the old west. It is an alternate reality where Tombstone has become a major metropolis that is run by the Clanton gang with high tech weapons and designer drugs. Scenes revolve around the zombies who have been brought back to life by a relation of Doc Holliday, and their conflicts with being alive, remembering the past, having zombie characteristics (like eating brains), yet being cast as the good guys against the evil Clanton empire.

How many people worked on the project?
GD: Three writers, one artist, one web master, and one project manager.

Who came up with the idea?
GD: I did.

On the site I saw links to 3 different blogs. How was the work divided? Did one person work on each blog? Or did everyone work on each blog?
GD: Each writer assumed the role of one of the characters doing the blogging. They all lived in Tombstone and had varying levels of interaction with the zombies.

In what ways do you think was writing online different from writing in a book or magazine?
GD: The writing was geared towards being on-line as blog entries were kept relatively short so as not to be too tiring on the eyes. Writing a book would have been very different because that would require much more descriptive writing and detail. Zombie Lawmen was very action oriented.

How long did the project last?
GD: The project was about 4 months in production and ran for six weeks on-line with new blog entries from each character Monday through Friday.

Are there any plans to bring the story to a different medium, such as a comic book?
GD: That is under consideration. There is also the possibility of doing it as a podcast drama. We recorded character actors reading the blogs and I added foley effects and scored musical themes.

Why was the project abandoned?
GD: The readership did not develop as we had hoped. This could be for a variety of reasons but we have no data to indicate exactly why it didn't take off. It could be the sheer volume of stuff on the internet that makes it hard to find. It could be that people who like horror/fantasy/scifi are more into games and movies than reading. It may be that people just didn't find it that compelling but judging by the small number of hits we got, it seems more likely that it just didn't get seen. It could be and probably was a combination of many things.

I found out about your site through an online ad. Were you aware that google adsense was still running ads for your site?
GD: No.

Besides online ads, how else did you promote the site?
GD: We ran targeted ads on Facebook at select Universities around the country and one or two overseas. Those didn't net us many viewers.

Do you, or GMobileMedia have any plans for future blog fiction?
GD: Probably not. Zombie Lawmen was a tremendous effort that we paid for out of our own pockets. We did all of the work in the evenings when we weren't doing our day jobs. It was exhausting.

What's next for you and\or GMobileMedia?
GD: Not sure. There is still a lot of work to do to create the podcasts. That would be the next step.

Do you have any advice for someone trying to start their own blog fiction or online story?
GD: Think small. Zombie Lawmen was probably over ambitious. If I were to continue, I would stick with one writer and one artist. Better yet, be a writer who can also draw. Another idea is instead of original content, use something familiar to people that would draw them in. It is too expensive to license content so use the Disney trick of stories in the public domain.

That's a real shame about the project not doing well. Hearing more about it I wish I could've seen it in it's prime. Let's all hope those podcasts get finished.

Rant on (lack of) Copyright Law Changes

This isn't, nor is it meant to be, a blog that discusses politics. Unfortunately, as long as politicians are writing our laws, we can't talk law without talking politics. I don't know what it's like for my friends across the pond or around the world, but copyright laws here in the USA are as outdated as they are draconian.

Faced with the new openness of the internet, the idiots running this country did little to clarify many of the new questions of copyright that the internet brought. Instead they extended how long a person or corporation could hold a copyright. Then, in the name of preserving intellectual property made it illegal for me to make a backup copy of my cds(if they have useless anti-piracy methods built in).

Further proving that my country's "leaders" don't have a clue what's going in the market are some of the idiotic things done since then. From introducing market stifling induce act to failure to pass net neutrality, they have shown that they are not interested in making our laws reflect the realities of the 21st century. Instead they are more interested in harsher and harsher penalties for infringement.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are still facing questions such as, "who has the copyright on blog comments?" Are you serious? Our laws are so outmoded, that it's not clear that a commenter on a blogpost gives up most rights to his words when posted on an open forum? Until I read about this, I hadn't realized how bad things had really gotten. It's crap like this that a law called "Digital Millennium Copyright Act" should have resolved.

I guess let that be a lesson for us all. Make your copyright policy on your website obvious. I'll start.

Any comment you leave on this blog you are giving me and blogspot the right to display that comment for *forever*.

I can't believe I have to say that...

Introducing the "catch up" button

In a recent post I put forth one of the challenges of attracting readers with a blog fiction site.

You could read a blog fiction just like any other. Subscribe to the feed and when there's a new entry go read it. One entry by itself is easy to read once in a while. The problem is that once we've written a lot of posts, people will want to read our fictional blogs from the start. That can be a lot of on screen text to read "for fun".

The assumption I'm currently working on is that, once a reader is caught up with a story and likes it, they'll subscribe to a feed and read it when updated. So the question is, how do we get readers up to speed on our blog fictions?

Well, one way of dealing with this problem is the way that Tom Evans does it in his blog Fate's Acquittal. He uses a tag (or "label" in blogspot speak) called "Catchup". Each post that has a something important that you need to know about the story is labeled "CatchUp". Of the total 32 posts, I read only the 9 with the "CatchUp" label. It reminds me of those short clip compilations that begin episodes of 24.

So the question is, how well does it work. Well, based only on the one example I've seen so far, pretty well. As you might expect, a lot of the earliest posts are labeled "CatchUp". As the story went on, the posts labeled "CatchUp" became more spread out. After reading only the CatchUp posts, I then read the most recent 2 posts and was able to follow them both pretty darn well. Although, don't take my word for it, go try it yourself. (One thing to note though, if you do read it yourself, use the Catchup Link in the label list, not the one in his welcome message. His link in the welcome message is broken\uses the wrong case.)

So here's a hat tip to Tom Evans for using a common blogging tool to solve a common problem. I think each blog fiction author may want to consider if it would help the readers of their own blog. I'm not saying it'll work for every blog fiction I've read -or even needed-, but I'm willing to bet it could help attract new readers for some.

Blog Fiction Formats

Blog fiction is still a very new fiction format. The number of English examples of it I don't think has even hit a hundred. But despite the low number, I am already noticing that Blog Fiction tends to follow only a few different formats. I'm going to describe what I've found here. Also, without any humbleness whatsoever, I'm going to try to give a name to the different formats.

Standard Blog Fiction
A blog fiction that is written using a single blog\url that's written by only one character. I call this the "standard" because it's the most common. As far as why it's the most common, I can only theorize. It might be because it's the simplest type to read. It might be because that's the most popular non-fiction blog type. Examples of this can be seen throughout my feed list and the entire list of blog fiction. For instance: Anonymous Lawyer, The Professional Pet, Wilf's World

Many to One Format
This I would say is the next most popular format. This is where there are many character's writing, but they are all kept within the same blog. Each entry somehow indicates which character is writing the blog. The indication might be a label, category setting, or may even be contained within the post itself. Active examples of this format would be Yanni's Block and Fate's Acquittal

Many to Many Format
This type of blog fiction not only has multiple character's, but each character has their own blog. If you're going for as much realism as possible, this format makes the most sense. Most people like to have their own blog and don't share it with others. In spite of that, it's the least used format I've seen. I think there is two reasons for this. It's the hardest format to set up(think 5 different blogger accounts). Also, it's the hardest for a reader to follow - trying to read them in chronological order means you have to have 5 different windows\tabs open. Examples of this format would be the Super-Hero Blogs and Ten-Sided. (even linking to them is difficult because i don't know which blog I should link to!)

Other
I wanted to have a category to cover sites that I haven't seen yet. I've found a couple "quirky" sites that might fit the description of "blog fiction", and they don't fit the description of any of the other formats. See them here: Renal Failure, The Writer's Stand

I think it's important to have words or simple phrases for common occurrences. It makes talking about them a heck of a lot easier. Looking into the future I plan on using these terms a lot. That's why I wanted to define them here so that I could just say [X] blog has a "Many to One" format, instead of always taking a paragraph to define the format. I just hope you all will forgive my audacity in thinking that I can invent new phrases.

Horton's Folly is Back

I wasn't planning on doing a post today, but I found a reason to put up a quick note. I noticed that Horton's Folly is back from his trip to the mental institute that he went to last August. Actually, he's been back for more than a month and a half. I just haven't been keeping up. I'm going to be adding his feed.

I'd also like to take a moment to ask for your help. I've asked before that if you write, read, or find a blog fiction that I don't have listed to let me know about it. I'd also ask that if you know of an inactive blog fiction that becomes active to let me know too. Whether or not you're the writer or just a fan of it doesn't matter. The list of fictional blogs is beginning to get large enough that it's hard for me to keep all of it up to date. Just like finding a new one, to let me know either put it in the forum list, leave a comment, or send me an email. I'd appreciate it.