August 22, 2022:
This is the 20th anniversary of these pieces. 7,300 of them, thereabouts.
Their quality is of course inconsistent. That's inevitable. To me, that's part of the draw of working in this format. You try something. If it works: yay! If it fails, no worries, there'll be another tomorrow and you move on. It's not like writing War and Peace where at the end if you feel it hasn't been successful you say to the sky, Can I please have my ten years back?
This is an early essay and an update highlighting how my interests have evolved over this time:
Blogging as Cubism: Update 2022: Twenty Years On
At first I was exploring the concept of "fiction blogging", writing short pieces which the world eventually tagged "microfiction". Typically I would interleave multiple narratives or experiment with other "postmodernist" narrative techniques, where the intention was to imply a broader canvas — a necessity in fact of the mediocre screen resolutions of the time. The content was frequently "confessional": I was still caught up in the ideology of storytelling which I later came to reject. Many of these pieces narrate experiences related by friends; retell well-known stories; or are highly stylized and fictionalized versions of events I took part in. They were fairly widely published in the incunabular online literary world of the time. I suspect editors of that day liked them because they're easy to consume.
In time I became more interested in nonlinear narrative; algorithmic narrative and poetry; and computer-mediated narrative. Much of this interest is fueled by the experience of TriadCity, where many of the techniques I and others employ have been tested in a mature and large-scale work. My pieces here became more abstract, less dependent on semantic content, more about pure music. Many are mosaics, cut-ups, or algorithmically-assembled, with no semantic content at all. The intention is for them to sound pretty when spoken out loud.
This, and vignette. In my realist writing I've been a vignette-icist since childhood. Once upon a time I'd write all day in spiral notebooks carried everywhere. I thought, I'm practicing to write novels one day. Later in the Internet period I lost interest in novels, indeed in linearity in general. I came to feel then that vignette is a powerful form in and for itself. A successful vignette checks many of the Postmodernist boxes: particularly, it resonates with echoes of bigger worlds. Again implying larger canvas, the way a still frame from a movie can evoke the movie as a whole. Now I write with a phone or a tablet, frequently of street encounters, or of strong memories — mine or others'. While still experimenting with computer mediation, cut-ups, and algorithmic assembly.
The feeling I hope to convey is restlessness. Dissatisfaction with the shoehorning of traditional narrative concepts into digital media. Search for new forms.
Below is the original essay I wrote explaining "fiction blogging" in 2002.
Blogging as Cubism (2002 essay)
In my opinion, Kafka's Diaries are where the literary practices we now call "Postmodernism" began.
His notebooks are more complex and interesting than their commonplace title implies. He'd move freely between conventional diary form, sketches for stories, hilarious ink drawings, and complete short works of fiction. As published their editing downplays this heterogeneity. Still they read with a fascinating dreamlike texture.
Their heterogeneity is their "Postmodernism". By bringing multiple orders of narrative into collision, Kafka explored what you might reasonably think of as ontologies of text. Where each order of narrative is its own literary "world", and they bump into each other with unpredictable consequences.
It seems to me that if you take blogging seriously as a space for literary narrative, Kafka's practices are natural signposts. The space encourages you to be arbitrary. You can move with great freedom between diary, fiction, essay, book review, grocery list, or any other formal possibility which suits your thematic purpose from moment to moment. If you group the results you can explore their unexpected interactions.
Think of it as parallax. Modernist parallax was about multiple subjectivities perceiving events within their individually flawed points of view. Postmondernist parallax is about bringing multiple orders of text into relationship.
Analogy with Cubism seems reasonable. The Cubists implied three dimensional objects by juxtaposing multiple two-dimensional planes depicting the object from different points of view. Substitute texts for planes and you're off to the races.
My writing here explores these ideas. Where individual pieces may be nothing more ambitious than exercises or vignettes, when you bring them into relationship they can turn out to resonate in unexpected ways.
Please also check out TriadCity. I believe that textual virtual worlds are an important form of literature. They're particularly good at fulfilling the formal and thematic agendas of Postmodernism. Along with other scholarly fora, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism agrees, citing TriadCity as its culminating example of literary Postmodernism. This is further explained here on the SmartMonsters website.