Monday, November 16, 2015

FictionFeed.net turns ONE! Who's ready for Terrible Twos?


I'm excited to announce this month marks the one year anniversary of FictionFeed.net, a weekly review of recently published internet fiction (flash and short) that details the conceptual and craft decisions that make the story in question worth reading. I'm proud to say that the site has featured works of fiction and prose ranging from SF/F to psychological to surrealist to erotica, mainstream, magic realism, humor, and even not-narrative/anti-narrative forms, which is to say we've run the gamut in terms of what authors (of all ages, nationalities, and walks of life) are doing. Basically, the only constraint on what we write about has been that it must be written in English, and I would honestly dispense with that restriction too, if it were feasible. 

Over one year and 108 individual fiction reviews (I was doing several per week initially, before relaxing to one/week), we've featured internet fiction from both obscure online zines to big-league journals in both mainstream and speculative fiction, including Paper Darts, Passages North, Word Riot, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Monkeybicycle, and scores of others.

Now that I've fallen into a stride in terms of what I'm doing with this project, I want to push the website to become something more in its second year. To this end, I hope to publish regular (monthly?) postmortem/post-publication analyses of individuals' writing processes, featuring high-profile short stories along with candid explanations of what it was like (from author's standpoint) to write this story, and why they even wrote it in the first place. This regular feature, which will hopefully have a witty name or theme or something, will be in Q&A form, and I want to make this feature special by asking questions that actually matter, and talk about the nitty-gritty of fiction writing rather than heady conceptual stuff that benefits no one (let's face it). 

Here are some of the questions I will likely ask my authors:

  • Do you eat during/after your writing session? Are bagels part of the equation? What about coffee? And for that matter: psychotropic agents?
  • What is the initial "trigger" (thought/feeling/idea/image) that prompted this entire story? What about this initial inspiration led you to create an entire story from this prompt?
  • What's you're favorite sentence in the entire story? Tell us how it happened. Spare no details of the sentence's evolution.
So that's what I have in mind for questions. Stay tuned to FictionFeed.net to see this feature, whatever it's called, whenever it finally emerges.

Later.

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