Stuff Going Down
I know that I haven’t updated in two weeks. There are a number of reasons for this. First and primarily, it’s nearing the end of the semester and I haven’t exactly had a lot of free time. Second, I’ve been preparing to move everything over to truefiction.org, to which I own the domain rights. The main problem there is trying to find a suitable web provider–this can’t cost too much money and it has to have a certain number of features–Perl 5 and PHP 4 are very important, MySQL less so–but there are other reasons for this as well.
Especially since I started going to afterDinner over the weekend (it’s a site for short fiction and personal narrative, as well as an online writers workshop), I started thinking about other things that could be done with a weblog format. I mean, the majority of weblogs that are out there all follow the same basic structure–short little snippets of ________, with an occasional longer essay or three every so often to mix things up. It’s great, but goddamn there’s a lot of it out there.
So I ask you: what if a weblog were almost entirely fictional?
I’m sure it’s not nearly as revolutionary an idea as I currently think it is (sleep deprivation = bad). There’s a better than likely chance that many websites are already doing something along these lines. And given my predilection towards long essays and linkless blurbs as it is, this site isn’t much different than a novel written up in a journal format.
But a journal formatted novel, set up in a world that’s ostensibly the same as ours but with some really weird stuff going on–I’m currently thinking of having a tron/matrix/neuromancer type of thing going on in the background, but different. Earlier. The first human computer interface in development. Now it gets a little more interesting. (I think. Maybe not. I’ll need to think this through while not tired.) The only major feature of this would be that it would be serialized, with real time updates as i think of them. Short plot twist? I can write it in between classes. I’ll be stuck with what I’ve posted, which could make for an interesting experience when I’m nine months in and I can’t remember which character picked up the flowers for the office party.
Then to get really crazy you could throw in a few other sites to the mix–one of the older characters could have a site on geocities or AOL, for example. There’d probably only be the one journal, but this way I can also get to have other characters in the story be slightly more fleshed out. I don’t know. I have to think about this a lot more before I make any decisions.
But it’s a hell of an idea, right?