I find the potential of online fiction publishing an exciting, even inspiring prospect. Years ago, when video cassettes first allowed us to watch films at home, prophets of doom announced that cinema-as-we-know-it was surely dead. The opposite turned out to be true: being able to watch what we wanted, when we wanted whetted our appetite for the medium as such, and the Multiplex is now very much alive and well.
Twenty years or so ago, we Brits were allegedly becoming a nation of illiterati: the book-as-we-know-it was, we were told, a dying swan. This week, the owner of the Waterstone’s bookstore chain in the UK announced in a radio interview that 8,000 new book titles were coming out for the Christmas season. Apparently we philistine, illiterati Brits publish more books than the USA.
There are limits, it seems, to how small the postmodern dumbocracy mill can grind us before one or two renegade braincells wake up out of their stupor and perform emergency mouth to mouth on what is left of our thought processes.
This does beg the question of what is suitable for online publishing, where we have seen the advent of a whole new genre, the blook, with its own Blooker Prize. In some ways, blook writing is like the rap of the written word – dynamic, spontaneous, insistent, quirky. The online medium might have been made for the short, pithy piece. Perhaps this is the right time for literature’s poor relation, the short story, to change out of its kitchen overalls, stop fussing over the bechamel sauce and come and sit at the high table with the grownups?
