Friday July 18, 2008 at 8:54
Fiction Volante completed its run yesterday. For one year, a new shortform story was posted every weekday. A blog format was used to contain the stories. They are of exceptional quality.
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It saddens me that people are more interested in talking about computer products and Gawker celebrities than the incredibly exciting artistic avenues that the web is opening up. Perhaps it’s the standard blog format, perhaps it’s that people aren’t really as interested in creativity on the web as they claim, but the site passed its year in relative obscurity. Hopefully that doesn’t mean it can’t become famous after it’s dead.
1. I’m glad someone else wrote this post. The issue is buried under a deep layer of permafrost for me, and will not be unearthed by man nor machine.
2. The 5 Pierce lists aren’t my favorites, so I’ll add these:
3. The Achewood blogs count as online fiction. So does One Person Trend Stories. There are people doing good work. And there’s also a whole other section of the blogosphere worrying full-time about this problem, so, you know. And everytime someone complains about the state of online fiction, the entire fic community can’t hear it over all the shouting.
4. When Meg or Pierce or whoever posts a new story to their website, I don’t read it right away. I star it and wait for the right time, and enjoy having something to look forward to, when the conditions are right. It’s nice to have something to savor on the internet, as opposed to having things to get through.
5. I love that Fiction Volante had an end date. I think more sites should have end dates. Actually I think most sites should have end dates. The only thing I genuinely don’t care for on the internet is the apparently craving for websites to post the same thing, 12 times per day, on and on ad infinitum. If it wasn’t like that, all the other needling annoyances (anonymous irate commenters, Top X lists) would fall away.
6. I wonder if James is doing the thing I do. Everytime I realize I’m coming to the end of my interest in one of my websites (read: a certain style of writing), I think: “There’s, that’s done. But if I get X emails asking me to revive it, I will reconsider.” X is never a very high number, but I never get there. And I don’t say that to be complainy about my lot in life, because my lot in life is pretty amazing, and if you know me at all, you know that either way, I’m going to do what I feel like doing. I’m just saying that if Gawker ended tomorrow, I don’t think they’d reach their X either.
7. Actually, OK. I took a quick look through my feed reader. 93 feeds (down from over 200, thank you very much). There’s a few in there that aren’t updating regularly, but only one where I’ve actually emailed the guy to be like What the hell, let’s go. How many sites would you miss if they stopped updating tomorrow?
8. Or this: How many sites do you read, vs. how many would you miss?
9. Or: Of the sites that you read, how many are enriching your life, and how many are about just keeping up with the blogger next door?
This post was reblogged from Is that blogging?.
