The Saturday morning gathering had "big book launch" written all over it.
Creative pride, nervous anticipation and a hint of deadline fatigue all hung in the air inside a gracious Eagles Landing residence. One day before readers would get their first look at "Aspen Expose," there was enough chatter about plot development and potential sequels among the assembled group to make John Grisham or J.K. Rowling feel right at home.
With a few exceptions:
> "Aspen Expose" has nine authors, who mostly live in metro Atlanta and specialize in genres ranging from "romantic fantasy" to "western historical."
> And it exists entirely on a blog.
"There is a little frustration involved because something's not done exactly the way you would do it," Sally Kilpatrick, 34, of Marietta, said of having to write Chapter 7 a bit outside her usual literary comfort zone ("light paranormal" and women's fiction) and in fewer words than in a traditional printed book. "But that's also the beauty of it."
As intriguing literary developments go, this one's pretty Twitter-worthy: The Internet --- specifically, blogging and social networking --- is changing the way many fiction writers work, and in ways not seen since the first bare-bones author Web sites began popping up a decade ago.
"This type of thing is fairly new, but it seems to be becoming more and more popular," Chelsea Gilmore, an assistant editor at Avalon Books, said of "Aspen Expose." Even young children are starting to co-author so-called blog novels.
"The great thing about everyone having so much access to the Internet now is that it brings together all these writers who might not normally meet. Even if they don't write together, they can pick each other's brains for ideas and ask if they're struggling over the same things."
The serialized "novel-ette" that Kilpatrick et al. spun out of their 5-month-old blog, "Petit Fours and Hot Tamales," illustrates the Internet's impact on writers most dramatically. But not exclusively.
Newly minted authors are flocking to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to create followings even before their books are published. Or to make virtual "appearances" at a time when publishers can't or won't spring for costly book tours.
Even veteran authors are discovering that social networking can be "writing" time well spent.
"I started my Facebook page in November, and in a week I had over 100 friends," said Jacquie D'Alessandro, who's churned out 30 historical romance and comedic novels from her Lawrenceville home since 1999. "I started hearing from people I went to high school with who said, 'I didn't know you were a writer. I'm going to read one of your books.' "
Buzz and feedback
The benefits for writers can go beyond building audiences. Some argue that interacting online actually improves the quality of their work.
Powder Springs novelist Joshilyn Jackson (whose 2008 best-seller "The Girl Who Stopped Swimming" is due out in paperback May 26) blogs regularly, and quite amusingly, on her eponymous Web site. But she also uses her "Faster Than Kudzu" blog to issue pleas for research help.
"I need a good river for drowning people in. In the South please," she recently posted for the new novel she's just started work on. "Know any potentially DEADLY rivers in [Louisiana] or [Mississippi]?"
She narrowed the numerous suggestions she received down to a promising two and plans to visit both sites soon.
"I'm a Southern writer, and sense of place is hugely important to me," explained Jackson, who will release "Backseat Saints," set largely in Amarillo, Texas, next spring. "I don't have the time or money to visit every river in Mississippi. That all came off the blog."
Some authors seek to build anticipation for an upcoming book by making the first chapter available to social network "friends" and then watching it go viral. Others test-drive plots or characters online in order to get fast, frank feedback while they're still writing.
"Instead of saying, 'I'm not really sure if this works, but I'll send it out after I'm all done and see what the publishers say,' you're getting to bounce your ideas around a bit beforehand," said Gilmore, the Avalon editor.
Prose and cons
But the Internet can also be a perilous place, as any teen whose parent just found out about his new tattoo on Twitter can attest. For fiction writers, time spent guest blogging on a book club's Web site or responding to new friend requests on MySpace is time not spent actually writing fiction.
"It's a major time suck," Jackson cheerfully conceded about Facebook, where she plays word games and posts comments about everything from her favorite cereal to broken toilets in her house. "But I'm a writer. If it wasn't Facebook, I'd be stealing the time somewhere else."
Blogging is another story. Jackson begins her writing day by blogging for a strictly enforced 20 minutes, and she swears by its positive effects like an elite athlete does his pregame warmup.
"It's like stretching before you work out --- you have a better workout," Jackson said. "If I close the [blog] and open up the novel I'm working on, I automatically get into it more easily. I'm already in that [writing] frame of mind."
But is she also sacrificing some authorial mystique? If Hemingway had posted regularly on Facebook, for instance --- "Ernest is cleaning out his sock drawer and hoping his editor thinks 'For Whom the Bell Rings' is an OK enough title" --- he might not have written as many novels, let alone achieved such exalted status.
Jackson doesn't worry about anyone who might not be able to separate the fictional worlds she creates from the real one she rambles on about online. But that's not the case with D'Alessandro, who neither blogs on her Web site (www.jacquied.com) nor ventures very far beyond work-related status updates in her Facebook postings.
"If a reader doesn't like my book because of the characterization or plot, that's one thing," D'Alessandro reasoned. "But I would hate for them not to even pick it up because they say, 'Oh, I saw what she wrote [online] and she seemed snippy,' or whatever."
So will she stop going on Facebook?
Not very likely.
"It makes me feel good," said D'Alessandro, who rewards herself with a Facebook break after writing a certain number of pages. "When I'm in that place where my deadline's in two weeks and I have a hundred pages to go and I say, 'I don't know if I can take this,' I click on it and somebody's written, 'I related to your character.' And I think, 'OK, I can keep going.' "
The next chapter
Similarly, the 19 founding members of "Petit Fours and Hot Tamales," all members of the Georgia Romance Writers Association, mostly envisioned having a forum where they could share writing ideas and experiences; it quickly became all that and more.
They take turns blogging daily, handing off the duties each Friday to a special guest. Already, several New York Times best-selling authors and an editor at a major publishing house have made appearances.
When the idea for co-authoring an online novel came up, nine members signed on. Tammy Schubert of Gainesville wrote Chapter 1, in which a brainy female computer programmer agrees to masquerade as her boss's wife at a corporate retreat. She then handed things off to Tamara DeStefano of Snellville for Chapter 2.
And so on, with each writer injecting her own style and plot twists (FBI agents! a high-speed snowmobile chase!) while striving to maintain a coherent storyline. The resulting short novel hangs together surprisingly well and goes places the reader might not have expected --- or that a solo author might not have taken it.
"Aspen Expose's" first chapter was unveiled on the blog on May 3, with successive chapters scheduled to appear every Sunday (it's all archived on petitfoursandhottamales.blogspot.com).
Initially, the idea was to attract more readers to the blog. But writing it made quite an impression on its co-authors, judging by the pre-launch day conversation at Sandra Elzie's McDonough house earlier this month.
The women had assembled for a "write-in," but the talk kept returning to all they'd learned from writing together online.
The Internet may not completely change fiction-writing as we know it. But it will bring us at least one more blog novel. The group is already planning a sequel to "Aspen Expose."
Copyright 2009 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution