I got a bit more verbose in my recommendations than Steph did (I just can’t seem to shut myself up sometimes), and it did take us a ridiculously long time to put this together (though not really that long if you consider that she’s in Australia and I’m in the US—ah the magic of the tubes!), but we’re pretty happy with what we’ve come up with. (Steph’s post can be found here )

My Recommendations:

1. WP Ajax Edit Comments

This plugin is really nice for both site admins and visitors to your site; it provides an easy to use, customizable interface for editing comments in the front end of your blog. When logged in as the site admin, every comment will have several buttons below it, including "Edit" "De-link" "Moderate" "Spam" and "Delete." This makes it way easier to manage comments if you’re like me and read and respond to comments from the front end, rather than in the "Edit Comments" tab in the Wordpress back end. (I do this so I can view the post and comments all together as they appear on the site, rather than out of context in chronological order.) I especially like the "De-link" function, which is great for those odd comments that don’t seem like spam but it’s hard to say. Rather than just mark these as spam (and thus flag the poster), you can "De-link" them so you’re not inadvertently playing into their spammy hands.
The plugin also lets you set every little detail of how users are allowed to edit their own comments, from how long after they post, to whether they can edit their email addresses or URLs. Basically, if you’ve ever misspelled something or realized you made a mistake right after posting a comment, but weren’t able to fix it, you understand how important this plugin is. Plus, it’s pretty Ajax. Mmm… we like Ajax…

2. All in One SEO Pack

I really like this plugin. Sure, you can do everything it does yourself without any help from a plugin, but why would you want to? This plugin has a nice settings page where you can set options for rewriting titles (to emphasize important words and phrases for search engines without affecting anything other than the title bar), home description and keywords, and even choose noindex settings for categories and archives to avoid search engines turning up duplicate content and penalizing your ranking.
Then, in the Post or Page edit screen, the plugin adds an "All in One SEO Pack" box were you can set the title, description, and keywords you want search engines to find for that individual post or page. Again, you can get your hands dirty and do all this SEO work yourself, but the plugin makes it soooo much easier. Try it, you’ll like it.

3. Organize Series

This one is particularly useful for webserials, but can be helpful for any type of blog, really. What it does is, in addition to having your posts organized by category, date, and tags, you have the added option to organize them by series. I use mine to organize all the chapters of Children of the First into one series, bonus content (like maps, pictures, bonus stories) in another series, and guest pieces in a third series, making it easy to navigate within each, regardless of when they were posted. I could post chapter 2 months before chapter 1 and they would still show up in the right order in the series.

The very best feature of this plugin is the in-series post navigation it facilitates; it adds (or doesn’t, if you take it out) a fieldset (box) containing links to the previous and next posts in the series to each post in that series. This way, you still have the regular "next" and "previous" links (depending on your theme and settings) which will take you to the next and previous posts chronologically, but you also have links that only take you to posts within that series. So, say I post a chapter, then a status update, then some bonus content, and then another chapter; I’ll have links to take me to each post in order, and other, good looking links to skip straight to the next chapter in the series. Beautiful.

Another part of the in-series navigation that Organize Series provides is an in-post table of contents for that post’s series, providing convenient, attractive, and unobtrusive links to every post in that series, with the current post highlighted in the list. Out of the box, the table of contents appears as an in-post sidebar with the text wrapping around it, which is great for blogs that want to have the table of contents immediately available, either so people can skip around within a series, or just so they can see all the article at a glance. Some webserials use it this way, but I find that having the text wrap around the ToC can be distracting, so I messed with the fairly straight-forward options page (essentially just moving around template tokens) to get the ToC to appear at the bottom of each post, and then mucked with the CSS until I got it how I liked it. Check out what I did with mine. I’m no code genius, so it should be doable if you have any understanding of CSS at all. Or Google. Google can help you code CSS.

One last thing this plugin does: it provides a "series widget" which displays links to all your different series as though they were category archives, AND, when viewing a post belonging to a series you are able to have it display a list of all the posts in that series in the sidebar, so really, there are two tables of contents, one at the bottom of each post (or wherever you put it) and one that appears in the sidebar. A plethora of navigation means nobody gets lost. (Okay, that is not true at all–if there are too many signs then none of them will help, but I think you get my meaning.)

Oh! One LAST last thing Organize Series does:  You can set up a Series Table of Contents page to display all the series’ tables of contents (or only icons and descriptions for each) on a single page. I never really set this up, mostly because I felt it would be supremely redundant for my site, but it could be a great way to organize your story or stories. I’d be interested to see how people put it to use, so if you do end up doing something with it, let me know, willya? (The creator of Organize Series used his fairly well. Go figure.)

4. WP Super Cache

This one is fairly self-explanatory; caching saves copies of your pages that can then be displayed very quickly when a visitor views them. Instead of loading each page element individually, which takes a long time, their browser only has to load the cached page, getting everything where it’s supposed to be much quicker. Bottom line: caching makes your site load faster. WP Super Cache is easy to use and gets the job done.

The only thing you have to remember is that a lot of changes you might make to your site will not show up until you clear the cache via the plugin’s options page. There were a couple times when I thought my CSS wasn’t working properly when it turned out I just wasn’t clearing my cache after making changes.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

This is another plugin that does something you can do by hand, but usually don’t want to. Google XML Sitemaps builds an XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your blog, and will notify several major search engines whenever you make changes. It also allows you to include pages in your sitemap which are not actually part of your wordpress blog, so if you combine wordpress with static pages, you can have it all in one sitemap without getting your hands dirty. Also, OPTIONS, OPTIONS, OPTIONS. Lots of em. I use very few of them, but you never know when you’ll want to exclude a category from your sitemap or prioritize author pages…
The plugin’s settings page also has handy links to some sitemap resources, including Google Webmaster tools (which is very useful for making sure search engines are seeing the right stuff, I go through and prune out dead links or duplicate keywords every few weeks). In conjunction with All in One SEO Pack, this can be a very powerful tool for getting your story ranked higher in search engines.

6. MobilePress

I looked for a plugin like this one when a friend over at the Web Fiction Guide Forums informed me that my story was very hard to read on mobile devices. Mobile device users are a very fast-growing market for internet businesses, and one of the most popular things to do with them is read blogs, and of course, web fiction. It’s HUGE in Japan. Seriously. (Don’t believe me? Ask Novelr, CMSWire (twice ), The Telegraph, or The New York Times, to name but a few.)

Mobile device compatibility is an incredibly easy way to give your story access to a new audience… or keep the one you have: Lets say that Joe Shmoe reads 3 chapters of your story before he leaves for work. He has a 30 or 40 minute ride on the bus or metro, so what does he do? He whips out his Blackberry, or his iPhone, or his Shiny-piece-of-Plastic-with-a-web-browser and pulls up your site to start in on chapter 4. But oh noes! Your site is impossible to read on his Blackberry, and if he zooms in enough on his iPhone to read it, he can only read three words without having to scroll back and forth. Well, if I were Joe Shmoe, I’d head on over to a different blog or webserial, one that I could read on the train. Now what’s to make Joe Shmoe come back to your story when he’s home? He’s already a few chapters into the other story, and he’ll be able to pick it back up on the train tomorrow morning.

Don’t give them any reason not to read it. Web fiction readers can be put off by little things, and they have a gajillion stories to choose from, so make sure they can read yours whenever they want, wherever they want. MobilePress even lets you customize the themes and select which theme displays for which mobile browser. There is nothing wrong with this plugin, and no reason not to use it.

Steph’s Recommendations:

1. Comment Licence

This is one of the more simple plugins available to help you. I happen to be in favour of more simple plugins in general, anyway, but this one aids you in adding either comment rules, a license or whatever else you may want to appear near the comment form. For example you may have a few rules you wish your readers to abide by (No flaming, chatspeak, etc) or tell them that by posting  ideas and thoughts they accept that if something they say comes up in the story (by coincidence or otherwise) that they can’t claim that you stole from them, etc.

It’s very simple to install and gives you an admin page in which to add and edit whatever you want to appear near the comments. Unfortunately at this point you can only enter plain text.

2. Guestbook Generator

Another of the more simple ones, but this is especially good for stories that don’t allow commenting on individual chapters. It turns your average wordpress page into a… well. Guestbook. Every time you change your theme you will need to “regenerate” it, but it won’t do any harm to any existing comments on the guestbook. It needs to do this because it makes a custom page template from your theme to make the page look less like a normal page and more like an old style guestbook.

3. Tiny MCE Advanced

Use visual mode to edit your posts? This baby is for you. It adds more options to the wordpress visual editor, including the add on of optional extra buttons and the ability to rearrange/remove buttons as suits you and your work flow. There’s an easy to use drag and drop page added to the administrative section to help you add and rearrange things as you like. It even allows you to “Search and Replace” within the post editor.

4. Search Everything

You may not know this, but the search engine that comes with wordpress is rather limited. This is where search everything comes into play, it allows you to decide what gets searched, allow wordpress to search more than just the basics and like the others I’ve suggested, is very easy to install and use – something to be expected from good wordpress plugins. If your search engine works better, chances are your readers will be able to go back and find stories they liked easier, things they were wondering about but couldn’t quite place or more.

5. Highlight Author Comments

The usefulness of this plugin varies, it’s not any use if the author doesn’t comment, for instance, or doesn’t allow comments at all, obviously. But it requires just a little knowledge of CSS and it will change the comments of the user who posted any given posts automatically using the CSS which can be edited to your liking at any time. This is useful to readers because they can easily spot anything you’ve said and insight to the story, etc.

6. Add To Any

The easiest way to take advantage of the many link sharing sites such as delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and the likes, in my opinion, is this easy plugin that lets anyone add your posts to their favourite site to help share the love. Just install it and edit the options page and you should be good to go! You can even pick/limit the sites you’re comfortable letting people easily share on and edit the colours of the widget (which appears on every post).

That’s it for now folks! If you have any questions, feel free to ask, or check out the individual plugins’ home pages. Rock on.

Poetry
Roy – “I have a hole in my socks….” – Concealing what’s inside with smile… like a sock with a hole…
Zorlone – “The Modern Hercules” – Do you desire the perfect body? Then you have just surrendered to the vanity of the demon within you.
Christable Anon – “For my Brown Boy..” – Brown surrealism… a collage of thought process..
Sourik Banerjee – “Somewhere The Artist Still Remembers…” – This poem is a tribute to the enigmatic evening that the poet had spent with his ladylove for the first time…
Dragon Blogger – “Traffic Jam” – Traffic Jam, a unique poem of love.

About Writing
Alex McGaughan – “Things Every Poet Should Know #1, “No-Nos”” – This is the first installment of a series offering advice to poets. This one is a discussion of some "crimes" often committed by novice poets.
Izzy Daniels – “Blogging or Writing…What is More Important?” – Sometimes we tend to walk a fine line between blogging and writing.  I do my best to highlight the differences.

Fiction / Monologue / Flash Fiction
Webbielady – “Confessions of a Devoted Sinner” – How distracted he was and so he decided to take his concerns to the Highest Being…
Jena Isle – “Mickey” – A story of a young boy who played video games.

Brought to you by PlotDog Press with the Serial Suspense Screenplay “Intervention”

Thanks to everyone who voted!

WOOF Contest – Top Picks

Fiction

Jena Isle – “Was Love Meant to Last  Forever?” – Is there such a thing as eternal love? A story of love’s imperfections.

About Writing

Roy – “Getting back to poetry… my real reflection” – Rediscovering my love for poetry writing…

Izzy Daniels – “Maximizing Your Writing Time: Ideas! I need Ideas!” – Ways to come up with ideas for your writing, and maximizing your outline in order to avoid having to go back.

Poetry / Poetic Fiction

Zorlone – “Ancient Cities” – We are awed by the presence of astounding skyscrapers, sturdy bridges, and majestic monuments. They are in one way or the other influenced by the ancient cities from all over the world.

Deeptesh Sen – “Time Travel” – It’s the creation of a surreal city which you can reach through your mirrors by means of time travel.The vehicle for this telepathic transport is a symphony.

Dragon Blogger – “Unlikeable” – A random word poem about a person who is simply unlikeable.

Gabriel Gadfly – “Shelter” – Two creatures cross paths at the junction of life and death.

Zorlone – “A Gentle Touch” – An intimate beauty of lovers sharing their passion for one another.

Brought to you by PlotDog Press with the Serial Suspense Screenplay "Intervention"

Children of the First will return with chapter 22 on Friday, April 17th.

I’ve already written chapters 22 (it’s a long one) and 23 and sent them to Whitney-editor for a look-through. The reason I haven’t posted them yet is that I wanted to build up a buffer before coming back, trying to get the schedule a little more consistant. I’ll be posting one chapter a week from now on, mainly to allow me time for work, life, and other writing. I’ve always been of the opinion that quality is more important than quantity or keeping to a strict schedule, but I’d like to be able to have both. I’m sure you’ll all agree. If something changes, I might try to go back to twice a week, or maybe one every five days or something like that, but I’m starting conservatively and working up if I think it’s feasible.

So, that’s that. I suppose I’ll give you a bit of personal update too:

I have gotten my health insurance and my doctor wrote me a scrip for my meds, but for half of the dose I was taking before. So it helped, but not as much as I would like. Since then, I’ve made an appointment with a psychiatrist (was previously going to general physisian, but she wanted me to get a psych. That was part of her reasoning for the low does: She’s not a psychiatrist and doesn’t really know the medications that well), so hopefully I’ll be back on track for real by the end of next week.

Other stuff:

Someone else put an offer on the farm my parents were trying to buy, and the owners accepted so we lost our contract. Bummer. We still haven’t sold our house and are currently in the process of trying to find another farm. Prices have dropped since we started the search, so we’re hopeful that things will start happening soon. God I hope so, because this tiny desk in the basement is not a great work area.

I have gotten a job in a little independant coffee shop near my house, so that’s cool. A job is one of those good things to get when you have no money. Maybe I’ll finally be able to pay off my credit card bill from the move up. That would be sweet.

Other other stuff:

I met a girl. She is awesome. We are dating. Her name is Kate.

WOOF Contest – Top Picks

Poetry
Zorlone – “Passionate Blogger ” – A tribute to the bloggers who have influenced my writing endeavors.
Alex McGaughan – “ Late Fall; She Retorts ” – A short free-verse poem about a young man and woman who are driven apart by one’s romanticism and the other’s inability to share it.
Jennifer M Scott – “Primordial Passion ” – Written in a series of three cinquains about spring and the renewing of love or starting new love.
Romeo – “Another Rainy Day ” – Short Poem for the one I’ve lost.
Dragon Blogger – “Aftershock ” – Poem crafted from random words, inspired by the earthquake in Italy.

About Writing
Izzy Daniels – “Maximizing your writing Time: Start with the Outline ” – I gave a brief description on how to write a short outline for ones writing.

Brought to you by PlotDog Press with the Writing Software: "Save the Cat Software and Book Review "

Thanks to PlotDog and all the entrants!

[DISCLAIMER: I may phrase things as "rules" or things to "never do," but it's important to remember that poetry rules are meant to be broken, as long as there's a reason for it and it serves the poem in a way that following the rules could or would not. More on that in a later installment.]

The No-Nos

1. The No-No Words __

These are words which will turn almost every reader of poetry off. They typically serve to cheapen the poem, add an unpleasant bit of melodrama, and/or make the poet seem unimaginative.

• Blood, bleed, bleeding
  
• Cry, crying, (and to a lesser extent, weeping, sobbing )
• Tear, tears, or any common variation on water dripping from one’s eye in sorrow. This includes things like, "A single glass bead rolled down her cheek…"
• Rain (Only a no-no when combined with any of the first three. Then it’s just awful .)
• Pain , anguish, torment (This mostly applies to expressions of emotional pain, but be wary whenever using these words.)
• Soul, spirit
  
• Heart (Please, don’t talk about your heart belonging to another, or capturing, breaking, or stealing your heart. Just don’t.)
• Love (This one is often unavoidable, but is a definite buzzword. Be careful not to sound trite.)
• Knife, razor, stab, stabbing (These are not always no-nos. Use your judgment; does it seem a tad melodramatic? Cut it and don’t look back.)

That’s all I have right now for big no-no words. There are more, I’m sure, and many more that are very tricky to use without making it a no-no, such as summer, breeze, angel, eyes, clouds, kiss, and beauty . If you think of any I’ve left off, please let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

2. Letting your word processor auto-capitalize each line __

It’s true that it was traditionally considered "correct" to capitalize the first letter of every line in a poem, and it’s true that many excellent poems are formatted this way, but most of them were written by canonized dead guys when traditional forms dominated poetry. This is not the case in contemporary poetry; free verse is by far the most common type of poem today and capitalizing each line makes the poem feel stiff, clunky, and old-fashioned. It separates the lines in a way that hampers the interplay between line breaks and sentences—enjambment loses its effect and the potential for intricate rhythms is severely diminished.

The other reason auto-capitalization is an issue mainly applies to student work, but anyone using a word processor like Microsoft Word can fall victim: It makes you look lazy. Every time I see a free-verse poem with the first letters capitalized, I think, "Did they mean to do that or are they just too lazy to change their AutoCorrect settings?" That was a very common frustration in college workshops, and an easy one to fix. So fix it.

3. Changing  form or structure in the middle of a poem __

Now before you freak out and say I have no idea what I’m talking about, that poetry is meant to be free-spirited, blah, blah, blah… Let me first say that this is a big one for the disclaimer; there are many times when changing form or structure halfway through a poem can be great—you can use it to separate sections, illustrate a shift in the poem, or otherwise enhance the poem by varying the form. What I’m talking about is changing the form or structural elements carelessly and without reason.

Say you start a poem with no punctuation or capitalization. That’s great! If that’s what’s best for the poem, more power to you. But say you get halfway through and start using punctuation… The reader starts questioning why it’s missing from the first half and why you started using it all of a sudden. You damn well better have a good reason for the switch, or your poem will look lazy and careless. You don’t want people to be distracted by wondering whether you made a mistake.

A good rule of thumb is to default to using proper punctuation and only vary it when necessary; when unconventional punctuation would serve the poem in a way that normal punctuation can’t .  Another safe rule is to either use proper punctuation and capitalization, or none at all. Variations on this include only capitalizing the first letter of each stanza, only using periods and omitting other punctuation, or any other selective use of capitalization/punctuation. As long as it serves the poem and stays consistent, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Same goes for form . Say you write a poem that has the following structure: tercet, tercet, tercet, quatrain, tercet, tercet. There better be a damn good reason that one stanza has four lines instead of three, because it’s going to stick out like an infected thumb—especially the fourth line. It will not only stick out when you look at the poem on the page, but when you read it as well; the rhythm will do a sort of stutter on the fourth line of the quatrain, distracting the reader and slowing the pace of the poem. You’d better want that much focus on that line, or the rest of the poem will suffer.

I’m not saying every poem has to have a clear and even structure, but I am saying that if it looks like you’re using a certain form and then you break it, people will notice. The longer your form is consistent, the more jarring it will be if you change it. The slight exception to this is in the last stanza; many traditional forms have a different number of lines in the last stanza: the villanelle has a quatrain after five tercets, the sestina has six sestets followed by a tercet, et cetera. Be careful though, varying structure at the end of a poem can lead you into the next no-no on the list:

4. Ending the poem with a "home run"__

I had a bad habit of violating this no-no, and still catch myself doing it from time to time—it’s a hard one to resist. Picture this:
You’ve just spent all night working on a poem and all you have to do is end it. Then it hits you—the perfect couplet to end the poem! It fits the meter, it’s reasonably clever, and it ties the poem together flawlessly, summing up the sentiment you worked on all night in two tidy lines (or one, or a few, whatever)… That’s great, right?
Wrong! You are not Homer and this is not an epic! (Unless it is, in which case, swing away.)

A home run is any heavy-handed, grandiose, pretentious, or altogether-too-neat-and-tidy lineor lines at the end of a poem. (It’s also called a "punchline," though punchlines can be good or bad. "Home run" generally implies you were swinging for a home run, but missed. When you’re swinging that hard, you look awful silly if you don’t crack it outta the park.  Don’t feel bad, though; most people can’t hit at all.

The problem with the home run is that if the poet doesn’t pull it off, it can ruin the whole poem by leaving a bad taste in the reader’s mouth, overshadowing anything good that might have come before. It will make you groan and resent the poet for letting you follow him all the way through the labyrinth just to find a crap sandwich at the end. Equally infuriating as the over-reaching home run is a subset of the home run:

The Bow. This refers to an ending line that wraps the poem up in a neat little package, tying off loose ends and driving the point home with a particularly condescending sledgehammer. This insults the reader’s intelligence and denies him the pleasure of uncovering the poem’s meaning. By handing him the message after he’s put in the effort to find it for himself, you cheat him out of the payoff. Trust him to find it. If he can’t, then either you didn’t give him enough to go on, or he’s too dense. But making that call is a discussion for a later day.

You don’t want to leave things completely unclear, with the reader lost and directionless at the end of the poem; but, you don’t want to just plunk him down at the end of the maze and hand him the cheese, either; instead, you want to give him just enough that he can find his own way there. It might even be a route that you hadn’t considered.

Loose ends are what you ponder after the poem, they’re what give you a sense of having read something worth your while. You need enough ambiguity to make the discovery satisfying, but not so much that the reader is overwhelmed and gives up. One thing that can really stick a nasty old bow on an ending is rhyme. Beware…

5. Rhyming__

This is yet another it’s-okay-sometimes no-no. Personally, I hate rhyming in contemporary poetry… usually. But Alex, you say. You’ve written several poems that rhyme. Do you hate your own poems?
Well, yes, sometimes I do. But the poems I’ve posted rhyme do so for a reason—"Mama Had a Baby and the Head Popped Off " emulates the tone of a nursery rhyme, and Found Poem: Spam Villanelle is a villanelle and the form dictates the rhyme scheme. In general though, if the rhyme does not have an explicit purpose like these, it will come off as sing-songy and childish. These poems are boring and predictable, yet extremely common for the simple fact that they "sound like poetry." When most people set out to write a poem, they will automatically start writing in an A-B-A-B rhyme scheme and something close to pentameter. This is not the only kind of poetry out there! It has been so beaten to death that it puts the poem at an automatic disadvantage. Don’t cheat your poems. Be an equal-opportunity poet.

Rhyme can be useful though, especially internal rhyme (rhyme between two words, at least one of which does not end a line), as a way to control rhythm and add emphasis. Just be careful you don’t over do it, and DO NOT let an instinctive need to rhyme change the content of your poem. Resist! Eventually you’ll wonder why you ever wanted to rhyme in the first place.

6. The last no-no is a big one: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF TOO SERIOUSLY __

This is a real problem for most novice poets. They take themselves too seriously, writing huge sweeping poems about the wretched abyss that is their soul or the legendary love they’ve lost. Well here’s the awful truth: No one cares about your lost love, they only care about their lost love.

When you write a poem, the speaker is not you. Even if it is you, it’s not you . It’s the speaker. The speaker is universal, he or she is whoever they need to be for that poem. If you’re writing a poem about your mother, for instance, the poem is not about your mother, it’s about a mother—the speaker’s mother. Keep this in mind as you write (and read) poetry, it’s extremely important.

If that poem about your mother just isn’t quite working, screw it up! Make it bizarre, or disturbing, or funny: Your mom wasn’t an alcoholic baby seal-clubber? So what? The speaker’s might have been, and your poem just got a little more interesting.

Write the poem, not your personal story. This will help you understand the reader’s perspective and shed some light on certain things, such as why it made no sense to them that mooing at your sister terrified her. You remember when she was two and got trampled on grandpa’s ranch, but they don’t. If you’re writing the poem and not yourself,  you will intuitively know when you need those details in there, instead of getting wrapped up in your own perspective.

Finally, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Nicole Cooley: She said that her poetry really took off when she realized, "No one gets hurt if I write a bad poem."

Write bad poems, let people read them, take their critiques seriously but not personally. You’ll need to grow a thick skin, ’cause I’ve got news for ya… We ALL suck. We ALL write crap. And we ALL have to live with it, working harder and getting better and still writing crap. Forever.

Ah, the peaceful life of a poet.

There is some good news though: All that crap eventually coughs up a diamond or two, and if you shine it up reeaaal nice, someone might just think it’s pretty enough to wear.
They won’t pay you for it, but still…

Next Up: Workshopping, Critiquing, Editing: Where Poems Go to Blossom or Die

If you have any questions, or disagree with anything in this post, I encourage you to leave a comment and I’ll answer you as soon as I can. Happy writing.

Now, with the plethora of mobile web browsers and devices like the Kindle, electronic fiction is one of the fastest growing markets, causing some proponents of traditional publishing to ruffle their feathers and get all huffy. Well, the sad news is that e-books, while closely related to webnovels, are not webnovels. This big boom in things like the Kindle and iPhone book apps does not bode well for web fiction writers such as myself. Then again, it doesn’t bode too badly, either.

Big companies like Amazon and Sony have the ability to serve these new devices and make people pay for it. We don’t. We’re usually free, and once (and if) our stories get made into e-books and are able to be downloaded onto Kindles and what-not, they’re no longer web fiction in the strictest sense, they’re blooks (here I use the definition from The Blooker Prize , mostly because I hate the term and want it defined as something other than webnovel). So, tiny little webnovels like Children of the First and so many others can either morph into something else, or miss out on the Kindle craze.

However, all these people reading their e-books are getting used to reading pixels instead of paper. That’s good. That gets people to open up to the idea of reading a webnovel. All we have to do is keep ‘em coming back. One small but important way to stay afloat in the realm of e-books is to set up a mobile version of your site, so that users of iPhones and other mobile web browsers can read your story on their mobile devices. But you already knew all that. I was just getting to the new, exciting part:

The Vook

You might trace this back to online choose-your-own-adventures, or to the predictably all-but-dead Twitter novel , or even to those old animated bedtime stories that my dad used to read off the Prodigy homepage, but people are not satisfied with digital literature, they have to create monsters. (Not that all monsters are bad. These remain to be seen.)

“Publishers are going to be confronted with the idea that either the words on the page have to be completely compelling on their own, or they have to figure out a way to create new sorts of subliminal draws in the new medium” -Sara Nelson, former editor of Publishers Weekly [NY Times ]

Well Bradley Inman may have just the monster for you: Vook , a project that "plan[s] to help authors tell stories using text, video vignettes and social-networking tools that would be accessible online, on multiple e-Readers, and via mobile phones." [Washington Post ]

Now, the main question that seems to be on everyone’s mind, other than whether or not things like Vook will be successful, is what impact this will have on traditional literature and whether this is somehow detrimental to literature and the art of writing. To that I ask, Do oil paintings detract from watercolors? No, of course not, they’re not the same thing, don’t be stupid.

Web fiction (the standard, more-or-less blog-style web fiction) may be in danger of loosing some of it’s audience, but hey, that’s how it goes. Time to learn flash, I guess.

Next Up: Rethinking the way we write , instead of the way we read.

First, let me apologize. Disappearing for a month without explanation or anything is hardly polite or professional (not that I’m professional; professionals get paid), and I shall endeavor not to do it again.

Most of you probably already know about my move from New Orleans to Maryland. Well I made the trip in one piece. Barely. Towing a trailer behind a ‘97 Mercury Tracer station wagon along 1100 miles of arctic highway wasteland will wear on the best of us. So that was fun, but the move didn’t really suck more than a week of my life away, all told.

What has made getting things done so difficult is where I moved to. I moved into my parents house while they’re trying to sell it so they can buy the farm which was the bulk of my plan for Maryland. Move to MD->work on farm. We don’t own the farm yet, so I don’t have a job. (Well, I do chop firewood and I put in a new stone path in the front yard, but that doesn’t count.)

So why is this a problem, other than the fact that I’m poor as hell? Well, I’ll tell ya.
First, it helps to know that I have ADD, for which I take medication on a daily basis. Well, due to some health insurance problems (i.e. I don’t have any) I have been without that medication for a little over a month now (coincidence?), which would normally be a pain in the ass, but not enough to keep me from writing or doing anything productive online at all. Apart from the meds, the most effective way I control my ADD is to control my environment–work at night with my chair just right and my screen just right and a particular playlist on itunes and a couple of lamps (not too bright) in the right positions and a dozen other little things that help me focus while everyone leaves me alone for 9-12 hours. If I can do all that stuff, I can get a good bit of work done without the meds.
Buuuuutt, the house is up for sale, which means it has to stay pretty clean and we have to be ready to vacate the place within an hour notice of potential buyers coming to see the place. That also means that the vast majority of our stuff is in storage and living here feels like renting a house at the beach. But no beach and it’s not really vacation. Yeah.

So, if I had my meds, I would get some stuff done; if I could set up my workspace, I could get some stuff done; if all were in order, there would be new chapters and I would have some money in my pocket. But then again, none of this is really a very good excuse and I just suck at getting things done when I’m not constantly busy.

Okay, I feel that I may be reaching the point of rambling, so I’ll wrap this up with my plans for the future: The hiatus will continue for a bit, both because I don’t think I could produce anything worth a damn on any semblance of a schedule, and because this way I can keep writing at my slug’s pace and when we come back from hiatus, there might even be a buffer. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Thanks for bearing with me.
Rock on.
-Alex \m/

THEN SUCK ON THIS, BITCHES: