wet asphalt

Most magazines on the Internet seem to be locked into an issue format like a print magazine, and if they have a blog it is an entirely separate feature. This strikes us as counter-intuitive. The blog format has become popular because it is accessible and up-to-the-minute, but it is still, after all, simply a publishing format; it can be filtered through categories or tags and have longer posts available after clicking past a description, much like the New York Times does with its news articles. In fact, the only difference in terms of format between the New York Times' website and a blog is that the Times updates all at once, once a day, whereas a blog is updated article-by-article on an irregular basis. We may have grown used to the idea of a blog as a tool for personal narrative, but one must separate form from content.

Eric Rosenfield - http://www.ericrosenfield.com

J.F. Quackenbush - http://mr_quackenbush.livejournal.com

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Welcome to Wet Asphalt.

Stop blaming the reader.

Read any article in any magazine about the state of fiction in America: most often the first thing mentioned will be the competition for time that contemporary fiction is engaged in with television, movies and video games. The reader, we are told, has been lured away by flashy new media. The reader is silly and impressionable and easily distracted by shiny objects held before her gaze. The reader is tired of made-up stories told in prose--this having to do, apparently, with the post-9/11 world, or the post-twentieth century world, or the post-contemporary condition or something like that. No, instead she only wants non-fiction, preferably memoir. Some critics have even derided fiction authors who pursue popularity as trying to be "celebrities." It seems there is some crime in wanting to be read widely, wanting to be culturally relevant, wanting more than to be read only by other writers. "What's the point?" these defeatists say with a shrug. "People don't like to read fiction anymore. It’s not our fault."