“We’re excited by writing that experiments with form and language.” That’s what we say on our About page. On the evidence of our submissions queue, you’ve really taken us at our word. So we’ve only got ourselves to blame.
Not that we do blame you. No. Keep it going. Keep exciting us, inspiring us.
Since we launched > kill author, we’ve had more and more writing come our way that, if not actively throwing out the rulebook, did at least take a good shot at shredding it into small pieces before reassembling the debris in awesome new ways. Ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine. Ways that made us wonder where the hell the author’s ideas came from. Ways that, yes, sometimes made us think “You can’t do that: that’s wrong, that’s not allowed” — before we realized that of course it’s allowed and, what’s more, it worked perfectly. The form and the language, as crazy as they seemed, were exactly right for what the writer was trying to say. And that’s the way another piece gets added to our ‘successful’ folder.
It’s only when we get to a couple of weeks before publishing that we remember the more mundane part of putting together an online literary journal: all those words in doc files needing to be turned into code, into web pages that as accurately as possible reflect the form and layout the writer has chosen to give their short story, their prose poem, their dialogue, their poem, their list-fiction, their micro-fiction (just to reel off a few of the array of formats we’ve dealt with). That’s when we sometimes find that this internet medium and the tools we use to build our corner of it don’t necessarily match the author’s vision.
Which is strange. The net’s been around for 40 years. Though it now plays sounds and music, shows movies, graphics and animation and allows us to interact with each other in a vast number of ways, text has been at the root of the technology from the start. But the treatment of that text doesn’t seem to have advanced nearly as much. You can lay it out a little and style it a little more if you know all the impenetrable hieroglyphics, and if you don’t mind that no one will see the end result in exactly the same way on their particular screen; you can feed a word-processed document into a piece of software and let it produce a web approximation of the original (if you’re lucky, and if the original wasn’t too complex); or you can take that same text document and make it into another kind of file that certainly looks exactly the same to everyone, but doesn’t offer the same interaction as a web page.
We’re not building a case for print only here. We’ve said it before in much greater detail, but we love the possibilities for literature and poetry that are offered by the web. We’re also not saying that PDFs are the only way to go — even though we now offer each issue in that format too — because to us they’re an uncomfortable midway point: not as usable, browsable or interactive as a web page, and clearly not as portable, tangible or immersive as a printed page (hell, we freely admit there’s still a romance to books that nothing else can quite match).
What we’re looking for, what we want to see, is a way of putting words online that finally allows this medium to truly reflect the innovative approach adopted by many writers in print, and which those same writers can accomplish for themselves via user-friendly tools that are free of bewildering technical jargon. Where are the geeks who are going to show us the code for marking up poetry and putting tags round micro-fiction?
In our introduction to Issue Five, we said that we wouldn’t be getting an accompanying blog or tumblr, for various reasons that sounded sensible to us at the time. So that’ll be why we’ve now got a blog on the site. Call us hypocritical, if you want; more likely we’re just indecisive and should think before we put such conclusive statements out there.
Finally, we’re really proud to be the recipients of the StorySouth Million Writers Award for Best New Online Magazine or Journal, and to have a fantastic four pieces shortlisted for their Notable Stories of 2009, which will be voted on in May. Big thanks to Jason Sanford and the panel of judges.
This issue, as ever, is packed full of powerful words and compelling ideas, expressed in perhaps the widest range of literary and poetic forms we’ve so far featured. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. Thanks to each and every one of the contributing writers.
Best,
> kill author
