Douglas Clegg - Naomi

[andydecker]

Douglas Clegg – Naomi (Email novel in 1999, print as Leisure Books, 2001, pb, 359 pages)

This novel has a little history behind it.

Douglas Clegg recognized the possibilities of the then developing internet early on. Naomi was at first a kind of experiment. Clegg published it for the subscribers of his mailing-list in weekly instalments. As Clegg said in an interview: "I wrote the novel in weekly instalments and sent them out. I was surprised by how enjoyable it was. As much as I liked writing the novel, it was a different feeling than I have with most of my fiction, because I revised as I went, chapter-by-chapter, rather than do several major drafts of the entire thing."

In 1999 it was indeed something new and fun. I was among the subscribers. In those early years of the net online-time was paid in minutes – I had a locally based provider - and downloads took some time, so getting stuff through mails was a great idea.

This was the (already declining) era of newsgroups, where you could subscribe to things like rec.arts.drwho or Paula Guran's weekly mail newsletter DarkEcho. A web-site like The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 set standards.

The mail-chapters of Noami have died on some long trashed hard drive; I vaguely remember printing them, but these pages are also gone.

The novel was published in 2001 by Leisure Books as an original paperback, which had become Clegg's major publisher at the time. The cover is the usual bland and unexciting affair.
 

[bluetomb]

Jun 5, 2024 10:17:08 GMT andydecker said:

Douglas Clegg – Naomi (Email novel in 1999, print as Leisure Books, 2001, pb, 359 pages)

This novel has a little history behind it.

Douglas Clegg recognized the possibilities of the then developing internet early on. Naomi was at first a kind of experiment. Clegg published it for the subscribers of his mailing-list in weekly instalments. As Clegg said in an interview: "I wrote the novel in weekly instalments and sent them out. I was surprised by how enjoyable it was. As much as I liked writing the novel, it was a different feeling than I have with most of my fiction, because I revised as I went, chapter-by-chapter, rather than do several major drafts of the entire thing."

In 1999 it was indeed something new and fun. I was among the subscribers. In those early years of the net online-time was paid in minutes – I had a locally based provider - and downloads took some time, so getting stuff through mails was a great idea.

This was the (already declining) era of newsgroups, where you could subscribe to things like rec.arts.drwho or Paula Guran's weekly mail newsletter DarkEcho. A web-site like The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 set standards.

The mail-chapters of Noami have died on some long trashed hard drive; I vaguely remember printing them, but these pages are also gone.

The novel was published in 2001 by Leisure Books as an original paperback, which had become Clegg's major publisher at the time. The cover is the usual bland and unexciting affair.
 

Orpheus vibes from the blurb here, never a bad thing in my book.