Erik Hare is trying something new. His new project, Mythnology, is part novel, part blog, part fiction, part truth, part written, part performance art, and entirely fascinating, from the sounds of it.
The story itself begins with a simple premise: what if you could look inside people’s heads and read their thoughts? Mythnology is based on what I think are the two almost certain results from this process – that you would probably not understand what you are seeing, and if you grew to understand it you probably wouldn’t like what you saw. That’s simple enough as it is, but speculating the nature of what you’d see is where the story comes in.
Mythnology is many stories at once. It is a mystery, it is science fiction, and it is a hero’s journey in search of truth. The story takes place in real time using a blog format to unfold gradually in a way that speaks to new technologies and new ways of reading. It is ultimately about the use of fiction to probe what the world has no interest in knowing as fact. A bit like The Da Vinci Code, Mythnology explores events that almost certainly happened but have been hidden by their own inconvenience rather than invent a new story of intrigue.
“The title Mythnology is a combination of Technology and Mythology,” writes Hare. “One is based on a system of faith where the other has a core of truth in it.”
I happen to believe that myths, or stories that illuminate a grain of truth at the core of them, are the strongest connections between people. If a strong society is all about connections between people and people or people and ideas, our faith in technology is certainly going to test us in ways we probably do not understand very well yet. The ancient art of storytelling, or the crafting of myths, is how we usually fill the gaps.”
The goals of this novel are as important as the story itself. It will be presented in serial, a chapter per week, for a subscription fee of $7 $9.95. The platform will be the personal blog of the lead character and told from his perspective. Mythnology is an attempt to show that fiction writers can use new technologies to reach their readers directly, bypassing the publishing industry altogether. By publishing “raw” text as it is written, with very little polish and editing, it will be equal parts storytelling and performance art. Taken as a whole, it is an experiment for a new generation of readers and writers.
5 Reader Comments
10:06 am
Thanks for the write-up! One small correction – I decided to up the price to $9.95 (a typical eBook). I hope that this experiement in interactive fiction proves many things at once, most significantly that there is a new way for writers to reach their readers directly – and interact with them on a two-way street.
Please check out the first three chapters, and I’ll have the fourth one up next Tuesday. I hope you like what you see and eagerly join in the disucssion we have going so far.
‘Scuse me, I have to get to work!
10:57 am
Interesting premise, Erik (and I enjoy reading your blog, too). But I wonder if I were able to read someone else’s mind and understood what it was I was “reading,” wouldn’t that make me … them?
11:35 am
Interesting. Erik’s a fascinating writer (whom I’d read a lot more of if he had full content in his RSS feed). Sounds like an experiment of the sort Robin Sloan would try.
12:47 pm
Noodleman – I will take that under advisement as something to explore as this goes on! This is what I hope to get from interaction – new ideas I’d never think of. Thanks!
Erica – Thanks a lot, that means a lot coming from you! But I thought I changed Barataria’s RSS feed to include full content. Chalk it up to incompetence on my part, I’ll look again.
2:10 pm
Erik, I hadn’t checked in a while. Looks like it’s working just fine. Good to know!