Just posted a new piece of flash fiction! As usual, it’s exactly 200 words. Keeping the flash pieces that short has been every inch as difficult as I expected it to be. This one was base on some passing comment from Lacey a few nights back. Enjoy!
-E.D. Lindquist
The other night, some of us were talking about a project I linked to a few days ago: The Mongoliad, a novel by Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson to be delivered online. Quite frankly, I don’t think it’s going to work. Not because I don’t like or believe in novels online, obviously, but because they’re going to charge a subscription fee for it.
So why does that worry me? Yes, I believe good fiction is well worth paying for. That’s not my problem with their plan. But even if it’s worth the money, I don’t think most people will pay for it. Merited or not, there’s a strong culture of free on the Internet. We don’t expect or want to pay for our digital goods. I doubt this book is going to change that expectation.
Worse, the plan is to place the Mongoliad community behind a pay-wall. Now forums and discussion is something that should be free and that if you charge your audience for, I’d bet money (that I’m not spending on your content) that someone else is just going to create it elsewhere. I think that Bear and Stephenson (and the creators of the PULP platform) would be better off keeping at least the community free and using it to convince the rest of the Internet that their main product, the book, is cool enough to be worth buying a subscription.
So, a subscription… What happens at the end of the Mongoliad’s run? Are readers going to lose access to the book? Will they have a nice PDF of it? An ebook? Or will it be up to them to save off every chapter and reformat it for later use? Will it be archived somewhere? I wonder.
What do you think? Is it going to work? Am I going to be eating my words a years from now?
- E.D. Lindquist
Well, our Star Wars game is going well. Erica and I have taken our players deep behind enemy lines, sent them on a mission into Hutt space and even down the throat of a space slug. Most recently, the characters have snuck back into Sith territory to break into a Sith Lord’s fortress on the world Vjun. The Sith Lord is a member of a fabulously wealthy family, so of course breaking into his stronghold happened during a grand ball!
It’s a real James Bond mission, but before all the sneaking in windows and silently taking down guards, there was intrigue, Sith plots, and dancing. Our games feature a lot of role-playing scenes and my biggest tool for creating excitement, humor, drama, and propelling the story are my cast; Non-Player Characters – the NPCs.
In the 80s, The Dune Encyclopedia was published with 200 essays on the Dune story, setting and themes. It’s been out of print for years, but now you can read it online. You can read more about it here, or go read the encyclopedia here. It’s available as a Google doc.
According to Tor.com, the book was at first considered canon, but was “quietly given non-canon status as Herbert’s son continued to expand the Dune mythos through his own books. With the Dune universe continuing onwards, the Encyclopedia is now considered completely apocryphal.”
I haven’t read any of the new generation of Dune books. I never even finished the old ones. I’m not particularly a fan of Dune. I feel that the characters are too powerful, the setting requires too much explanation and the writing is extremely dry. Still, I can appreciate the serious tone and gravity that Frank Herbert helped to infuse into science fiction, a genre with a long and pulpy history.
So… why all the new books? I can’t say this with any kind of authority, but from what Aron’s told me about them (and Tor’s above statement), Brian Herbert pretty much changed everything. Why, oh why, didn’t he just write his own sci-fi series…?
- E.D. Lindquist
Tired of them? I sure am. I liked how my other theme looked… but then I learned how impossible it was to access on a lot of devices. And I learned how long it took to load when my connection slowed down. Most of all, I’m tired of the eye strain from staring at the tiny gray text on my tiny netbook screen. I kind of thought some other people would be, too.
So, though I miss my pretty Arras theme, I worked with the default WordPress theme, Twentyten. It’s simple, it’s basic, it’s readable. I’m still screwing with the finer details, but after about 48 hours of work, LLS is at least back to functional.
How many people will even notice the change? When I asked Cedar and Lacey to look over it this morning, neither one of them had even realized I changed the site skin.
Why can I never leave things alone? I poke at my ice cream till I’ve got nothing but a sticky puddle. Sometimes, you just can’t perfect things. I tell other designers that all the time… Your site will never look the same across all browsers. It’ll be pretty on one and (if you’re lucky) passable on all the others. If it looks good on a computer, it’ll look like a bird did a fly-by on someone’s smartphone. You just can’t win. All of my fonts are about twice as huge on Internet Explorer. WTF?
At any rate, it’s almost four in the morning and my cats are staring at me. I think it’s time for some bed.
- E.D. Lindquist
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