This just in – Warren Ellis, comics supremo, science fiction author, and roving gonzo journalist of the metaverse, is about to start writing a weekly column for the Suicide Girls website. Which is another reason for me to curse the fact that they don’t take debit cards or PayPal …

… er, the first reason being, ah, research. Yes, research … into, um, subcultures and social networking. Yes, that was it. Ahem. Carry on.

Proof (as if proof were required) of the old adage that “if you don’t blog about it today, BoingBoing will have pipped you to the post tomorrow” … but better late than never; here’s a sterling post from Warren Ellis on internet publishing and ‘burst culture’.

In keeping with the spirit of what he’s saying, I’m just going to snatch out the bits I want, but you should really go and read the whole thing – it’ll take a few minutes at most, and it’s time well spent.

“365Tomorrows was an ideal reaction to sf publishing in new media, the concept of flash fiction and the way the medium works. 100-word bursts of speculative fiction, daily. JR Blackwell’s gotten herself a career out of it. And note how 365T kept producing and fulfilled its mandate even as sf sites and sf print magazines died on either side of it.”

365T is a good little site; Jeremy Tolbert and a bunch of co-conspirators have something quite similar going on at The Daily Cabal (which, for my money, carries higher quality fiction, but as far as I can tell doesn’t yet have the reach of 365T).

“How far behind the curve is the sf publishing community? When International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day came around, hundreds of writers of gift and ambition ran short work for free on the web. This came about following a recently-resigned official of the Science Fiction Writers of America calling those who produce material for the web SCABS.”

I can add nothing to that.

“The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s *another* medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you?”

Zing!

“Bursts aren’t contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn’t be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn’t be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in.”

The death of print does not mean the death of reading. At least, it doesn’t *have* to.

“And just a thought: if you’re an sf writer grappling for space in one of the fiction magazines for seven cents a word or whatever the rate is now — what exactly are you losing by teaming with writers of like mind, going to the web and convincing a friend to work out the monetising bells and whistles for you?”

I refer you again to The Daily Cabal. And also to the No Fear of the Future group-blog, which has been running some brilliant material since it started up, and has done a great job of shoving the names of a bunch of previously unfamiliar authors in front of my eyes on a regular basis. Sure, it’s early days yet – but there’s a lot to be said for boarding the train early while it’s easy to find a comfy seat.

Nothing particularly new there, at least not to anyone who’s been reading rants (by me and others) about this sort of thing for a little while. But because Ellis has come out and said it, the meme will get a lot further (31 links to the piece as counted by Technorati at time of posting this response). For some reason, people pay a lot more attention to him than they do to me …

Now, I don’t want to brazenly name-drop … actually, scratch that, yes I do. I was hanging out in The Wastelands in Second Life last night with a bunch of my neighbours, when Integral Danton (who is probably better known to most of you as comics writer Warren Ellis) dropped by wearing a rather impressive outfit.

Click through for the larger size – that’s Mr. Danton on the right. Despite the fact that he’d been preceded by someone turning up in a dragon avatar with full fire-breathing capabilities, everyone present with a bit of a science fiction background recognised (and was fairly impressed by) his outfit – a stillsuit, as per Frank Herbert’s Dune novels.

It turns out that some people have put together a sim entirely based on the Dune universe. I popped over there to get some photos, but it turns out it’s a very hardcore roleplay sim, and I didn’t have the time or motivation to read and absorb the huge list of rules of conduct that would have been necessary for me to venture in without pissing off the natives. I may well pop by over the weekend for a better look, but if you want to see for yourself, just do a place search in-world for ‘Dune Project’. However, work on the theory that if you haven’t read the Dune novels, it’s not going to mean an awful lot to you.

Just as a side note, memes from meatspace have a way of bleeding through into the metaverse, too. Let’s just hope no one from the Boston Police Department visits The Wastelands any time soon…

Just in case you needed further proof that every now and then the internet will deliver you something to make you smile, try this:

You’re going through your RSS feeds, just the same as always, when you suddenly discover that a writer you greatly admire has accidentally stumbled upon and liked some music by a band from your local area, who you’re also rather fond of.

Gave me a little warm glow, that’s for sure. So go and have a listen to the music of The Strange Death of Liberal England – as endorsed by Warren Ellis.

I was hanging around in Second Life last night, and gatecrashed a bunch of people chatting about Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin (which I have yet to read, so I mostly listened to what everyone else was saying).

Inevitably someone brought up the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, and someone else mentioned that he’d not only been to Second Life, but been interviewed there too. The things you find out from random people that you’d have never thought to Google for, eh? So here’s a video of Vonnegut being interviewed in the metaverse.

Talking of Second Life, I’m considering buying a plot of land in The Junkyard. One just came free, and I’m looking into the financial considerations (which are quite low for a single small parcel, all things considered) before laying out some Lindens and begging Jason Stoddard and Co. to build me a cool hangout in keeping with the local ambiance …

… the local ambiance being very much post-apocalyptic, a la Mad Max. My kind of place. Pop by and visit – the locals have some diverting (and deadly) entertainments should you feel the urge to join in. Otherwise you can just wander around, chat to people and check out the scenery. And not have people try to sell you crap you don’t want, quite unlike a huge swathe of the rest of the metaverse.

Oh yeah; Warren Ellis has a new gaff in SL, which I also dropped in on. It’s called Winterstate. And being the sort of host who understands his client demographic, he’s laid on entertainment in the form of a set of zombie-infested tunnels for you to blow off steam in, should you wish – you’ll need to buy a gun elsewhere, but that’s not much of a chore. There are also little helicopters, and it snows a lot. Mr. Ellis wasn’t around at the time, regrettably.

Any VCTB-reading SL users, please friend me, because I still hardly know anyone. Just IM for Isambard Portsmouth.

The ability to spool a variety of ‘content’ onto the web from any moment and/or location we find ourselves in is growing by the month. But what use is it in real terms, and how much of that content is actually worthwhile? Continue reading “Shadowcasting”

We all have those days, don’t we…y’know, the ones where you want to crush and destroy everything that offends you, and when everything that offends you is, well, everything? Continue reading “Writing as catharsis/exorcism”