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Found a broken link? May be the story can still be found.
Forgot mentioning it last week. E L Doctorow's non-genre short story, "Edgemont Drive" (download), has unusual presentation that might of interest to authors independent of the merits of the story.
It almost entirely consists of dialogs, but without any quotation marks, often with a jarring effect during scene changes. At the very least, it has novelty value.
Significant Objects is noteworthy because of the business model it presents to earn money from online short story publications.
Publish a story online for free, but ensure that a generally useless object plays a significant role in the story. They classify their objects under 4 categories: talismans, totems, evidence, & fossils.
Then auction this physical object at eBay! Stories include pictures of objects, along with eBay auction links.
I've no idea how much money they earn, but sf is full of stories that have magical objects of all kinds - so may be some money for good samaritans publishing online?
[via Guardian Books]
While the story itself (from Clarkesworld, May 2009) is unremarkable (a jungle adventure with strange creatures & "CPU plants"), it's noteworthy because of unusual presentation - a story clearly meant for online world rather than for paper world: it has embedded links with additional text behind them. While a paper version could conceivably put this text in footnotes, they would be far too long - it works only because of online "hidden behind hyperlink" layout.
David Nygren's "Under the Table" (download XLS file).
Linking it only for unusual presentation. It's a non-genre story, mature content (sex talk).
[via GalleyCat & Boing Boing]
Related: Fiction in unusual formats.
Idiot's Books & Tor join hands to provide a ... sort of, downloabale game. Print a few pages, fold them in specified ways, & you're promised a story! Go ahead, if you have time.
PS: This is the first of a series called "One Page Wonders:". I'm still wondering whether to make original free fiction feed pick it up, but I just might.
[via Boing Boing]
Related: Benjamin Rosenbaum & Ethan Ham (Eds)' "Tumbarumba": An anthology as a Firefox plugin.
"Tumbarumba hides stories—twelve new stories ...—where you least expect to find them, turning your everyday web browsing into a strange journey."
"The browser add-on will occasionally insert a story fragment into a web page as it loads it. The result is a disorienting surreal sentence that sometimes is nonsensical and sometimes amusingly close making sense. If the reader spots the fragment, they can interact with it in a way that will cause the full story to appear".
Authors represented: Haddayr Copley-Woods, Greg van Eekhout, Stephen Gaskell, James Patrick Kelly, Mary Anne Mohanraj, David Moles, John Phillip Olsen, Tim Pratt, Kiini Ibura Salaam, David J. Schwartz, Heather Shaw, Jeff Spock.
Disclaimer: I've not installed it. I don't like distractions during work, & am way too conservative when it comes to installing new software.
[via Boing Boing & GalleyCat]
Related: Collections & anthologies; stories of Benjamin Rosenbaum.
