chuggnutt.com

So here's the deal. It's blindingly obvious that I haven't devoted much time to this blog in quite a while, even though I consider this site my "main" identity on the web. Part of it is blog fatigue, part of it is all my best ideas these days are related to my other blogs, part of it is inertia.

Whatever, I'm tired of looking at how desolate and empty this site has become. So I'm going to revitalize this blog, and in doing so I'm undertaking something that is—for me—entirely new and radical.

I'm going to start publishing all of my fiction writing here. Mostly old stuff, and whatever new stuff I write. All of it.

My thinking is this:

I talk a lot about being a writer, but let's face it—these days especially—it's mostly talk. Well, that's not entirely true; I seem to be writing a lot on the blogs, but for this exercise I'm talking about being fiction writing. So I talk a lot about being a writer, and wanting to do it for a living, but I also need to be realistic about it: I know myself, and at the rate I'm going (or rather not going), that's just not going to happen.

I've got a bunch of old writing that I haven't done anything with, though only one or two stories are actually finished; it's mostly work-in-progress stuff, rough drafts, like that. Science fiction, largely, though there's some plain vanilla fiction and at least one horror-ish piece. And some Star Trek fan fiction as well.

As for new stuff, well, I've got lots of ideas, but my execution has been lacking. I'm thinking that this will prompt me to, you know, actually write.

So I'm gonna put my money where my mouth is and publish it all online here. Because the reality is, if I don't do it here, I won't do it at all, of which I'm 99.993% certain.

Plus, I get to dabble and experiment in this whole new publishing model, where writers are putting their works online under Creative Commons licenses, for instance. Why not? Stuff published online potentially has a much vaster audience available than traditional printed works with limited runs. It's wide open.

So here's the deal: I'll tag the title of the post as "Fiction" and whether it's a completed piece or (most likely) a work in progress ("WIP"). Much of it will be dreadful, I'm sure—some of this stuff goes back years, and... well. Let's just say a lot of this will be "rough drafts."

It'll all be published under the same Creative Commons license I have on this site—Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike 3.0—which means it can be copied, shared, remixed, mashed up, basically treated how you want as long as proper attribution is given (i.e., credit given to me) and it's all noncommercial (no money is made from it). Otherwise, it's all free.

Comments and criticism are welcome (encouraged!) and on the off chance that someone actually does some sort of CC-related stuff like I related above, let me know.

Checking out Wikipedia's excellent (as always) article on fan fiction today, I ran across the site FanFiction.net, which I hadn't seen before. It's a comprehensive directory of fan fiction, organized by TV shows, movies, cartoon, games, books, and much more.

The amount of fan fiction out there is truly astounding; I've known this, of course, but I just never guessed at the sheer depth and breadth it covers. Let's take a little stroll through the site for some examples.

• The combined number of Star Trek stories: 9240. Wow. They actually split the Star Trek stories up by each TV show, but that doesn't really matter.
• X-Files: 5393 stories.
• Lost (the TV series that debuted just this season): 1462 stories.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: 26,567. Holy shit!
• Law and Order: 2037. Like Star Trek, they split out by the different subseries.
• Star Wars: 11,828.
• Lord of the Rings: 37,136. Good grief.
• Harry Potter: 190,077! If I'd been drinking something when I read this one, I would have done a spit-take. This is beyond comprehensible!

Those are kind of the usual suspects in fan fiction, what you'd expect... but there are seriously hundreds more different topics people are writing about. Here's a sample of some of the oddball ones:

• All in the Family: 4 stories.
• Bill Nye the Science Guy: 6 stories.
• Lazytown (a kids show, our kids watch it): 16 stories.
• Diff'rent Strokes: 2 stories.
• Saved by the Bell: 13 stories.
• Moulin Rouge (the movie musical): 1466(!)

You get the idea.