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Do Serialized
Novels Work? |
The
Warren Adler E-Sheet 39
In
this issue:
We're Dying to Know!
We hope you
enjoyed our summer surprise: a new
Fiona FitzGerald mystery, the complete
novel enclosed in the previous
E-Sheet 38. Now we'd love to hear from
you—your thoughts, suggestions and
personal reviews of Warren Adler's e-mail
serial, Death of a Washington Madame.
C'mon,
everybody into the
comment pool.
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Back in Wyoming
I awake each morning to the sight of the
majestic snow-capped Grand Teton as the
sunrise splashes its orange colors from
peak to base and never fail to reflect
upon the transitory nature of our lives.
Against such a backdrop, man seems puny
and insignificant and the great immortal
mountain appears to shrug and smile at our
futile effort to play out the tiny swath
of time we are allotted in some meaningful
and fulfilling role.
Silly fools, the great mountain declares,
as it presides forever over mankind and
all its follies and foibles.
This season a tragic event prompts even
deeper reflection.
One of my neighbors, John Walton, was
killed in an airplane crash just a few
miles from where we live. He was reputed
to have a net worth in the neighborhood of
eighteen billion dollars. By all accounts
he was a good and decent man. Yet all
those billions could not buy him one more
millisecond of life.
I will not be tempted to rage against the
futility of having all that money. It was
amassed through honest labor by John's
father who created Wal-Mart and, like many
a devoted progenitor, bequeathed the
fruits of his labor to his children.
Creative entrepreneurship is, after all, a
great gift and for the most part it
enhances and does not diminish our lives.
But I cannot resist asking some questions
about the real worth of money. How much is
enough? Is there a point where acquisition
morphs into greed? Is the amassment of
money the criterion of a successful life?
Indeed, what exactly is the definition of
a successful life? Or its meaning.
Every morning, I ask the mountain to
answer these questions. The mountain
answers with a cryptic craggy smile. |
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The World of the Serial
Novel, Online
 Did
you know that Moby Dick author
Herman Melville wrote a newspaper
serial?
The
serialization of Death of a Washington
Madame on
Warren
Adler's web site follows a long tradition
of "partitioned fiction" that reached its apex
in the late 1800's and today is thriving in
cyberspace. Now-classic works by Charles
Dickens and Mark Twain first appearing in
syndicated newspapers can still be read in
their original cliff-hanger form - online.
Mousehold Words perpetuates more than a
dozen serial novels, all public domain works,
through email delivery. Some are classics,
such as The Woman in White by Wilkie
Collins and The Hound of the
Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle.
Some are obscure, like Benito Cereno,
Melville's "nautical mystery" set in New York.
Serials have
helped bring authors into the limelight for
over a century. Dostoevsky in Russia
became famous first as a newspaper serial
author. In France, Colette's 1923
serialization of teenage love in Le Ble en
herbe (The Ripening Seed) was so racy that
Le Matin had to stop printing
it—readers had to wait until the
book to discover the fate of the
characters.
Like the
novel itself, the serialized novel refuses to
die. Armistead Maupin's Tales of The
City, begun as a loosely-linked series of
comic essays in the San Francisco Chronicle
briefly flared in the 1970's and early 1980's,
finally attracting attention when it was
turned into a TV series. Ditto for Tom
Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities,
which ran as weekly installments in Rolling
Stone before it became a book, and then a
movie.
Daily
newspapers, online and off, still take up the
challenge of running serials. Recent results
run from the embarrassingly puerile (USA
Today) to the simply embarrassing (Miami
Herald), yet literary lightning once again
may strike.
On their own,
authors have explored Internet delivery for
serial novels. Stephen King has tried
it twice: once successfully (The Green Mile)
and once not (The Plant). Less famous
names have turned the concept into a cottage
industry: the authors of Daughters of Freya,
a pay-for-play epistolary novel, garnered
income and a certain amount of publicity
through their
website
efforts.
The Holy
Grail for many is to have their online novel
"picked up" by a publisher for transformation
into a print book. This does happen—Tor,
the science fiction house, is perhaps most
active in this regard. Editors trolling for
new writers can still stumble upon small
diamonds worth polishing for print. Robert
Joseph Levy's The Ghosts of Partition
Street is one example of a
blog serial novel by a young Brooklyn
author from Simon & Schuster's farm team.
Search for
serials on line and you'll find the Web also
littered with failed attempts and tales that
peter out on abandoned blog pages. Writing
fiction is hard work, and writing good fiction
is even harder. But desire for self-expression
will always find its way...to any new medium
that links author to audience.
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Warren
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