Online Novels

There's been a lot of chatter in the last few years in regards to what's popularly called online novels. More than one writer has started blogging his novel and suddenly found his way to fame and fortune. A particular example that I can cite is the online novel 30 Days of Night. Obviously most people know by now that the author originally started his blog story posting chapters every day or every other day or so and this eventually grew into a novel that was published in print and eventually became a hit movie.

Please don't get me wrong. I'm not criticizing the author of 30 Days of Night. Indeed, I'm considering following his example.

As most of you probably know I wrote a game about 15 or 20 years ago called Fire On The Suns. It's never been hugely popular, but it has had its fair share of fans over most of those 15 or 20 years.

About seven or eight years ago I actually started writing a novel based on a game within the FOTS universe that was one of the best games we've ever had as well as one of the most memorable games that most of the players has ever experienced. It was so memorable that it stayed with us for a long long time. At various points in time through the years I've worked off and on on this novel cutting it adding to it moving pieces of it around and variously editing it for wider consumption. Last year or the year before I decided it would probably be too embarrassing for me to seriously consider trying to publish this novel not because it's bad, but because it's a gaming novel and most of them generally end up pretty poor. to be honest there is also not huge market for gaming novels, unless of course you're one of those huge Halo, Warcraft, or other game related tie-ins.

Obviously my poor little game isn't one of those.

However, we came up with a pretty damn good storyline that combines over a dozen different alien races, all unique, a mechanically internally consistent universe, and thousands upon thousands of star systems. There's also ancient technology, ancient alien buried secrets, a race against time, lots of unique characters, conversations between characters that actually developed from conversations between players, and one hell of a lot more.

Given that this book will never see the light of day in a professional publishing environment, I'm seriously considering posting chapters of Fire On The Suns on this blog at least a weekly basis.

If anyone out there is reading this, I'd kind of like to see what you have to say in regards to reading it online space opera blog that has elements of science fiction, horror, real space physics, in a universe that is infinite and vastly expandable.

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Naturally, I will intersperse postings that deal specifically with more intricate and detailed writing topics. I will not completely abandoned that topic in favor of a novel. I just thought it might be fun for some of you to read a bit more of what I write. Let me know what you think.

Thanks.