The Network Novel

20 days ago I wrote my last blog post about my plan to start writing fiction again, specifically about the stories that began in a novel manuscript I started in 2020 titled Dear Future.

Well, I'm happy to report that the first part of the first story is complete! I even had a close friend and excellent writer give it a once over to help me with some editing. I'm real out of practice on editing fiction.

Unlike editing non-fiction blog posts where the goal is much more clearly defined, I found myself rewriting and re-editing and rewriting and straight up starting over many more times than in my non-fiction blog posts or technical writing.

But that's not what this short post is about.

This short post is because my friend had a lot of questions about the story that I sent him, questions that I realized are largely due to a lack of context about what I'm doing with this writing project, even given the context of my last blog post.

So here's the explanation:

I would like to continue developing the stories from my old manuscript separately but maintaining the threads that tie them together and eventually bring them together into a cohesive whole— that part you know.

Here's what needs some explaining: does each story stand alone?

In some ways the answer is yes, I think that each story can/will be fun to read even without the greater context of the whole.

However, each story is but a fragment of a greater whole and without that context a first-time reader might be expecting one of the stories to provide a bit more background. Might feel like getting dropped into a world with nothing to anchor you.

So here's the idea:

The Network Novel

The name, inspired by The Network State, represents a possibly new (I have not researched if anyone else has done anything like this but I'm sure they have) way to write a novel/build a world.

The idea of The Network Novel is to create your world in story-fragments which connect in a literary sense and also more literally in the way Wikipedia is connected.

For example, here is a brief excerpt from the story I'll be posting later today: "not long after General Cocks of the USSA blew most of North America off the face of the Earth."

Now I'm not going to lie, in the upcoming post, General Cocks, USSA and North America being blown off the face of the Earth is not going to be explained. At all. In fact, I don't really have any plans for any of these things to be explained in this particular ~3 part story.

But I do intend to explain them.

Picture this, 8 months from now I've completed this story and written like 5 other parts of other stories. Maybe one of them is the backstory on General Cocks, so I'd go back and create a hyperlink in the old post: "not long after General Cocks of the USSA blew most of North America off the face of the Earth"; which leads to the story where he's explained.

And so on and so forth until you have an interconnected web of stories all set in one world that you can discover at your own pace. I'll likely end up moving Dear Future - A Network Novel, to an Obsidian Publish site once I have enough posts strung together.

But anyways, just wanted to bang out this little explanation real quick before publishing the first of hopefully many.

(and I also might eventually still tie the thing into a normal novel too, we'll see....)