THE FISHERY: a diary of the Loose-Fish Project

Please do not take the lack of updates here to mean that hard times have befallen the Fishery.  On the contrary, much is afoot. Scaffolding is being erected. Lumber is being jacked.

And a truth universally acknowledged will be coming to an Internet near you.

#SXStarWars

http://starwarsblog.starwars.com/index.php/2009/03/18/twitter-trench-run/

http://weblogs.variety.com/technotainment/2009/03/from-sxsw-death-star-attack-kicked-off-on-twitter.html

If readers want to pay for the old-school premium package, they can get their literature the old-fashioned way: carefully selected and edited, and presented in a bespoke, art-directed paper package. But below that there will be a vast continuum of other options: quickie print-on-demand editions and electronic editions for digital devices, with a corresponding hierarchy of professional and amateur editorial selectiveness. (Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they’re called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

“Books Unbound,” by Lev Grossman in Time Magazine

Nice article on the changes bubbling in fiction and storytelling.  Although I’m not sure I agree — or at least I really hope he’s wrong — about the need for novels to hook the reader faster.  That’s an arms race that never ends.  I’m hoping that there will be room for slow builds, story archeology, and all the other parts of the beast that I’ve been coming to think of as Ambient Fiction.

The third argument says we have to change. We have to develop content that metamorphoses in sync with new ways of experiencing it, disseminating it and monetizing it. This argument concedes that it’s not possible to translate or extend traditional analog content like news reports and soap operas into pixels without fundamentally changing them. So we have to invent new forms. All of the fascinating, particular, sometimes beautiful and already quaint ways of organizing words and images that evolved in the previous centuries — music reviews, fashion spreads, page-one news reports, action movies, late-night talk shows — are designed for a world that no longer exists. They fail to address existing desires, while conscientiously responding to desires people no longer have.

I was interviewed by Matt Shaer for an article that appeared this weekend in the CSM:  “The Novel By Tweet”. Here’s the, as they say, nut graf:

“I think there’s value in looking at these media as conduits for serious storytelling,” says Bushman. “I like to think of this kind of work as ‘embedded fiction.’ That is, in your daily online life, you have lots of sites, feed, channels you get information from. And it’s all nonfiction – news, e-mails from friends, status updates. And I want to embed little bits of fiction within these real streams and, hopefully, blur the line between the real world and the story world.”

Thanks to Nick Belardes for pointing him in my direction.

if:book London

This month, Good Magazine has a profile of the notorious Sean Bonner and the Metblogs network.  As a part of the piece, they’ve done a small sidebar and link to the Spoon River Metblog.

Thanks to Sean and to Alissa, who wrote the piece.

or, how to use ARG-tools to Rickroll the Internet

We’ve got a new Facebook group for The Loose-Fish Project. Please join us.

And I’m exprimenting with Twitterfeed to automatically announce when new Spoon River entries are added.

The second Loose-Fish Project story is now live.  “The Spoon River Metblog” is an adaptation of Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters.

Read the story here.

Read more about the project here.