WFSN?

Today, 1889 Labs author Greg X. Graves (Bears, Recycling and Confusing Time Paradoxes) proposes to us a way of cataloging web fiction, and keeping us from, and I quote:

'Murdering the shit out of history' by electronic editing.

So, exactly what solution does he offer us?

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Consider this: you're the biggest fan of Wings that the world has ever known, and you've lived each day since 1981 in gut-wrenching torment because that is the year that their music died. Reality has failed to dim your enthusiasm. You wear your Wings shirts to work every day and after an exhausting day of rocking out to Wings, you slide in between your Wings bedsheets.

In a town on the far side of the globe, a fellow by the name of Saul McBlartney has founded a band named Feathers and it is the heir apparent to Wings.

But you never hear about it. Because you are in one of your fits of ennui caused by a world that has had its Wings clipped, you are sobbing as you cross the street and whammo, you're hit by a bus.

If only you'd had the latest album by Feathers, you'd be very alive and very happy.

There are directories out there that cover webfiction, including the fantastic Web Fiction Guide. But to the best of my knowledge, all of them include some component of editorializing. And that's not a bad thing, but I want to consider the model of the International Standard Book Number or, more analogous to what I'm about to propose, the International Standard Serial Number.

To be included in the IS*N directories requires no claims of quality. To Kill a Mockingbird and Uncle Horace's Junkyard Journal share catalog space. You register and you're set. Then you're in directories of published fiction.

Web fiction needs a similar system, the Web Fiction Serial Number, or WFSN. An author could submit their series, novel or story to the website and be issued a serial number for their work. The serial number would encode significant data, just like the ISBN. Here is a suggested schematic:

1234567890-123456-greg_x_graves-123-1-123

raw serial number (billion-digit number space)

author id

author slug

language code

webfiction type (single story, series)

edition

Searches against the database could be done by any of the criteria.

One of the major benefits would be that editions could conceivably be tracked. As an author myself, I constantly struggle with the power of editing. When I stumble across one of my stories on my site, it is completely unlike a print author finding one of their books in a bookstore. While they can flip through their book and shake their head at their past mistakes, I can open up my fiction to live editing and make lots of present mistakes.

Example: "Man, if I switched this character from being an elderly autistic survivor of World War II to being a gregarious just-hatched space lizard, then the story would make soooo much more sense! Sweet!"

I refuse to edit my stories, because one of the obligations that I've put on myself to reign in my limitless editing power is to add an addendum to every story that I've edited (beyond the hour just after publication) and I don't want to crap up the page with edits. But I also want to avoid driving my readers crazy. The clever turn of phrase that was their favorite part of the story might be, in my estimation, the crappiest coupling of words I could ever conceive.

The system would be able to support editions via a web standard named XML-RPC, the same technology stack that powers trackbacks and pingbacks in standard weblogs. Ideally, there would be no plug-ins necessary as trackbacks are baked in to most blog platforms.

As a web fiction community, we'd suddenly have a powerful tool at our fingertips. An appealing part of music is being able to chart a musician's improvement over time, especially if they release updated versions with time. Consider how the mono set of the Beatles is considered valuable by Beatles fans. Under the current web fiction paradigm, those editions would have been stamped out forever.

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Thoughts? I know some of you out there generate them.