A week or so ago I raved about the website of Raspil Iverson. Just wanted to update. I’ve read her fiction online and found them marvelous and funny and full of insights. (I’ve even entered in a bit of correspondence with her).
Her writing is “entertaining but infuriating.” The fiction shorts seem to be variations on a similiar theme, a confrontation between the deluded romantic and the cynical realist. She documents the ways people can be heartless or thoughtlessly cruel in a way that makes us laugh. (In fact, I might even wonder if her stories suggest that all people are thoughtless when it comes to matters of the heart, a very profound thought indeed). Strange, one wouldn’t think that stories about relationship arguments would be this fun to read.
Iverson is a pseudonym of a 29 year old who has written several novellas and engaged in various writing exercises (5 minutes stories and story fragments) which imposes some obligation to produce periodic content. Fragments is one such example, and many other examples can be found on Iampariah.com ‘s Meme’s List. The result is several dozen different people who post thoughts on the same topic, presumably with one page that links to all of them. The implications of this are amazing. It means that that each creative topic will be tackled by lots of different people at the same time, and one can read the meme in all its variations. (I’d seen something like this done on ASSTR and on various story contests, but never so formal a thing).
This formula for content seemed mechanistic at first (I am frankly bored at webloggers who spend a day of the week telling me their answers to 10 questions), but with enough imagination, memes can impose creative constraints and even focus the brain on what to say. Sometimes the mind just flaps about helplessly unless someone decides on a destination for it to sail towards.
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