Blog Fiction

Introduction
Blog fiction is a blog that is used for fictional writing. What makes blogs different from other mediums is that you can take advantage of the features that blogs offer such as hyperlinks, images and polls. . Blogs allow readers interact with the author. The author is given feedback on the direction of the story and the author adjust the story based on the feedback that the reader gives. In some blogs the author can even choose to respond to readers in character. There are many types of blog fiction. The most common one is where there is only one character telling the story on one blog. DustinM said that this is the most common type of blog fiction because it is the easiest to read. The more authors you add, the more of a chance of confusing the readers. Another type of blog fiction is where there are many authors in the story and each author is controlling one character and authors must collaborate if they want to use another character in there story. A good example of one is Urban3zero.

Blogs appeared around the early 1990s and were made popular by digital communities and evolved into a sort of "online diary." Blog fiction began rising in popularity when free, automated blog generators began appearing in 1999, such as LiveJournal and Blogger. This genre is sometimes compared to the 18th Century novel and appears in short installments of textual pieces, lexia, that must both stand on their own and work towards a larger whole. Betsy Friedrich, who wrote her thesis on blog fiction, "shows that the 19th century novel was epistolary - or delivered in the form of letters/ diary entries, an echo of blog fiction today."

A blog (from the term weblog) most generally refers to a kind of online personal journal. It strikes a balance between the traditional journal and hypertext fiction, in that it is published as a series of entries just as the traditional journal, though usually with the most recent entry appearing first, and is enhanced by features like hyperlinks, graphics, and the commenting system.

While there are many options available to authors of blog fiction, all of these options taken together signify the use of the blog format as a writing device. That is, in choosing the blog format, the author opens up avenues of storytelling technique not previously available to writers of traditional book fiction.

Being able to both comment on the writing and view hyperlinks helps form a community of readers as it broadens a typical readers ability to interact with the text. This community of readers can use their ability to interact with the text in order to expand the face of authorship. Authors normally intended their readers to only read, but now their readers are able to respond and interact with the authors. Being able to interact with such diverse people on the world wide web breeds a new type of literature, and this is what makes blog fiction so unique and interesting.

Group Members
Kevin Mai

Meredith Cannon

Igor Borisov

Justin Kollender

Alex Lange

Super Powered (Mai)
Super Poweredis a superhero fiction blog about five young people that have superhuman abilities that they cannot control called “Powereds”. They go through difficult times in their life because of these powers they cannot control, until one day each of the five young people are approached by a company that told them that they can give them the ability to control their superhuman abilities. They want to be part of a group of people called “supers” that are born with superhuman abilities, but they are able to completely control their powers. The powereds accept the companies offer and enrolled into Lander University to join the Hero Certification program so they can prove and test that they are as useful as any born” Super”. The struggle these five young people will face is will they be able to control their power permanent and become a permanent super or will they revert back to their old Powered ways.



The style of this superhero fiction is set up like a common fictional blog. The blog is written by a single narrator on a single blog site. The author decided to make himself the narrator because he did not want to confuse the readers with many character narrating the story from their point of view. This format allows allow readers to understand and what is going on in the story more effectively. Each blog post seems to focus on one to two characters. The author seems to do this because when you have too much going on in a story, it can be hard for a reader to keep track of everything that is going on. Also this blog is updated with new blog post twice a week. This keeps the reader in suspense. Suspense is essential to any fiction story because it prevents the story from becoming stale and keeps the reader coming back to the blog. It is also updated just enough to keep the reader from forgetting and abandoning the fictional blog.

Superpowereds contains over 20 characters and terms that there special to the story. To prevent the readers from getting confused, the author did something that I have never seen a blog site do.

The author has a separate wiki page just for readers to get important information about the story. The wiki contains a character list that has a brief description of each character. The wiki also contains a description of terminology that the story uses so that the readers do not get confused. The plot is very complicated considering how much many characters the author has involved in the story but the wiki help prevent confusion.

The author installed a comment section at the end of every blog post to interact with readers though the use of comments. This allows the author to answer questions that readers may have to help them understand the story. Having a comment section is important to a blog because it allows reader to give feedback and interact with other readers. The interaction the author gets from the readers gives the author feedback on how the author should go with the story. The reader rarely posted a comment on any of the blogs post. This allows blog fiction to form a community of readers by keeping them engaged. One feature that the author does that I really enjoy and that that a lot of blog sites do not use is adding a forum section to the blog. The forum section allows readers to ask any type of question to the author and other readers to answer or give their own opinion on the subject. The forum section is not very active but still is a great feature that reader can take advantage of.

There is a lot to like about this blog fiction. The characters are very interesting. My favorite character is Nick Campbell. His has the ability to control luck. Nick is a very intelligent character but lacks the self esteem. He is not your typical superhero who is confident and knows what they are doing. Nick seems to be an average person and which is why I am drawn to him. The readers do not seem to take advantage of the comment and the forum sections, but once they do you will start to see the potential blog fiction can offer.

In My Daydreams (Cannon)
After the death of Nick Klein's grandfather, who was a super hero during World War II through the 1980s, Nick inherited his grandfather's powered armor and team's command center. He also discovered that his friends who were the grandchildren of other team members wanted to bring back the Grand Lake Heroes League. It was up to Nick to choose whether he should go along with the group and restart the League, or just avoid it all together. The Beginning of the superhero web series, "Home of the Legion of Nothing " starts with Nick meeting up with other grandchildren and getting to know each other. For the most part, the Legion of Nothing focuses on a group of high-schoolers that have to deal with their parent's and grandparent's pasts and their own desire to continue the superhero group their families started.

The story has a very serial nature, which is common with blog fiction. The posts are relatively short, but archive back to 2007, so if you're just starting the web series now, you will have a lot of catching up to do, especially since new posts are written twice a week (on Monday and Thursday). The story is told from the perspective of Nick, who is the grandson of the Rocket. Nick doesn't have powers of his own like his friends, but he's great with technology like his grandfather was. Eventually, Nick and the others decide to fight crime and continue the League that their parents and grandparents had started while trying to please their parents, finish their homework on time, get good grades and get into college.

"In My Daydreams" embodies the idea of character creation and after reading just the first few introductory posts you will be hooked and the characters will feel like friends you've known your whole life. While most super hero fiction does focus on the "people" behind the mask, what's interesting about these characters is that they are just a group of teenagers going through trivial troubles of social status and relationships who decide to team up as heroes to take on sociopathic killers.

I'm not one that typically engages in electronic literature or reads blog fiction, and I definitely had never read a superhero web series, but the author, Jim Zoetewey did a great job at engaging me as a reader and sucking me into his story. Apparently, I'm not the only one who was intrigued by his story, considering the comment feature of the blog has nearly twenty comments on each post alone.



The comment section is one of the basic features of blogs nowadays, and helps to differentiate blog and electronic fiction from regular books, and in this case, comics. According to Betsy Friedrich's thesis on blog fiction, "comments from readers and the interactivity of the blogging medium has helped shape blog fiction. It is a great feature that allows the readers to interact and connect with the author. Commenting also invites the possibility of collaboration and creates an interactive and user based culture.

This web series is definitely one to look into if you have any interest in in blog fiction at all. The story is interesting and entertaining and the writing is well done and easy to follow. The story is not like any other superhero fiction and is fascinating throughout the posts. I would highly recommend using the hyperlinks to follow the story or checking out the Facebook fan page.

Death's Blog (Borisov)
Death's Blog is a humorous blog written about a fictionalized post-retirement Grim Reaper. The Blog posts are pretty random and do not have to be followed in a chronological order. Death blogs about things like dating, parties, his mother, his most memorable killings, etc. Since this is purely a humor blog, you are not going to find much of a cohesive plot, or any in-depth story elements. This is simply a story of the Grim Reaper going into retirement, returning back to dating, then being forced out of retirement. This blog is set up like it is being written by the Grim Reaper, and the posted guidelines and Q&A sections are hilarious.

This blog is written in standard blog fiction form (single character writing the blog) and makes good use of various formats. This format allows for easy comprehensibility and for the non-chronological reading of posts. Every post is supplemented by funny pictures and offers links to previous events so you always know what is going. What this blog does differently from many others is that Death actually responds to user comments regularly and in character. A good example could be seen in the Grim Reaper's “mailbag” posts, where he replies to many of his user's emails. This blog is really enjoyable even though the first fifteen entries started out pretty slow. But then quickly picks up with a hilarious cast of characters, and a whole lot of satire. Some of the characters featured include a perverted devil, many of death's victims, depressed/ alcoholic reapers, egotistical philosophers, and several interviewers. Posts by the Grim Reaper have a very similar feel to the Death characterin Family Guy.

A particularly humorous post is when Chery Kaye Tardif interviews the reaper. This post satires the whole celebrity interview process and questions. For example, death talks about his career inspiration he got from a “career aptitude” test in school. Apparently his results stated that he was well suited for a career as “Death”. Another great example of satire could be seen in the Reaper's story of when he was delayed bringing a busload of victims to heaven because of heavy traffic. This is an excellent example of satire towards modern airline delays. Most posts by death have a very surreal feel due to the way he casually describes seemingly horrible situations. For example, he would describe the deaths and screams of victims the way a normal person would describe doing a menial task.

If you manage to get through the first few slow posts, and ignore the boring formatting, this is a very enjoyable blog fiction. Once you combine the excellent characters, clever satire, and funny writing, you get blog posts that you cant stop reading. This blog makes full use of the blog format by using pictures, comment responses, and links to past events to bring you a very enjoyable read.

Sonus (Kollender)
Robert Coover discussed in The End of Books how he hopes that the group fiction space called “Hotel” would still be around in twenty years. Twenty years later, these ‘hotels’ are everywhere in what we call blogs. Blogs allow users to enter any ‘hotel’ of their particular interest and collaborate with others who have similar interests. Collaboration in blogs yields very interesting results, and when applied to storytelling in particular can create some truly amazing blog fiction. Blog fiction is a form of electronic literature that uses a diary format in a blog to tell any fictional story. This literature can be extremely interesting because it involves so many different authors and styles like on the blog Urban 30.

Urban 30 is a blog where writers narrate a story by each portraying a different character and all collaborating in a fictional world of superheroes. All the individual stories combine to make a truly amazing piece of electronic literature that appeals specifically to older generations. My favorite superhero is Sonus, who is brought to life by Leroy J Powers. Sonus is a powerful leader that is extremely loyal to his family and friends but also simply refuses to kill another being.



My favorite story about Sonus was called Now, That’s What I Want to Hear '''. '''It was a quick story that set the entire Urban 30 team up for a much larger mission. Sonus and many other members of the team were tricked into meeting at headquarters for separate missions. Sonus quickly realizes that Hitman has ‘assembled all his troops’ for this much bigger mission. This leaves Sonus to prepare a plan and ready his team for this mission.

The way this story is written leaves a lot of room for interpretation. It is crafted specifically like this so that another writer can continue writing the story. The Urban 30 blog works as a collective group of storytellers, taking turns telling the same story from a different characters view. By using the technology available in blogs, Urban 30 exploits the possibilities of electronic literature by changing the way a typical story can be told. The diary style of Urban 30 is very similar to the way that Frankenstein was told, using Victor's and Walton's letters to tell parts of their story. Urban 30 is just much larger, told by over twenty five different characters, and all the authors for the characters are different. They are both great fiction stories, but Frankenstein is a piece of traditional literature while Urban 30 is a form of electronic literature.



Another story called No Place Like Home, conveyed all of Sonus’ great physical powers yet at the same time his biggest flaw. The story begins by Sonus reflecting on his dreams and worries, only to be interrupted by an eerie feeling his sister has. After this feeling goes away, a huge Brute (Monster) breaks through the gates of the apartment building, attacking and killing three of Sonus’ men. Sonus runs to battle and captures the Brute’s attention immediately. With two quick moves, Sonus knocks the Brute out and is urged by his troops to slay the beast. He refuses and fly’s the Brute far away so that he will never come back. The story ends with a twist when Sonus finds out that the evil Dr. Grimm had a hand in the attack.

Leroy J Powers crafts this story in a way that shows both Sonus' violent side and his gentile side. He develops his character's story and emotions, while leaving the end open for somebody to deal with Dr. Grimm in their story. This is what makes this particular form of Electronic Literature so interesting and different from normal forms of literature. This collaboration of writer's styles and imaginations gives the blog a creative advantage over most fictional stories. The story only gets this creative advantage by successfully exploiting most features of blog. The blog does not receive many comments from it readers although they strongly encourage leaving them. If the readers started to comment in on the story, it could have an even larger creative advantage.

Lord Likely (Lange)


The Victorian English aristocracy meets 21st century blogosphere: add in plenty of bawdy humor and lecherous commentary, and you have Lord Likely, a Sherlock Holmesian hedonist whose journals have been “transcribed” to the format through which the web reader enjoys them. The entire blog is set up to support the persona of the rakish narrator, complete with era-inspired ads (see picture to the right), “praise” for Lord Likely (“Utterly wonderful. Upon reading Lord Likely's diaries, I went out and set fire to a homeless wretch to celebrate.” THE LONDON LOOKER), and a generally vintage design harking back to sensational broadsheets and sepia photography. But the hypermediacy of the blog format necessarily draws attention to itself, not least for Lord Likely’s tweets in the sidebar or a “Paychum” (Paypal) button asking for donations to support the running of the site.

The pretense of publishing a collection of journals from the 1850s fits well into the established diary format of the blog, while social networking supports Lord Likely’s online presence (he is on Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace), even with the true author playing along as the scribe for His Lordship’s adventures.

Within the chronicles, Likely’s Victorian-ness is supported by mentions of “webbed-pages” and the “inter-net,” while at other times His Lordship is being rescued from aliens by none other than Elizabeth Darcy née Bennet, of Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens. This particular adventure even pokes fun at modern preoccupations:



She looked down at the mass of severed tentacles.

''“By jingo!” I ejaculated. “Are there more of these things?”''

''“I fear ’tis true. We have won a battle or two, but the war is not 'yet over. One day, someone will write a great book about our adventures so far, but there may yet be many sequels. As well as vignettes such as this one – although no doubt there will be debates amongst the aficionados as to whether it is a true part of the canon.”''

''“Madam, you talk in riddles!” I exclaimed. This was getting needlessly post-modern. ''

The blog manages to address various concerns raised in the writing of blogs, namely the existence of “fake blogs,” in which the online presence has all the credibility of a real person but is in fact invented by an anonymous party. There is never any question of Lord Likely’s existence in the real world (the “Est. 1857” of the site’s header takes care of that), but the front of striving for authenticity puts pressure on the phenomenon of created identities taking on legitimacy through social media, something that characters in novels rarely have been able to do.

The comment sections, usually a key feature of blog fiction and blogs in general, of Lord Likely’s adventures are not very active, though there were more regular commenters in entries a few years ago. This may be due to a migration of narrator-reader interaction to the corresponding Twitter account, where Lord Likely offers daily witticisms and banters with his followers.

Lord Likely thrives in its current format. Its serialized predecessors which it seeks to emulate worked well in print because it was the only available medium at the time, however Lord Likely proves that through the integration of new media, these markers of legitimacy, however farcical they may be, nevertheless lend a kind of credence to the online presence and engages its readers in a fun jaunt through another era while still hanging tight to modern humor and references.