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On 'Axis of Andes' and Adapting Online Alternate History for Publication

Online serial writing overall I've found is an apple to the orange of conventional fiction. Even the ones that are trying to be character-based and not pure exposition like internet AH just have different necessary skill-sets and audience expectations. They're meant to be read as they go along one update at a time and it feels weird to look back on a completed/stopped one (that they tend to balloon to ridiculous lengths doesn't help). The most important thing for an author is punctuality, because being a little slow will jar the audience out and often make them simply drop it in favor of the next shiny thing.

I've said that I respect web serial writers for their ability to write a lot in a short amount of time, but the product, especially in hindsight, often looks sour. I also honestly respect James Patterson as a businessman, but that doesn't translate to liking his writing ability.
 
Online serial writing overall I've found is an apple to the orange of conventional fiction. Even the ones that are trying to be character-based and not pure exposition like internet AH just have different necessary skill-sets and audience expectations. They're meant to be read as they go along one update at a time and it feels weird to look back on a completed/stopped one (that they tend to balloon to ridiculous lengths doesn't help). The most important thing for an author is punctuality, because being a little slow will jar the audience out and often make them simply drop it in favor of the next shiny thing.

I've said that I respect web serial writers for their ability to write a lot in a short amount of time, but the product, especially in hindsight, often looks sour. I also honestly respect James Patterson as a businessman, but that doesn't translate to liking his writing ability.

I find this deeply ironic because, well, this is also literally how Sherlock Holmes was written.

And everything by Dickens.

And everything by Dumas.

And I'm not sure if Anna Karenina was meant to be read in this manner but it's certainly how it was originally published.
 
A very insightful article. Given the way almost all of us have had the privilege of becoming published authors, this examination of the issues that arise when transitioning from a free online medium to a commercial printed one is particularly relevant.

When it was published on alternatehistory.com, it had the name The Anglo/American-Nazi War, a blunt, literal title that does not embellish a description of its contents. Such literalness was common in the lectoral environment of alternatehistory.com in the late 2000s, as part of the job of the title was to tell the reader what era the work was about so people looking purely for WWII stories could find it.
It's for the same reason that the practical but uninspiring title Superpower Empire: China 1912 (meant to inform casual forum readers about the what, the where and the when of the thread) became With Iron and Fire.

I find this deeply ironic because, well, this is also literally how Sherlock Holmes was written.

And everything by Dickens.

And everything by Dumas.
Balzac, too.
 
I find this deeply ironic because, well, this is also literally how Sherlock Holmes was written.

What makes it even more ironic is that I use MMA/boxing as a metaphor for that (ie, both involve writing just as both involve hitting people, but they need different skill sets and there's less overlap than you might think)....

....when early bare knuckle boxing had more in common with modern MMA than later gloved boxing.
 
I think the serial novel comparison doesn't quite work, since most timelines don't actually follow a particular group of characters.

It's one thing to tune in every week to see the adventures of Ellie N. Space-Bat and her galpal 'Butterfly' Effie, quite another for a book to be assembled out of two-to-three page updates that in turn are often composed of a half dozen fictional textbook extracts.
 
I was interested by this article as I have increasingly met the reverse of the legitimising effect in terms of the balance between published/printed books and online contexts. With my novel 'Stop Line', I drew on analysis provided by Sandhurst military college in 1974 about the potentials for a German invasion of Britain during the Second World War. The events that unfold in the novel, especially the Germans managing to get 90,000 troops ashore, but struggling to land more, drew directly from that analysis and I gave credit to that work. However, reviewers dismissed this source, arguing instead that online discussion around the impossibility of any German forces landed proved it would have been impossible. Thus, in the attitude of the reviewers, no book on a German invasion in 1940 should now be permitted to be (self-)published. For them even fiction on this topic was now entirely illegitimate, simply due to the discussion they cited.

This was the first time that I had encountered someone in the community feeling than online discussion, because it had been effectively 'tested' and thus tempered by the community was more legitimate (or indeed exclusively legitimate) compared to a published work from a national authority. I put this down to generational aspects in that people of the 2010s view their discussions as better and stronger than work published in the 1970s.

It also marked a shift from when I was first self-publishing alternate history books in 2012. Back then you would get critical reviews complaining that my information seemed to come from 'online sources' rather than 'proper', i.e. published books and because I did not include references they could not tell the legitimacy of what I was using. They did not judge the book for its quality; they were suspicious of it simply because of what they thought might have been the medium the source material was made available through. I would hope now when university students and staff use e-books and e-journals, that such snobbery would have died. However, I do feel it does highlight the shifting views on legitimacy in the online context as has occurred just in the past decade.

One challenge with sourcing specifically from online discussion fora as opposed to say, a blog or a website, is that it is as much a battle as anything else. Those who 'win' through, are not always those who have the greatest knowledge on a time period and country or movement, but effectively those who can 'shout' the loudest and browbeat others into accepting their line. Consequently there is a tendency to very male, macho, militaristic views to 'win' out when on the basis of more objective or opinions stemming from other drivers, difference conclusions for the AH scenario, perhaps 'better' or more appealing or applicable to being morphed into a novel.

I would encourage authors to come back to their own judgement. After all, AH fiction and analysis was being written long before online fora. An author should be encouraged not to be intimidated by those 'laying down the law' in fora or using these as a basis for criticisms in reviews, especially any that dismiss the book/story entirely as invalid (apparently for all time) simply because some men on a forum have decided that was the case.
 
I find this deeply ironic because, well, this is also literally how Sherlock Holmes was written.

And everything by Dickens.

And everything by Dumas.

And I'm not sure if Anna Karenina was meant to be read in this manner but it's certainly how it was originally published.

Yes and literary analysis does highlight some of the challenges that writing to a weekly deadline led to with these works of fiction. However, it seems that people are far less tolerant of books being produced that way now, than they were in the 19th Century. What galls me most is how people judge the quality of a book on the basis of the way it was created rather than whether the writing is any good or not. The more I read published, printed books of low quality, the more personally that I feel prejudice on the basis simply of the medium or format of a story, rather than what is written, the more I am riled by it.
 
I was interested by this article as I have increasingly met the reverse of the legitimising effect in terms of the balance between published/printed books and online contexts. With my novel 'Stop Line', I drew on analysis provided by Sandhurst military college in 1974 about the potentials for a German invasion of Britain during the Second World War. The events that unfold in the novel, especially the Germans managing to get 90,000 troops ashore, but struggling to land more, drew directly from that analysis and I gave credit to that work. However, reviewers dismissed this source, arguing instead that online discussion around the impossibility of any German forces landed proved it would have been impossible. Thus, in the attitude of the reviewers, no book on a German invasion in 1940 should now be permitted to be (self-)published. For them even fiction on this topic was now entirely illegitimate, simply due to the discussion they cited.

Ah, this. I think for Sea Lion or other WW2 divergences, there's been a sort of understandable but still regrettable backlash where any thing that has the Germans doing better than IOTL gets treated as Wehrabooism. I think having the Germans get the bulk of the first wave ashore in a Sea Lion gone ahead is rather unlikely but still possible if the British roll enough 1s, and certainly something that wouldn't break suspension of disbelief in a story.

For my own experience with online AH, I remembered @Elektronaut saying accurately that military AH tended to be ultra-nitpicky and the kind of thing where a reader would throw a fit if a tank that historically wasn't introduced until May 1944 appeared in April 1944, whereas political AH could be exceedingly implausible and almost no one would care. Though I've seen the discussion around my "favorite" conventional Fuldapocalypses shift from the former to the latter. It slowly went from pages of critiques after each post to horribly inaccurate wikiboxes and situations being accepted with nary a peep of protest.

Thankfully, in commercialized AH, even self-published books, I don't see this dichotomy nearly as much.

(By the way, I just got Stop Line. Will gladly read and review it!)
 
I must say, first of all, that I'm extremely flattered.

Generally, I think it's in bad taste to engage reviews and I really try not to do it. It's too easy to fall into the awkward trap of the comedian explaining why his joke is actually funny. But there are some very engaging thoughts here, so I'll try and make some trenchant observations about choices I made and why I made such choices. I can't pretend to offer any kind of organized order.

First and most intriguing, Spanish Spy raises the issue of transiting a story from one form or media to another. In this case, the shift from online discussion / serial to a completed work. This is actually a fascinating issue, because we see this everywhere.

As has been pointed out - Dickens novels were originally written as serials, we are literally not reading them the way they were meant to be read. Serials actually have a long and storied history, there were a lot of newspaper fiction serials, running literally hundreds of chapters, like a predecessor to soap operas. Most of these are basically obscure now, unless there's some connection - Garrett Serviss 'Thomas Edison Goes to Mars', an unofficial sequel to a plagiarisation of Wells' War of the Worlds, or the saga of Varney the Vampire. My impression is that a lot of this stuff didn't cross over successfully.

But still, there are plenty of examples of transliteration from one medium, means of communication to another - Icelandic sagas meant to be recited get written down. Shakespeare's plays are studied by students in classrooms. The 1930's was a great era for serials - both literary serials, as in the works of Burroughs, or cinematic ones as in Buck Rogers. Success varies - I watched the 12 episode Flash Gordon serial in my living room in one straight binge, and it was pretty exhausting. I believe that the experience would have been much different an episode a shot over 12 weeks without all the accumulated baggage. But then again, Burroughs like Dickens manages to transfer very well from their different kinds of serials to novels. We have all watched movies that you can see were originally stage plays - highly verbose, limited sets, emphasis on certain kinds of interaction. You can see the fingerprints.

There often has to be some level of adaptation - I think we can look at Star Wars and Indiana Jones and see the adaptation of serial adventures and the serial format successfully into a new thing. More directly, there's a lot of book to movie adaptations - Jaws, or television to movie adaptations - Doctor Who. Things are lost, things are added, the flavour changes, the very viewing experience and position of the viewers shifts.

It's an endlessly fascinating area, and one that I tried to wrestle with when writing and then rewriting Axis of Andes. There were some caveats. The original version of Axis on Alternate History was not an evolved discussion. Basically, I knew from the start where I wanted to go, what I wanted to do, what the major beats and conflicts were, even some of my gags and how it was all going to end... more or less. So basically, I started out to write a sort of novel, I had a background writing novels and short stories, and I was adapting my story to the palette I had available. Which may mean later, when I was adapting it to a more convention format, I think it was very much adaptation friendly. It's akin to someone who wants to make a movie, lacks resources, does it as a graphic novel, and eventually, it gets picked up as a movie.

Unlike some alternate histories (I'm not judging) which are flat out explorations, this thing was already a 'novel' in its bones. Maybe that gives some fluidity, I'm not sure. Does this mean it's not authentic within the medium and format it originally emerged in? I'm not sure.

One thing I recall very vividly when adapting it, was being very sensitive to the exclusion of the dialogue. There was an ongoing discussion, and while I could claim my own work, it wasn't proper to include or claim others writing and posts. So literally, I had to strip out conversation and turn it into a monologue. This posed certain challenges. I could do it, because I had a clear idea from the start where I was going and what I was doing. BUT I can see situations where a more collegial or more open ended approach would make adaptation much more difficult.

One issue that I faced when adapting was 'filling in blanks' - the adapting the narrative exposed gaps which had to be filled in. I actually ended up writing a whole lot more. I estimate that as much as 25% may be new material. In some cases these gaps were things I'd always planned or wanted to do, but which ended up getting left behind and abandoned by the online running narrative. In other places, narrative segments were rearranged.

And there was a deliberate (and tedious) decision to switch the narrative to present tense to give it a sense of immediacy, which I hadn't needed when doing the original as a serial in real time. I think that there was a deliberate choice to try and retain the sensibility of the original work through adaptation.

Other issues posed challenges. For me, for both versions, the largest challenge was that I was tilling unplowed ground. If we write about the American Civil War, WWII or even WWI there's a certain universal cultural bedrock we can rely upon, starting with high school history classes, but including movies, television, popular culture etc. South America was much more terra incognita, it's a place on the map that everyone knows, but doesn't know much about. More than that, it's a place without a historical footprint in the minds of readers. So there were a lot of details to fill in. I literally had to build the context, the background, that other alternate history stories could much more take for granted. That in itself shaped how the narrative was structured and what the narrative demanded. Sometimes to me it seemed less a novel than some kind of abstract Jenga.

Perhaps that's actually a good way to describe Alternate Histories of this sort - they often don't fit into conventional novel or story formats, with rising arcs, dramatic plot points, etc. But rather, as a kind of academic Jenga, as interesting and useful in it's own way in exploring the human condition.

Axis, I think was something of a hybrid. As I said, I had a novel, or novel structure in mind - beginning, accumulating tension, protagonists and antagonists, epiphany/catharsis, climax, resolution, denouement. Thinking back to the way I approached Bear Cavalry, that's a self contained work, but I don't think it inherently incoporated literary structure. That's why I had to lens it through a framing device. An evolved product like Green Antarctica Ice and Mice, would be much more difficult to adapt in a satisfying way.

One thing with Axis and how it got written, perhaps as a result of the need to build the background and lay foundations which could not be taken for granted, was that the countries themselves became characters. They literally had pasts which drove their presents, internal dynamics which drove external dynamics, relationships. Axis was very much the story of nations as characters, collective characters, but characters nevertheless. This interested me a great deal.

Some things didn't interest me. You'll see no romantic subplots as in Michael Bay's Pearl Harbour. I thought early on employing a Studs Terkel narrative structure - a whole bunch of voices and vignettes. There are interludes like that, personal narratives of this or that individual, excepts from fictional books and histories, even a chapter that's essentially ripped out newspaper headlines - a technique borrowed from 1940's film noir. But these were serving the narrative thread, not dominating it. But it seemed to me that other formats, allowing individual narratives and voices to dominate distracted from what I wanted to do.

I'm not sure it was always successful. I remember after making the shift to present tense narrative uniformly, struggling with sections that were supposed to be excerpts from books, or character interactions. I felt making everything present tense gave things an immediacy, but then I had to struggle with the flattening effect of uniform use, or the jarring effect of switching tenses.

There was always the question of the voice, the appropriate tone. I struggled with 'pants shitting' because that's definitely not how historians write. Ultimately, I went with it, as true to the overall voice, the sensibility of the writing. Academic writing is often dry and careful, sometimes the excitement, the immediacy, the drama of life, its comedy and tragedy gets leached out. I would find this sometimes in reading histories, you're reading the recitation of facts and events, and then there's this epiphany where suddenly I'm struck by the sheer randomness of something, how it must have felt to those people actually experiencing it, without knowledge of future or context and how starkly shocking it must have been.

Ultimately, when you do something like this, you sit there and you have to constantly make decisions, which become chains of decision, following and binding, shaping you. And at this point, I come close to being the Comedian explaining how his unfunny joke is actually hilarious.

But it's actually a subject that interests me. If you look me up on Amazon, you'll find I did a series of books about the Canadian space opera, LEXX, which really is a wonderful exercise in surrealism, with an absolutely bizarre production history. And there I was absolutely obsessed with dissecting the creative process, how things come to be, how decisions got made, and how these decisions shaped events. I did nonfiction books on Doctor Who which explored intersections of culture and technology.

And now that I think of it, I went drilling down into these same issues with my Doctor Who alternate histories - The New Doctor, and A Change of Life. What drives creative choices, and once choices get made, where do they lead? With The New Doctor, I riffed off a real life incident, to chronicle a series where an ad hoc, underfunded, inexperienced crew got a license to the show, and try desperately to produce something while melting down off camera. With change of life, I used a series of real world unauthorized video productions from the 80's to chronicle a series which is driven by events off screen.

Yes, yes, I'm obviously shamelessly self promoting here. But I think they're all relevant points for discussion, and they're all terrific books which might interest readers here. Guys, i wouldn't peddle shit to you, I promise. Or peddle stuff so completely unrelated to interests or discussions that it's naked shilling.

So anyway, I don't think I'm being the Comedian trying to justify an unfunny joke. I'm just a guy who is fascinated with these issues and process. But I could be wrong. I should probably bring this to a close. I don't think I've embarrassed myself yet, but that may mean I should quite while I'm ahead.

I should probably wrap this up though. Let me offer a thought.

I think one of the driving forces for an artist or a writer, is not just finding expression for art, but finding a venue, seeking out a potential audience. I think that's why I hung with the alternate history forum. Here's a chance to do creative things and find an audience.

But alternate history forum is a live venue. You've got an audience only so long as you're in process.

Axis of Andes as a process or timeline was finished years ago. The audience had moved on. If I was lucky, once every year or every other year, someone would stumble across it and give it a few likes. Part of my motivation for moving it to a new medium, apart from money (not a big consideration, but yeah, it's in there) and adapting it to a new form and format was to chase an audience. It worked, I moved from a reader every now and then, to a handful of readers every month, and even reviews. I feel like the work is more alive now, than it was, because I engage. Even the financial side, minimal as it is, is a form of validation.

Ultimately, I think art is not a thing in and of itself, but a form of communication, and we're driven by a need to find someone to communicate with.

Anyway, some thoughts.

Den....

PS: To Spanish Spy, thank you for your thoughts. I hope you do not take this response amiss. And thank you for your review.
 
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