“Bloggers: a Novel” was composed directly to a WordPress blog between Jan 26 and March 4th, 2012. The blog was authored by me, but in keeping with the premise of the novel, in which the lives of two bloggers collide with tragic consequences, the site was pseudonymously published by Julian Gray, the fictional academic who, in turn pseudonymously was writing this blog under the name Andrés Amos… Wow! Did I think I could get away with a stunt like that? I did! Did it work? The reader (if there should be one) will be the judge.
I (Ken Beck… ) am bring Julian/Andrés under the roof of my own web domain, along with all the other writings I’ve perpetrated and have had the energy to publish in digital form.
Here is the author’s bio that Andrés published on WordPress in the original edition of ‘Bloggers’ …
I am an aging academic, misleading our youth for another straight year at a small community college in the Blue Ridge mountains. I teach literature. Most of the time, it teaches me. My students range from brilliant to nearly illiterate (we are in the hills, after all), and my approach is andragogic. Even those who do not read have something to say. I say; let them say it.
And, needless to say, the photo is me (Ken Beck … ) at age 35 or so, taken by Bunnye Levy at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washinton for some sort of JCC Dance School publicity. I am looking here, ironically, very Nietzschean. It struck me as somehow perfect for ‘Bloggers.’
Bloggers did not get the sort of distribution among my friends and literary acquaintances that “Boston Tales” did. I did not make a Facebook discussion group, nor did i send out hard copies. I printed a few for myself. After all, one can’t trust that the lights will stay bon in the Free World. I learned from distributing “Boston Tales” that (bad or half-baked) fiction is a good way to kill friendships. I did not (have not so far) sent any agent a query. I read “Fifty Shades of Gray.” It was getting a ton of hits; it sold unedited. Let them come to me. If they don’t, I deserve oblivion.
These notes and scraps bring the project, in its online incarnation, up to date. Everything else on this edition of ‘Bloggers’ is what was originally published serially online.