One Heartbeat

This past December, I started writing a novel about a man named Heivë.

Now, I am not an obsessive counter. I didn’t document the number of times I stopped and stared at the screen before searching through my timelines and notes for information that didn’t exist. Invariably, the struggle ended in a frustrated sigh and a statement or two in the novel that seemed hollow and incomplete. All of these moments centered on an all important question:

This statement had a very simple answer, and I found that I couldn’t give it. This answer meant everything to my main character: the difference between acceptance and rejection of his family identity. It explained why Heivë hated the politician Tenes Sari and how he ended up in the Narahji canyon jungles during monsoon season. After a while, I set aside the novel.

Fast forward to May 2009, where yours truly is less than two weeks from her college graduation with a BA in English. I had no job lined up. My post-graduation plans involved playing with the cat, writing a series of frantic job applications to places that refused to hire me, and panicking about my student loans. Somehow, during all of this, I found a blog post by Jorge Escobar. Escobar argued that most novels written on blogs tend to be cut-and-paste manuscripts with no definitive voice that makes them different from print media. His solution called for a set of guidelines for what blog novels could be, with the added incentive that they could be edited for print publication once finished.

After reading Escobar’s entry on that beautiful May afternoon, I knew that I wanted to create a blog novel, but I couldn’t decide on the subject. A confession? I didn’t actually know until after I had written the first entry and tried to figure out the date. When I found out where my creative impulse had led me, I thought, “FINALLY! An answer!” I didn’t know the role Sehutannyi would play until the fourth chapter, and I didn’t know Salus’s true sexual orientation until she slept with Sehutannyi the first time. Likua had been a nuamë to me from the beginning.

Akačehennyi is the kind of novel that Salus and Suka would read on smart paper with embeddable audio stickers. Rather than endeavoring to write this web novel as a prelude to a bound book, I decided to flirt with all the medium could offer: CSS and HTML. Any paper or PDF version would require not only editing, but translation, because virutal and paper media are so different in what they can do. I decided to take Escobar’s guidelines under consideration when I planned out the work, but we differed on this fundamental account.

Now that the novel is done, I don’t plan on disappearing from the web novel community. In fact, I have a new project going on called Ossia: A Novel. The first entry went live in September 2009. It’s about nanotechnology, music, true love, and the pursuit of sublime sorrow.

Thank you for completing the journey with me. Mësahelepui.