Writing Online







>When did you have your first experience with online-media, and what was your first impression of the perspectives?

In 1983, when I was living in Los Angeles, I had a subscription on The Source (1200 baud!) and became addicted to playing Colossal Cave online I kept on trying to persuade other people to join up so that I could make proper use of email.

>What possibilities does the Internet give you as a writer?

Instant research. The other day I need some info about names of bird species. I was astonished at the sheer deluge that inundated me when I typed 'bird' into Alta Vista.

>Do you feel enriched by being able to communicate directly with your readers?

I think it's a good thing. If you're in the public eye in any way you need to protect your privacy so you guard your phone number and address. Which is odd in a way, because if you're a writer you're in the business of communication. Email solves that because it is totally non-intrusive, you're free to answer it or not. It means that you can be reached.

>Here and there short stories or even novels are popping up on the Internet. Could you envision laying out a literary work on the net - perhaps funded by advertising or the much-heralded micropayment?

Probably not something that would be better suited to a book. Maybe something a little more media-rich. I'm thinking about it.

>Even not considering publishing books on the Internet, you as a famous writer could still sell paperbooks directly over the net, circumventing the publisher and retailer. Aren't publishers and book retailers threatened species in this information age?

I probably wouldn't sell books directly over the net myself because it would involve buying a lot of brown paper and string and stamps and so on, but I can certainly see that Amazon.com and so on must be giving real world shops something serious to think about. I think their best recourse will be to join in.

 

>Some believe that the book, that humongous paper thing, is threathened in light of the new electronic media. Will books survice the digital onslaught of the Internet?

Yes they will, though the market will have to make adaptations. Every new medium that has emerged this century - film, radio, tv etc has been supposed to kill off books or each other. It never happens. They just make room and re-adapt. I think that when PDA screens are larger, brighter, and offer at least 300 dpi, people will feel comfortable reading a lot of things off computers, and the book trade will lose some of its business. But it will survive.

 

>Hypertext, the threedimensional crossreferenced document, opens a whole new way of structuring a book - the user clicks through a dynamic and everchanging chain of hypertext links to experience an individual story. Could you envision writing a hypertext-novel?

Maybe not exactly a hypertext novel as such. But the multimedia world more generally interests me a lot, of course. Hence Starship Titanic.







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