My First Day on Fictionaut

Like a mouth-breathing, crotch-rubbing, bulge-eyed stalker, I have long admired Fictionaut from afar. But I’ve always felt that it’s slightly out of my grasp. Fictionaut is for proper writers; ones with pro sales and chapbooks and story collections and maybe even — gasp! — novels. Surely I was not ready for such glory.

Ready or not, when I received an invitation from the ever-surprising Beate Sigriddaughter, I jumped all over that hot little Fictionaut profile without stopping for breakfast. That was eleven hours ago, and I’m still staring at its pages.

I’ve posted a story. I’ve replied to the comments on the story. I’ve commented on a few strangers’ stories. I’ve joined groups for magazines I like and made a group for my own magazine. I’ve added a few friends, who aren’t really friends as such but more writers whose writing I admire and who I can kid myself that I actually am friends with if they appear on my little list marked “friends”.

Fictionaut makes me feel like an astronaut, a cosmonaut: like I’m seeing things that I haven’t seen before. I feel special, like I’ve won something. Technically speaking, I have seen everything on Fictionaut’s pages: I’ve seen literary fiction, I’ve seen poetry and flash fiction and disconnected paragraphs. I’ve seen work offered up for critique and writers’ bios and photographs. But there’s just something about the way those lovely white boxes and Georgia font look on my laptop screen. They match my MacBook, for heaven’s sake, and I can’t be expected to ignore that.

I particularly like to refresh the main page, just to see how many people have looked at my story. I don’t know whether anyone has actually read to the end, or if they have all just clicked on it, read the first line, then clicked back in disgust or indifference. But I like to imagine that everyone has read to the very last line, then sat back and thought something interesting.

I’ve been fiddling around with Fictionaut all day, and I feel like I’ve been busy. But is it all just timewasting? Should I have been actually doing some writing? Probably. I tell myself that networking is very important, and that makes me feel better. And then I refresh the main page again.

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It’s a few days since my first flush of Fictionaut love. I still read and comment on stories, and I’ve posted some more of my own work. I’ve noticed that the submissions to Fractured West, the magazine I co-edit, have improved in quantity and quality.

I’m still not sure whether Fictionaut is just another social networking time-vortex (see: Twitter, see: Facebook) that I will obsessively lurk around, wasting time but calling it work. I can say that some of the writing I have seen posted on Fictionaut is better than work I’ve seen in literary magazines. It’s better than work I’ve seen in books published by large publishing houses. Some of it is genius, some of it is crap, and some of it is probably amazing if I could only understand it. I read Fictionaut more avidly than I read any other magazines or websites, and I feel more connected to it; maybe because I feel like I know these writers. I don’t, obviously, but the tendency of comments to turn into dialogue make me feel like I do.

Because that’s what I love best about all this social media — the blogs, the status updates, the trackbacks. I love when people comment on one another’s words. I love dialogue. I love that people are responding to the thoughts of others.

I don’t know if you can identify, fellow fiction writer, but I sometimes feel like I’m talking to myself when I write. Sure, my words are flitting out into the vast world of the intarwebs, but does anyone give a shit, really? Or maybe it’s all just so that I can assure my girlfriend that yes, I am working, not just drinking tea and staring at TweetDeck. I trip over my own thoughts all day and finally corral them into some sort of order, and I feel that is progress. I suppose I do think about blogging as writing a diary; sometimes I forget that other people do actually read it. At least, I think they do. There are so many words out there and no-one can read them all. If we did, we would have no time to write our own words.

Anyway, PANKsters, give me your thoughts. Are we all talking to ourselves?