Announcements

Hi all. Bad Influences is now up and running at http://badinfluences.org.uk, and this blog has moved to http://badinfluences.org.uk/under-the-influence/.

Please update your links - I'll be deleting this blog once the project is properly underway.

What makes an apocalypse contemporary?

First an update: I’m still alive, I’m still writing, and the first draft of Bad Influences is almost complete and still scheduled to begin posting in January, despite a few setbacks this year.  Otherwise, I’ve been reading contemporary apocalyptic fiction and thinking about the place of Bad Influences in the genre as it stands.

In his introduction to Wastelands, John Joseph Adams notes a recent resurgence in post-apocalyptic fiction, with a fallow period for the genre between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11.  It seems to make sense that we have a greater interest in the end of days in times of heightened global conflict, until we look at global history and current events a little more closely and realise that, from a global perspective, there’s never really been a time without the presence of some potential civilisation-levelling disaster, whether man-made or natural or a combination of the two.  Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, famines, plagues, tidal waves, hurricanes or the ever-escalating disaster of war, at any given time some form of large-scale devastation is taking place somewhere, or being awaited with helplessly inadequate preparation, or its aftermath is being survived.  What high profile events like 9/11 spark in our apocalyptic imaginations is not the idea of apocalyptic danger itself, but a different perspective on it, a new way to articulate the ever-present anxiety that the fragile egg-shell of human civilisation can be smashed at a moment’s notice.

Contemporary apocalyptic fiction is ultimately, in its underlying anxieties, the same as classic apocalyptic fiction.  What differs is the perspective and focus, whose anxieties are explored and how they are expressed. Wells and Wyndham explored both the causes and effects of disaster, with evident social critiques and dire warnings from what seemed, to them, a fairly neutral viewpoint. Both War of the Worlds and The Time Machine were concerned with humanity’s decadence and complacency.  Wyndham was interested not only in how his Triffids worked and where they might have come from, but how a lack of social cohesion could set the stage for their takeover. Neither Wells nor Wyndham was excessively interested in the personal losses or inner emotional lives of their protagonists. Their narrators were everyman figures, excluding specific viewpoints (which, of course, means excluding the viewpoints of anybody not in the demographic of the narrator and the writer.  Women cannot be everyman.)  The traditional apocalyptic narrator is white, male, middle class, practical and knowledgeable on relevant issues, usually with no family of his own to complicate his observations, experiencing disaster like a BBC reporter, choosing the shots and angles from which to portray the events while avoiding visible sentiment or detectable bias where possible.  He can explore the differing perspectives of those he meets, he can even be persuaded by them and change his mind several times, but ultimately he will occupy the middle ground.  He is neither cowardly nor foolhardy, neither aggressive nor weak, neither emotionally cold nor hysterical.  It’s not that the classic disasters don’t relate personal and harrowing stories, but they do so at a distance.  The protagonist isn't made of stone, but in the end it's not important how he feels about the collapse of society, only that he records humanity’s reactions to it in all their extremes without discrediting the account by doing or feeling anything too extreme himself.

Contemporary disaster fiction, when it focuses on the disaster at all, often does so through a character who has some personal reason to be particularly affected by it, or must make important decisions regarding it. Otherwise, it uses a range of viewpoints, rather than attempting neutrality. Each viewpoint is specific, and they differ in order to give equal weight to their differences. Conclusions may be implicit in these experiences, but in contrast to the classic disasters it is the experiences rather than the conclusions that are assumed to interest the reader, so that the experiences are described in intimate detail, and the conclusions are often left ambiguous.  In The Testament of Jessie Lamb, it's not important whether or not Jessie becomes pregnant; it’s her struggle to make that decision, and the responses of her friends and family, that interest us.

Disasters themselves can be specific or interchangeable.  The specific kind explores events and decisions prompted by a strong central "what if" premise - what if the human race became infertile? (Children of Men) What if a virus wiped out or otherwise endangered a specific group of people, such as men (Y: The Last Man), pregnant women (The Testament of Jessie Lamb) or adults (Jeremiah)? These disasters explore a targeted aspect of our present society by focusing on a specific cause. In the Interchangeable kind of disaster, it's disaster itself – collapse, conflict, societal breakdown – that is being explored. The nature of the disaster is random and affects enough people to be considered untargeted: zombies (World War Z), pandemic (Contagion), nuclear war (The Road), environmental (Flood) or economic disaster (Player One) - it doesn't really matter, as the effects on society are similar, if not exactly the same. These disasters don't pose an original dilemma through their nature, but allow a more general exploration of human nature in adversity. The general nature of the disaster means that these stories need some other specific point of interest to focus on.

Sometimes it is the medium or format of the story that determines its focus - the Fallout series tells a post-apocalyptic story interactively in the form of computer games.  It could be that the nature of the disaster is a premise for a hard science plotline, while the characters’ actions are driven by the jeopardy it creates (Contagion, Flood).  It could be that a particular character or character type is explored, with a significant role in the disaster or the society that follows, or an interesting reason for surviving (When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Oryx andCrake). Sometimes the focus is the intimate story of one person who, through their ordinariness, tells a story tragic and plausible enough to signify the entire societal breakdown (TheRoad, Then), not through their detachment (as in the older tradition) but through the intimate portrayal of their personal apocalypse.  This is the most disturbing kind of apocalypse story, because it is so easy to identify with.  In the Wastelandsintroduction to his story The End of theWorld As We Know It, Dave Bailey says:

“We don’t need the destruction of entire cities to know what it’s like to survive a catastrophe. Whenever we lose someone we love deeply we experience the end of the world as we know it.  The central idea of the story is not merely that the apocalypse is coming, but that it’s coming for you.  And there’s nothing you can do to avoid it.”

We’re no better equipped to take on board and deal with the deaths of a hundred strangers than a million.  We can’t imagine such numbers.  It’s only when death touches us, personally, that we feel loss.  If we lose somebody close to us, even if they were one death in thousands, that one death means more than all the others.  Disaster gives us the sense that we should be drawn together by a shared loss, but all loss is personal, and it sends us into scattered, isolated disasters of our own.  Every survivor experiences their own personal apocalypse, every bereavement entails the personal decision to come out fighting or retreat into solitude, to rebuild the world or leave it to rot. 

Bad Influences will be the Interchangeable, format-driven type of apocalypse: the nature of the disaster is not important, what's important is how the characters respond to it, and to each other, as their societies collapse.  It uses a multiple viewpoint format to give a global perspective on events, but it uses just four blogger-narrators.  My aim isn't to provide every perspective and scenario but to explore the contradictions inherent in publicly blogged experience, in online relationships, and in personal experiences of global disaster.

Blog Fiction allows for multiple perspectives that are both geographically distant and strongly connected, a re-imagining of the survival-group microcosm.  An apocalypse seems the perfect scenario through which to explore the group dynamics of online relationships, the ambiguous intimacies and antagonisms that the medium provokes. The blog seems, initially, like a diary, or a memoir, but blogs are more public than diaries, more disputable than memoirs. The writer of a blog may be writing a personal, honest testimony, but unlike Jessie Lamb they know that what they write will be instantly viewable by friends and strangers, who will be in a position to respond, and they will have to deal with those responses.  Blogs are a contradictory social phenomenon: at once intimate and self-conscious, personal and public, revealing and concealing. They look like diaries, but act like newspaper columns.  The characters use them to desperately reach out and connect with people, while constructing personas that hold back the part of themselves capable of doing so, and getting defensive and possessive of their words when somebody tries to break through that barrier to what they’re hiding, the deepest fears that they’re desperate to communicate and unable to express, until such time as they believe they could be writing their final post.  Then, the walls come down.  Then there are connections, and the influences can break through.  The characters are all, at various points, self-quarantined, and their blogs are both their connection to the outside world and the barrier that separates them from it, their emotional quarantine.  Their apocalypses are personal, except for the moments when they can break through the self-conscious nature of the medium to truly influence one another.

If recent disaster fiction has broken out of the traditional, generalised, neutral perspective to concentrate on the personal, then the next step is to break through the seclusion and atomisation of the personal perspective in search of common experience.  Douglas Copeland’s Player One, dealing with a group of survivors trapped in their own viewpoints and failing to connect, broaches the idea of how an apocalypse shatters post-modern individualism:

“Information overload triggered a crisis in the way people saw their lives.  [...]  The crux seems to be that our lives stopped being stories.  And if we are no longer to have lives that are stories, what will our lives have become?  Yet seeing one’s life as a story seems like nostalgic residue from an era when energy was cheap and the notion of the super-special, ultra-important individual with blogs and Google hits and a killer résumé was a conceit the planet was still able to materially support.  In the New Normal, we need to strip ourselves of notions of individual importance.  Something new is arising that has neither interest in nor pity for souls trapped in twentieth-century solipsism. Nonlinear stories?  Multiple endings?  No loading times?  It’s called life on earth.  Life need not be a story, but it does need to be an adventure.”

Blog Fiction seems like a good medium from which to explore this premise.  Of course, the characters’ lives are stories, but they do not write about them as if they expect them to be.  Narrative tension comes from anxiety about present and future, not mystery awaiting revelation (though there will be revelations).  While stories imply conclusion, the blog format implies endless continuation.  Since the characters can neither be certain of their futures nor blog their own deaths, their individual stories must be inconclusive, but their interactions can have conclusions, and the reader can extract the resolutions they’re looking for from these.

Contagion

Beware the blogger with bad teeth

Contagion was an interesting film for me, given that my blogfic project (now fully planned and well into the writing phase, posting expected from January 2013) concerns a deadly global flu pandemic.  I watched it with a certain amount of disconnection, more concerned with how the film’s narrative might overlap with mine than its quality as a film, and so I don’t seem to have been bothered by a lot of the faults that concerned others.  While my partner obsessed over Jude Law’s inexplicably crooked tooth and the WHO’s oversight in not removing its key operatives from compromised neighbourhoods, I was more interested in where the film was coming from politically, and especially what it had to say about the place of bloggers in a disaster scenario.

As you’d expect from a Hollywood film, it was relentlessly pro-state authority.  I found the Jude Law character interesting because he encompassed not just paranoia about radical agendas but mistrust of independent journalism and free communication networks.  The metaphor of the misinformation spreading like the virus, for which the state regrettably can’t develop an inoculation that wouldn’t also smother free speech, feels like the closest thing the film has to a point.  Not that it’s entirely authoritarian in its message – the scientist who makes the breakthrough after being told to stop work, the one who tests the new vaccine on herself and the doctor who warns his wife to leave town and gives his own inoculation to the janitor’s son are all deliberately disobeying orders or procedures, and are all lauded for it.  It’s only the blogger, who bypasses authority entirely rather than merely bending the rules, whose actions are unmitigatedly bad and damaging.  It’s interesting that they chose to have him team up with the shady investment bankers, making him a fully fledged con-artist, when they could so easily have made him merely a misguided conspiracy theorist.  That much didn’t ring true for me: that somebody who’d initially seemed motivated by the strength of his principles should be shown to have been self-serving to the extent that even the hedge-fund fraudsters shake their heads at him.  I would have liked a bit more ambiguity in this character, who up until that point was more interesting by far than any of the saintly doctors and scientists, risking their lives and reputations to do the Right Thing, or just doing their best under difficult circumstances while hounded by inconvenient mobs of faceless protesters.

Still, I’m quite glad that probably the nearest high profile pandemic story to the release of Bad Influences did feature blogging as a theme and did it from the polar opposite angle that I’ve planned to.  The significance of blogging, in both Contagion and Bad Influences, is as a communications network that can say things the mainstream press can’t or won’t, especially under circumstances in which population control becomes a matter of life and death.  Who controls the population under those circumstances, and to what effect, is a central theme of both narratives.  Contagion plays out the opposition between the benevolent authorities and the viral forces of rumour and misinformation, embodied in an irresponsible blogger.  Bad Influences will, I hope, use the multiple viewpoints of bloggers to investigate the struggle for control between the authorities and populations themselves.

And another thing about LJ...

A little more search and experimentation has shown that, in certain LJ themes, you can indeed change the format of the date in both entries and comments to show whatever year you like. This is good.

The bad news is that this is only visible in the comments view if you have a paid or Plus account. A paid account is $20 a year, while a Plus account is free, but puts ads all over your blog. Not only are ads generally annoying (especially with the very limited display and content options LJ provide) but they'd serve as a constant reminder that this blog is not, in fact, taking place 15 years into the future, thus defeating the whole object of getting the Plus account. This irks me.

Four paid LJs will cost me, at current exchange rates, around £55 for the year it'll take for the story to run its course. All told, I suppose it's not a huge amount of money for a Ph.D. project - it costs as much for a couple of bound copies of a paper-based thesis - but what happens after the initial year? I would like to keep the story online - in fact, I'm going to have to until the accompanying thesis is written the entire project assessed - but upwards of £50 a year is pretty steep just to keep the comment time-stamps in the right format. So the options are: pay up, give in to the ads or go with another platform.

Blogging Live from the Future

Having clawed back a little free time, I'm getting back into the swing of writing, and while doing so I've been considering the choices of blogging platform available for Bad Influences.

I've chosen LiveJournal, despite the fact that the vast majority of successful blog fiction is based on Wordpress, Blogger or Typepad. While these tools are seen as quite respectable, and are designed primarily to be found on a search engine and read by the public, LJ seems to have a reputation as a frivolous place to blog, more of a social networking site, a platform for personal angst and collective drama rather than serious commentary. While I can see how this would put some writers off using it to showcase their work, it nevertheless gives the platform features that make it ideal for multiple character blog fiction.

For a start, comments on posts are set up for conversational threads (i.e. comments have a visual hierarchy to show which are direct answers to each other), while the other major blogging platforms have a more journalistic layout, with all comments being given equal weight and the writer replying to many at once. This is a more useful structure if there is one central author who is to answer all comments to the post, but thread-style arrangements are better for opening up multiple dialogues on the same post, and so lend themselves better to interactions between a group of characters.

However, it's the friends list aggregator that really makes LJ different to the journalistic blogs: it creates a sense of community, a true social network in which feed subscriptions are reciprocal and people don't just "follow" but "friend" each other's blogs. The bloggers in my story aren’t journalists or academics, posting for the respect and elucidation of strangers; they are friends, blogging to keep in touch. I especially want to make use of the customisable page that automatically aggregates the "friends list" feeds to set up a blog from which to read the whole story. This blog would be friended to all the others and I could link to its friends list for a full reverse-chronological story-so-far. There are probably other feed aggregator sites I could do this from with the other blogging tools, but personal icons and customisable colours make LJ friends feeds both more readable and a little more credible as an implied reader¹. The reader who subscribes to each RSS feed and reads them on an aggregator somewhere else will read the same story, but the reader who uses the friends page will be subtly implied into the characters' community, despite their inability to comment on the blogs directly. I'm interested to see how many readers actually friend the characters on their own LiveJournals and read their blogs in amongst those of their present day, real life friends (which works, even when you change the year to 2026 - I tried it).

One feature of LJ that I'm concerned about using is the facility to make posts public, private, viewable by “friends only” or even restricted to a custom list or an individual friend. This could be very useful – allowing some characters to see posts that others can’t has obvious applications for plot - but this does bring up logistical problems. Readers may start to question why, if the post is supposed to be restricted, they are themselves able to view it. It will be interesting to see whether small inconsistencies like this will cause readers to question the format, or whether they will be taken in the same light as more obvious ones that are built into the premise: what's the inexplicable ability to read private posts next to the fact that you're reading a blog that won't be written for another 15 years? But this may well be the point - asking the reader to make explicit exceptions for the form may well show up devices that would otherwise remain implicit. It's tinkering with the fourth wall, and I'll have to think carefully about whether or not I can get away with it.

There are credibility issues to get around in content as well as format. Convincing explanations for narrative conveniences are often an important part of writing science fiction (which has to explain how the world came to be as the story portrays it) and epistolary fiction (which has to explain how the narrator came to produce the account of it that the reader is viewing). My explanation as to why the internet still works when the rest of society is collapsing will involve all phones and modems using satellite technology as standard, and so not even requiring a powered phone mast to boost the signal (this technology already exists, of course, though it is currently slower than mobile broadband). A greater problem, where feasibility is concerned, is explaining the continued existence and reliability of the internet's infrastructure, including the LJ servers. Mirror sites in Iceland on geothermal power can't account for everything, and unreliable connections and temporary outages will have to be built into the plot, but Cory Doctorow's 'When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth' has provided some enjoyable inspiration.

There is one very blatant inconsistency that I simply can't get around, though it applies to all blogging tools, not just LJ. While dates for each entry can be chosen and altered to display the year of the setting, comments posted to an entry have the date and time of posting, including the year, inalterably stamped on them. As above, I'm not sure whether to ignore the problem and trust the reader to suspend disbelief, or make it explicit and try to get around it with a little dialogue about a glitch in the system.

The only way around this particular glitch would be to not use a standard blogging platform at all but create my own website in which I design and control every element, made to look like a blog. I could possibly even use some of the LJ code for this, which is open source. The first thing that puts me off this idea is the amount of work that would be involved. The amount of time that I need for the actual writing - which is supposed to be the core of my study - may not leave me time for messing around with Dreamweaver and LJ source code. Even if I did have time and leisure, though, I wouldn't want to lose some of the advantages that come with the community aspect of being part of LJ itself. One of these is that each of the characters' journals would immediately go into searchable listings based on their interests, and I can include “Blog Fiction”, “Internet Fiction”, “Hypertext Fiction”, “Disaster Fiction” and “Science Fiction” in these and attract a large potential audience from LJ users.

So, a few decisions still to be made. Opinions welcome - what aspects of the LJ platform (or any others) would interest you as a reader? Which would put you off?

¹ This feature, incidentally, not only adds an immediate distinguisher between the characters’ blogs, but provides a visual indicator of how the characters see themselves (or wish others to see them), adding a form-specific mode of exposition to the text.

Writing and Politics

I had a meeting with my supervisors the other week and they seem pleased with the writing so far - so that's good. Perhaps a little more writing at this point wouldn't have gone amiss, but I've managed to rope myself into collectives for an Anarcha-feminist event in Manchester and the Merseyside Mayday Festival, so not much chance of writing anything fictional until at least May 2nd.

Just so this blog doesn't die before it's begun, though, I decided that, since my politics is clearly getting in the way of my writing, I'd do a post about why my politics doesn't get in the way of my writing.

I'll start by mentioning a thing that annoys me. I am explaining an idea for a story, or something that happens in the story, or even showing an extract of my story to somebody who happens to know my politics. People don't know me for any length of time without finding out about my politics, so I may as well make my politics known here: I am, in no particular order, an anarchist, a communist and a feminist. I probably count as a few other things, but that's my conspicuously secular trinity (in that I tend to a belief that the three are actually one and the same, as the core values of any one of those ideologies implies the necessity of the others, but that's not what I want to talk about here.)

So, it may come to the attention of somebody viewing my writing, and knowing my politics, that elements of my politics can be detected in elements of my writing. What I want to know from the reader of an early draft is what every writer wants to know: does the plot work? Are the characters engaging? Are the outcomes plausible? Does the language sound right? Am I a worthless peddler of purple prose? Should I burn every word I've ever written and never show my face in polite society again? But all that person wants to tell me is: "That bit, there, with the anarchist/feminist/communist thing...You're just writing that in because you're an anarchist/feminist/communist." It's the qualifier that irks me rather than the observation. Why "just"? Why should the presence of political thought preclude other narrative concerns? The implication is that visible ideological bias is inherently damaging to the quality of creative writing, and this assumption is expected to hold without the need for any solid objections to either the ideology or the writing.

There's a misconception that if radical political thought and narrative collide, the only possible result can be propaganda, often described as "thinly veiled" to compound the crime, as if hiding the ideology behind heavier drapes would make it more acceptable. Now, if what's actually meant by "thinly veiled" is "badly integrated" or "inconsistent with the plot and characters" or "The plot and characters are insubstantial enough that there's nothing to this story except the ideological message", then those are all valid criticisms, but the presence of an ideological theme does not, in itself, turn a well-written story into "mere" propaganda. In fact, it's difficult to imagine well-written fiction that doesn't have political or ideological themes going on somewhere.

What separates good fiction from propaganda is not how well-hidden, or even how valid the politics are, but how good the fiction is. William Morris' News from Nowhere, for instance - much as I can get behind its aims and principles, and enjoy it for its visionary passion - is a dull story. The characters are not characters but devices, the questions don't ever challenge the explanations the protagonist is given, and nothing really happens - no changes in pace, no tension, no conflict, no plot. Something like Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, on the other hand, despite some politics I find elitist and objectionable, is a good piece of fiction. It has characters who change, develop, make decisions, take risks, ask awkward questions of themselves, each other and the reader. It has twists and turns that make me want to know how it ends. I may not accept Bradbury's assertion that a society seeking after equality for all will attempt to eradicate innate intellectual advantage by burning all the books, but the readability of the novel allows me to suspend my disbelief - if not my disagreement - enough to enjoy it as a good read. This doesn't only apply to overtly political utopian and dystopian fiction, either.

The idea that fiction can be apolitical fails to take into account that every fiction writer is the de facto dictator of their own world. More than that, writers are gods, with ultimate power over cause and effect. I not only decide what dilemmas my characters will face, and how they will react to them, but what the outcome of their reactions will be. It's a mighty responsibility, but I don't shirk it. Many writers do. They claim not to be political or, worse, politically neutral. My favourite debunking of this attitude comes from Yonmei on FeministSF, who says:

I cannot make a decision politically neutral by declaring I have no interest in politics or that I am not a political writer: that statement just means a writer who is [not] prepared to think about the politics of their fractal selection - or at least that they’re not prepared to acknowledge any political thought. The only political decisions/political thought that appears neutral is the politics of the dominant majority. If, without thinking about it, a writer strives to appear politically neutral, the kind of political writing they will do is the promotion of the dominant narrative.
Yonmei, 'What is a Writer's Job?'

Nobody, and certainly no fiction, is politically neutral. Espousing the dominant politics of one's own time and place is not neutrality, but it is safe, practically invisible and highly unlikely to get you labelled a propagandist. This is illusory, though. Failing to question the status quo is as good as tacitly approving it, and besides, characters who don't question are boring. Attempts at political neutrality are, therefore, far more likely to lead a story into both bad politics and bad writing than a committed, well-integrated ideological component to the narrative.

So, when it is pointed out to me that my writing reflects my politics, I can only look puzzled and ask: "Whose politics were you expecting it to reflect?"

Navigating Blog Fiction

I'm not, just yet, going to go into reviews and analysis of individual Blogfics that I've been reading - though I plan to do that soon. My reading of Blog Fiction so far has been more about exploring the structure of the narratives than the narratives themselves, and I've been thinking about the way that fictional blogs are read, or at least the way I find myself reading them. This differs from the way I read real blogs.

When I find a new blog, it's normally because I've followed a link to a specific entry. If I like that entry, I read the latest one, perhaps the latest couple, and then subscribe to the feed and read new entries as they appear. If it’s the blog of a friend, or if I really like it, and if it hasn't been updated every day for 5 years, I might go back and read it all from the beginning. If they've blogged on a topic that particularly interests me, I might click on the tag and see what else they have to say about that topic, ignoring the rest of the blog. But generally, I read as they write, starting from the point I added them and not really looking back, because life doesn’t go that way. Fictional blogs are different: I’m aware that there’s a narrative, and narratives have a beginning, middle and end, so I naturally want to see the beginning and the middle. Because of the way blogs work, my first click brings me in at the end. At first, I deleted that last thought, because unless somebody has died or very conclusively decided to blog no more, there is no real end. You come in somewhere amongst a hazy and structureless eternal middle. Then I put it back, deciding that, actually, you come in at a hazy and structureless eternal end. This is provided the writer a) is trying to make the fiction seem credible as a real blog and b) is any good at it. There are plenty of blog fiction writers, even those who are writing Blog Aware Blogfic (see Mineau's definitions), who just tell a serialised story cut into chunks, using the blog more as a publishing tool than a medium, and these lack a certain credibility. People use their blogs to reflect on their lives and relate recent events, not to serialise an ongoing narrative, and they certainly don’t leave cliff-hangers (unless a villain comes in mid-sentence and






Which isn’t a very effective way to create tension or curiosity, because it shatters the illusion that this is a real blogger trying to write about their life. If they got cut short in the middle of typing, who posted the entry? Real bloggers, and credible blog-fiction writers, write in self-contained episodes. The fact that those episodes may be referred back to in later self-contained episodes doesn’t make them a narrative middle, it makes those later episodes a form sequel. A Blogfic is a peculiar combination of novel and short story collection. It’s somewhat like a TV series, except that the episodes are less formulaic, or perhaps just have a more varied range of formulae. It is a type of epistolary form, obviously, but it has its own characteristics beyond this. For a start, it introduces a non-linear or multi-linear element to the narrative, even when it doesn’t intend to, by having choices of reading order inherent in the structure. The reader comes in at the end – that’s just how most blogging tools work – and probably reads the latest instalment before deciding whether they can be bothered to go back to the beginning and read from the start. Or they may choose to read it in reverse-chronological order, like Memento. Whichever they decide on, they may choose to keep reading this way, or if, like me, they have a short attention span and no self-control, they may get through the first (or last) few entries before getting distracted by the list of entry titles in the margin and randomly clicking on something that sounds interesting. If the author has been thoughtful enough to provide tags, that’s another way of navigating. If the Blogfic is multiple character, this adds even more possibilities. Do you read through each journal in turn, An Instance of the Fingerpost-style, or do you create a custom friends list and read all the characters’ blogs on a single friends page? Either way, do you read them forwards, backwards, randomly or tagwise? Does it matter?

I’ve come to the conclusion that due to the self-contained nature of each entry, it probably doesn’t. Even if you don’t read the cause before the effect, the effect will have evidence of the cause within itself, and when you later read the cause it will add to the effect retrospectively. I’ve been trying to think of narrative devices that only make sense when read in a certain order, but I’ve come to realise that actually I don’t need to be anywhere near that clever. Clues, whether detective-style or just ordinary narrative pointers, will work when the reader has read them all, no matter what order they are read in. This is not due to the cleverness of the author but the sophistication of the reader, who already recognises the possibilities being offered and the allowances being asked by this new medium.

A Blog Fiction narrative relies less on suspense and the gradual exposition of plot than on a knowledge of the facets of the characters and their relationships. While my fictional bloggers may well have the odd action-packed escape or conflict, when they write it up they won’t be aiming to entertain or excite (except one of them perhaps, but he’ll mostly be exaggerating). There certainly won’t be much true suspense, as the very fact that the character is blogging rather gives away the outcome of any perilous encounter. Blogs deal with mundanity, not adventure; the pleasure of reading a blog is in how interesting the character’s life is and how well they write about it, and the latter can easily make up for any lack of the former (though categorically not the other way around). I think the interesting thing about Bad Influences will not be in what the characters do, but in how it changes them, and the way they see themselves, each other and the world around them.