Wired writes about a fictional weblog called Flight Risk: it tells the story of a runaway heiress. In the first post and in a box on the front page, the narrator encapsules her story:
Nice start. The posts are mostly very long, which doesn’t particarly entice me into reading. I like short posts, or long posts that are really well written, about a topic I’m already interested in, with a clear entry point so I know what it’s about, and links and space between paragraphs. At least that’s how I feel today. Grumpygirl did a fictional weblog a while back (can’t find the link now) that I rather enjoyed – it had quite brief posts, much more webloggy than Flight Risk. If I weren’t so tired I’d try and write something clever about the rhythm and so on.
I know I promised someone links to literary/fictional weblogs, but I can’t remember who. Was is JosÈ? Someone at humanistic informatics? Oh dear. I hope they’ll ask again.
[update, evening same day: Mark Bernstein has a nice long, interesting take on Flight Risk and why it works. I guess I do like long posts. If I’m interested in them :)]
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Lisa
It wasn’t me who asked for the links to fictional/literary blogs, but I’d be interested.
Jill
I’ll try and collect them and post them 🙂
mitch
How do you know it’s fiction?
Jill
Well, actually, it may well not be fiction – I just went into my it’s literary so it’s fiction reflex thing, which isn’t necessarily true at all. The most literary things I’ve written here are also the truest.
I should just call it literary and narrative, perhaps?
And by that I mean that it has a clear plot, and most weblogs don’t, they’re, uh, episodic (the picaresque novels of the, what was it, the 1700s? earlier? were episodic too, there wasn’t a careful plot but instead a person who just happened to have lots of fairly separate adventures, so episodic narratives aren’t new) whereas a few blogs are very specifically about a particular theme or plot that enables a story. The Date Project is a good example that I wrote about last October. There’s no reason to assume that The Date Project is fictional, though again, it could be.
I’d like to come up with a better term for this kind of blog. Literary isn’t quite the point, though they are more like literature than most blogs are. They’re not necessarily fictional. They do have a clear plot.
And now there are quite a few of them it’d be great fun to write an essay about them. Maybe this summer 🙂
OnePotMeal
The rhythm of variations
Deep in the depths of my hard drive this morning, as it rains outside and my hydrophobic dog refuses to go for a walk, I found a list of things I intended to write about here before my connection went on the fritz a couple of weeks ago. Some of them we…