Let's make the mountain
Me as Nurse Chapel, modified for Star Trek XI.
I come from a family of nerdy people, doing nerdy things.
I have been to Comic Con. I have cosplayed. I have spent late nights up on Livejournal at party posts. (If you don't know what that is, you have a better social life than me, good sir.) I have written fanfiction (Oh Magen, bite your tongue!) and yes, I have been in flame wars. My high school career was comprised largely of flame wars, and from the ages of 15 – 18 I was banned from most reputed comic book and anime message boards of the day.
Why do I mention this? Because I come from fandom. I am a fan. I have a collection of action figures in my bedroom and I wear buttons and pins professing my love for Cthuhlu and Spock. I flail my arms on my couch every week for the latest episode of Supernatural and retweet everything Misha Collins does. (Note: No matter what you hear on Livejournal, I'm not stalking him. I just happen to admire him a great deal. Honest. One day I hope to be shoving scripts through his mail-slot with lovely little notes and promises of expensive European beer, but that's neither here nor there.) Being a fan brings a sense of community. Under every rock on the internet is a group of like-minded people, who feel the way you feel and love the things you love. You can talk about storylines and meta, swap theories and (gasp!) even fanfiction.
It's safe. And you know what? It's fun. I've had a better time sitting on the grass with a stranger in San Diego talking about TV shows and movies, or sitting in a coffee shop with a friend discussing video games and anime, than I've ever had in a bar or at a club. Keep your grown-up pursuits and give me a damn comic book instead.
As a writer, I'm supposed to look at writing clinically. It's a business, because writing is my job. I should exist in a vacuum of market trends and profit margins. I should write things that will get an editor's attention and earn me a nice royalty check. I should be worried about the bottom-line. But at the end of the day, no matter how many articles I read (and sometimes even write) on the business of serious writers, I can't shake the tethers of my inner fangirl still tied tight around my ankle. It makes me want to write things that people enjoy, that people want to read. That people talk about and draw fanart for and, evil of evils!, even write fanfiction about. I want to write things that gather people around them in a sense of community.
And this is where I start to wonder why I'm working on a novel, and not a web serial.
Some of my favorite stories over the years have been web serials. Be they serialized novels or comics, there's a sense of excitement that comes with them. Wondering week-to-week what happens to your favorite characters or to their world. Talking about it with other readers, maybe even finding a message board or a Livejournal community or a DeviantART group dedicated to it. It creates a sense of urgency and community, if you can pull it off. And if you can pull it off well, it can be a really beautiful and wondrous thing. To me it feels truer to my own experiences as a reader to publish this way. It just makes more sense. You can set up your own space for it, you can interact with your readers, you can make it exactly what you feel it needs to be. You can really own it.
I'm not saying that my novel is going to be the Next Big Thing in serialized fiction. I don't know if anybody even wants to read it, outside of the handful of writers, editors and artists I know online. I just know that the closer I get to the end of this project, the more I find myself trying to look at it as a reader. Maybe it makes me wide-eyed and naive, but there it is. I try to look at it the way I would any book, movie, TV show or serial I'm invested in. Is the format too clinical? Does a novel feel too detached? Would it be organic to read as a serial? I'm starting to think that it would.
And the idea is actually exciting.
Flesh Trap: The web serial? I guess we'll see.
