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James at Progression has a good post about quality (or a severe lack thereof) in blog fiction, and all online-print. He writes:

I think that people aren’t terribly willing to shout about quality as far as the internet is concerned. If you went onto someone’s fiction blog and left a comment that tidied up some language, or made writing tips, you’d probably be termed ‘teh troll’ (or some-such similar insult). But you’re only giving advice! So, what to do? Well, that’s well out of my hands, and yours, and probably anyone else in the world. There are very few ways to legitimise the use of the internet as a mass-publishing tool, no ways to enforce quality controls on things that you aren’t uploading to your own servers, and no ways to stop people doing things that they enjoy…

He uses as an example some of the awful stuff that won Blooker prizes and runner-up prizes this year. I checked the critera they list on their site, the criteria by which they judge the winners, and it’s very vaugue:

Finalists and winners will be selected based on the quality of the writing and the general excellence of the content. Preferred submissions will be those entries that lift the subject matter out of the routine category and give the reader greater insight into the topic covered. The Overall Winner will be the blook judged to have shown to the greatest extent the qualities outlined above.

This whole discussion reminded me of a day two years ago, when I had first begun research for my thesis. A philosophy professor I’d had for a few classes came into the Writing Center where I was working, and asked me whether I was doing a thesis, so I summarized what I was doing. He asked, “Are any of these blogs any good?” Well, no, I answered him– there are very few diamonds in the rough, and I have read or at least skimmed a lot of that rough to find them.  Then he asked, “Well how do you know what’s good?” I was sort of flustered by this, though I think I could give him a better answer now using a lot of pretentious literary terms. Anyway, it was interesting to me because that became one of the most commonly asked questions about my thesis–are any of these fictional blogs any good. The answer is very few. But in my research it didn’t always matter.

I mean, sure, I read a lot of awful stuff while I worked on my thesis, but I wasn’t particularly interested in quality. The better blogs were the ones that kept me interested in the subject, and made it seem worth studying, but all of them were useful in some way. In the interviews I did, even if I didn’t particularly like the content of the blog, it was always fascinating to hear why the writer was writing, or how it had been going for them.

I’m not saying quality doesn’t matter, because I think unless there are some absolutely stellar fictional blogs that appear, and get a strong readership, blog fiction will never be taken seriously because it isn’t all that serious right now. But for my own personal purposes, I wasn’t all that concerned with quality. 

Maybe I’m a bit late discovering this, but there is growing “fliction” community–that is, people who write fictional text to accompany their flickr photos. The term was coined by Andrew Losowsky who wrote The Doorbells of Florence, the Blooker Prize fiction winner for 2007. I read through it and it’s delightful. Losowky’s work sort of reminds me of the novel Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman or Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Each photo-text-segment shows a doorbell from Florence and gives a brief short story about the people who live behind them. The segments don’t necessarily connect to form a narrative (though there are some loose connections drawn between them), but that’s okay. It’s more like an appositional essay. Except fiction.

I searched the “flicktion” tag on flickr and found that since Losowsky wrote Doorbells several other flicktions have sprung up. Very interesting- I’m excited to browse through them. It sort of reminds me of blog fiction, except there is not the imposed timeline or chronology of a blog, so the flickr segments can be more loosely connected if the writer wants.

And oh yeah-

The Blooker Prize winners were finally announced! In case you don’t know, the Lulu Blooker Prize is given to the best “blooks,” that is published books that had their beginnings on a blog. The 2007 winners are:

Overall and Nonfiction Prize: Colby Buzzell’s My War: Killing Time in Iraq. This one was no suprise–Buzzell’s blog has long been considered one of the better war blogs.

Nonfiction Runner-Up: My Secret: A Post Secret Book by Frank Warren. I loved this book, and the Post Secret blog is way cool. If you haven’t seen this, do check it out. I used some of these in a class presentation on Joan Didion, oddly enough.

Fiction Winner: The Doorbells of Florence by Andrew Losowsky. Losowsky posted photos of doorbells to flickr and wrote a short story about the people who live behind each one. I wish I had known about this sooner- I don’t know how I missed it. His photograhs are beautiful–I’m excited to read it.

Fiction Runner-Up: Monster Island: A Zombie Novel by David Wellington. I haven’t read this, and maybe it’s great, but at first glance I can see it is in third person and divided into chapters. Maybe there were comments in the original run, but they’re not there now. It just seems like there is no reason for it to be on a blog except for more publicity– I mean, it’s not using blog technology as fully as it could. I guess the Blooker prize is not as picky as me, but I would have liked to see something a little more bloggy win. 

Comics Winner: Mom’s Cancer by Brian Fies. Yeah, I know nothing about this except that it’s about the artist’s mom’s struggle with cancer.

I don’t have too many serious arguements with the judges’ choices, but if Simon of Space ever gets a paper copy available, I’d like to see it at least get nominated. Also The Orphan, which I don’t think has a published version yet, but I hope it does eventually.

Eli James, who writes Novelr, read/reviewed my thesis. Well, summarized is probably more accurate. He blogs about “blooks,” one of terms people use to talk about blog literature, and he was very positive about my work.  He writes:

I’ve just come across Betsy Friedrich’s thesis on blog fiction … and I’m very impressed with it. So maybe as a reader I could’ve done without the first chapter (Definition of Terms), but it was a thesis, so it had to explain blogs to internet virgins academicians.

That made me laugh because he is exactly right– some of the stuff in there that might seem obvious or unnecessary to bloggers was stuff that my advisors wanted to know because they are practically internet virgins. Anyway, James’ blog is great for anyone interested in blog fiction, and he certainly keeps up with it much better than I do.

Sorry, there seems to be a glitch on the site right now that only lets you read the first part of the post. I’ll try to get it fixed soon.

One writer, Jamie, recently emailed with a few questions about blog fiction, wondering whether or not it’s a good idea to write a novel on a blog. One question he/she asked: 

“Presumably there are copyright issues to this kind of thing… and it
would be very easy for the whole thing to be copied from me.  How do
other people deal with this?  Password protection to control
readership?”

I responded:

“As far as copyright issues go, that’s a little sticky. I’m not a lawyer by any means, but copyright law, as I understand it, says that as soon as you create something in a tangible form (i.e. write it down) then it is copyrighted to you. You don’t have to register with the copyright office or anything like that, you just need to put your own stamp of ownership on your work–so a little thing at the bottom that says your name, the copyright symbol, and the year. In order to actually file a suit against someone you would have to be registered with the copyright office, but I think most people probably just do that when it’s needed. You could also look into Creative Commons, which is another type of copyright that is not so strict ( www.creativecommons.org). I’ve never seen a blog that is password protected–maybe it would work, but I’d be afraid that the extra hoops would turn off readers.”