I hate how fiction looks online. It’s almost never anti-aliased and the typeface is never really quite comfortable. Plus, there’s often some enormous photo to contend with or a banner ad, or even just a splash of color with the name of the site on it, always something to make reading online unpleasant.

    Plus, it’s hard to sketch or add any additional element onto a web site. You have to contend with the template and there’s scanning, resizing, cropping. Inevitably, it becomes more of a hassle to get it on the web site than it’s worth. And then you post this short little thing, finally, and it reads surprisingly long.  Maybe the only good thing about writing online is that you can sometimes get feedback from people who come by, and that is truly very nice.  Still, the end result of all this isn’t supposed to be a web site with comments, right? It’s supposed to be some kind of product.

     I don’t know that it can’t be both - evolving, responsive, but still tangible. I’m playing with ideas: why not publish as a serial, in little chapbooks? In the way back, novels got published one chapter at a time, in magazines. I could play with all kinds of forms, let myself be inspired by Une Semaine de Bonté. There’s loads of potential, lots of options. Maybe too much.

     In the meanwhile, I’ve got to keep writing the damn thing, and that means talking myself into it sometimes, and doing a bunch of research, and not quitting my day job. I chronicle it all under “On Writing.”

     As well, I like to get away, and when I do get away, I like to explain was it was like to people I don’t know, which is why I write a travel diary. Enjoy.