A new serial novel!

Dear reader,

So this is it. The inauguratory blog post. (By the way, I don't believe "inauguratory" is technically a word, which is a bad sign, since I've heard that blogs tend to use, um, words to get their point across. Beware of more debatably real words, such as trealism, fictuary, and suckoholic.)

The saying goes: if words are food, then novels are five-course meals, short stories and bedtime snacks, and blogs are diarrhea. Nevertheless, I can promise you that my diarrhea will be extremely noble and upstanding. And full of trealism.

I'm sorry. I don't think this blog is starting out all that well. At my count, I've prerequisitely made up five nonsense words and used the word "diarrhea" --well, now that's three times.

Mission Statement (0r s0mesuch)
This blog will chronicle my research and drafting of "1337," a novel about gaming in the 21st century. (By the way, the title is pronounced "leet," but we'll get to that in good time.)

It will also be the proving ground for the novel, which will be released in serial format, one page at a time (click on the label "the novel" to follow the book's progress).

I can't tell you much about the book just yet, partially because I don't know much about it, myself, just yet--but more because telling it defeats the point of experiencing it. I'll simply say that it begins with a narrator who's at the bottom rung of the gamer totem pole (sorry for the fictuary mixed metaphor)--he's the social outcast in a sea of social outcasts. In other words, he's a real suckoholic. In any case, he'll introduce us to a cast of characters (college students mostly) who spend upwards of 30 hours a week playing MMORPGs. Their lives will be completely boring (they're all a bunch of suckoholics, really), a story premise which I've always considered a sure thing.

After all, there are plenty of exciting, fantastical, romancey-schmomancey novels out there, and do we really need another Danielle Brown? I think it's high time a novel was written that is more boring than real life. And I'm confident I'm just the writer to do it.

Yours affectionately,
John Cortland