The Plan for A Novel of America

My plan for A Novel of America is to follow the strategy James Michener and I used in crafting our books, with a key difference of letting these multilayered tasks unfold on the Web.

1. Reading and Research (current, see remarks on "Notes" in the guide)
   
2. Plotting a rough outline (the next stage, which should be complete by March 2009. (See examples of the plotting for The Covenant and Brazil. )
   
3. Manuscript (draft, to be posted serially on line, two or three times a week. Readers’ comments invited. The complete working draft will be available on line, with interactive images, maps and web links. See, Kindle Illustrated Guide to Brazil.)
   

Like Brazil where my saga spans six book sections, I plan a similar structure for A Novel of America.

Each completed section will be published on Kindle and initially made available via Print on Demand. The final manuscript with all sections will be offered in a traditional book form.

I’ve launched A Novel of America as an independent writing project. A traditional publisher could come aboard along the way, but if not I’m ready to go it alone, one of the true empowering features for the serious writer of the Digital Age.

Monetization is the challenge, of course, as others have pointed out. The first step will be to build a subscriber base with a loyal following who have an eye on the future and an appreciation of good writing that both entertains and educates.

A prospect as vital as when the first story-teller sat beside the glowing embers and began, "Once upon a time, when the sky was new..."

Writing a Novel "live" on the Internet

When I talk to friends about the idea of writing a novel "live" on the Internet, their response ranges from "A-mazing!" to an adamant, "I’ll never read a book on a computer."

I live surrounded by books. I still welcome my daily Boston Globe. I watch the rising tide of red ink threatening to engulf the presses and look back to a time when I was a young reporter in a hectic city newsroom: never could I have imagined a day when the very existence of newspapers would be moot, not the yellow rags but the great gray ladies of the world.

In less than two decades, the Digital Revolution spurred by the Internet has radically altered the way we communicate in private and in public. Twenty years ago, social networks like My Space, Facebook and Gather where millions of people interact daily did not exist. The idea of a single article generating 10,000 "letters to the editor"was inconceivable, yet we saw this in the last election with comments racked up on some Huffington Post headliners.

Startling as these changes are, Robert Coover suggests we’re in the "silent movie" era of the Digital Age – the early stages of a transition as fundamental as going from writing on parchment scrolls with reed pens to inking text-blocks. An advance that spanned a century and a half, during which medieval copyists existed alongside printers of "good cheap" books.

It’s this idea of transition – lightning fast, by comparison, given the exponential growth of the Web’s reach and application – that underscores my interest in picking up the new web writing tools.

The innovative communities at if:book, Grand Text Auto, MIT Communications Forum and other sites I visit regularly represent the vanguard of change. (See links opposite: "Inspiring Inquiring Intuitive") I’m intrigued by such digital works as Gamer Theory, In Search of Lost Tim, 253, and the squawk of networked fiction on the lines of A Million Penguins.

I love these edgy explorations of digital literacy but I see my friends rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. Baby boomers mostly, they’re the same folks who stood in line for the newest Michener saga with multilayered facets of entertainment and education.

This is where I see potential for transitional works like A Novel of America. I’ve intentionally kept the portal simple with a linear framework highlighting techniques Michener and I employed as seen in my web archives for Covenant and Brazil.

A key difference lies in the wealth of interactive material: blogged working notes, research links, maps, images, books I’m reading. As the work takes shape, I will share plot lines and draft manuscript, all open to comments which I will moderate.

A Novel of America is not a networked book but a writer’s invitation to explore a world as new to me as most of the readers I hope to reach.