Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Kudos to author John Scalzi, who serialized a novel on the Web some time back -- and just had it picked up for publication by TOR Books, courtesy of editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

There is an unspoken assumption about written fiction appearing on the Web: that it is somehow inferior product that was not good enough to make it into the traditional print markets. This is certainly not true in all cases, and I'm not remotely equipped to even say if it's true in most cases. I suspect that it's not totally true: while Sturgeon's Law almost certainly applies, and while the exact percentage might be skewed a bit -- say, 93% crud as opposed to the classically-ordained 90% -- it seems to me that there must be professional quality work out there, somewhere. (I'm talking about work posted directly to the Web, at the author's expense. I'm not talking about pay-markets that exist on the Web, some of which are fairly good if not excellent.)

Some creators -- notably those working with comics, like Scott McCloud -- have been speculating on the future of the Web as a "post-publishing industry" alternative, where creators will be able to place their work directly in front of the eyes of their audiences without having to go through a "middleman". Some people view file-sharing utilities such as Napster or KaZaA in this light. Other creators, though, post their work to the Web for more prosaic reasons: it's been rejected everywhere else. This second camp is primarily responsible for the view of Web-content as being second-rate content, although the history of publishing -- indeed, of art in general -- is replete with examples of works rejected many, many times before finally catching on, somehow, somewhere. This is what Scalzi has done.

The only fiction of mine that I have posted to Byzantium's Shores is a small sample from the first chapter of my novel-in-progress, and a very short story I wrote (and didn't much like) in the wake of 9-11-01. (Links to these items can be found at left, under "Notable Dispatches".) I posted them for different reasons, and I haven't yet considered posting much more of my fiction here, because some of my stories are still at market and will be for some time. A while back, though, I did consider doing a serial project on the Web in a blog format. It was going to be a space opera, and I even wrote the first chapter of it and have it on my hard drive even now. I also tinkered a bit with the design for the weblog I would have used to create the thing, even selecting a few stellar photographs from some online repositories of Hubble Space Telescope images for a masthead. The story has tugged at my mind more than a little since then, and I've actually worked out some of the background in my mind. (In truth, a lot of the background would have been pilfered from another, older project that I am certain will never see the light of day except for a certain devious soul who lives in Washington, DC. He knows who he is....) But, I've waffled as to whether or not to undertake the actual project.

I've waffled in part because of the "two many directions at once" factor. After all, I do a lot of writing for Byzantium's Shores, I have a novel on the front burner that is constantly simmering if not outright boiling, and there is always a short story or novelet going as well. I didn't want to spread myself too thin by adding a serial work to the mix.

Additionally, there are other considerations pertaining to such a project that I haven't really thought out. How should I approach such a work? I've considered doing it as an open-ended story, with no definite resolution in mind, rather like an ongoing comic book without the images; I've also considered the reverse, doing it as a definitively-planned story. Then there are problems of structure and point-of-view, which are also important concerns. Foremost here is the nature of the Web: most experts on such matters will tell you that, when posting text to the Web, "shorter is better"; we are told to keep it direct and to the point, with posts restricted to easily-digestible lengths. But then, considering the many sites out there that seem to generate high amounts of traffic despite consistent violation of the "shorter is better" dictum, perhaps this isn't as much a concern as I've been thinking.

So...I don't know. I like the story that's in my mind, but I'm not sure if a Web-serial would be the way to go. We'll see.