Total Oblivion

"A fast-paced, suspenseful dystopian picaresque, part Huck Finn and part bizarro-world Swiss Family Robinson..."

---Kirkus

Read more...

Order online...

Skinny Dipping

Long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and finalist for the Crawford Award. Title short story listed for the 2000 O. Henry award.

Get the fun-sized edition.

Order online...

 

Goblin Mercantile Exchange

Futures, Options, and Swaps (the weblog of Alan DeNiro)

papyrus vs. stone tablet vs. vellum

I’m sure others have discussed this at greater length and with greater clarity elsewhere, but I’ve been struck-and also confounded-by how many online media there are out there. Even on a casual/end-user basis.

Does the proliferation of these have an accumulative effect if I use them all? I only have so much energy in the day, and I have data/words/whatever to get out there-but how much energy is expended in actually deciding whether to use myspace vs. a wiki vs. a blog? (And by the way, is Friendster RIP 2002?)

E.g., I think, now, that Taverner’s Koans would be best served as a wiki, rather than the (rather obscure) content-management system that I ended up using. But I feel a little like, unless I suddenly get gobs of free time, that I won’t be able to port it to a wiki for awhile.

In a related impulse, I’m starting up a barebones wiki for Rabid Transit, which will be a clearinghouse for information about past contributors, and will be a space for the contributors themselves to add info, links to other stories of theirs online, etc. I hope that gets off the ground and goes well; it’ll definitely be an experiment-and hopefully a way to keep giving “added value” to our writers (who we love and think are brilliant and want to do well!). I wanted to do this originally in straight HTML. But that would have been crazy.

Also, I’m kind of using my own blog as the “home page” for the story collection. I think this is both good and bad. But I also don’t think there’s a neat, one size fits all solution.

Anyway, these are just random examples from my own experience and aren’t meant to be definitive. As writers, we have more choices than ever as to what we inscribe upon, and those choices will have lasting impact on what we actually write.

Fri, March 24 2006 » Meta/Logistics

2 Responses

  1. heather whipple March 28 2006 @ 4:46 pm

    I’ve recently come into the wiki-love and want to host one on my own site eventually. Are you doing that with the RT wiki, and if so, which software did you pick? figuring out which media to choose is hard enough, but then there are so many options within each type…

  2. Alan March 29 2006 @ 1:56 pm

    I’m trying it out with hosting on PBwiki-mainly because it’s super easy and has password protection.

    Exactly, there are so many flavors of wiki that it was hard to choose one. But I figure, rather than hosting it myself right off the bat, this would be worth it (PBwiki) as an experiment.

Leave a Reply