What is particularly weird about it is the claim that it is fiction.
Although as I read it I already anyway felt it would be more interesting and useful if used as/in fiction than it would be if it were a factual diary and the author refused to permit it to be utilised in works of fiction. (Though hah, by submitting it he made it usable by any.)
Have you ever read stuff like "Report on Probability A" by Brian Aldiss? Or even weirder stuff that also was "mass" published?
One wonders also how much such material the author can come up with? One of the bonus features of imagining it to be true was the idea that they wrote it already years ago, and thus maybe only had so many years of diary written, thus would run out at some point. But maybe they simply sat at their computer and made up that whole thing in 80 or 800 minutes?
(This is where an article about the novel itself would be useful, and/or one about the author. It could tell me things like when the author wrote it, how long it took them to write it, how many similar sized works they write per year or decade or lifetime, any pertinent info about how or why they came to write it, who the protagonist is, what kind of genre the piece falls into or is it totally revolutionary, carving out a new genre and so on and so on...)
Maybe such large pieces, especially if they themselves do not seem to clarify what even larger work they are a piece of, need some kind of background in place at the least? Like maybe we ought to know who this character is, what world they are on, whether it is a science fiction or fantasy or historical novel, or, who knows, maybe even a romance, and stuff like that before embarking into the actual text of the novel?
That is, maybe at least say hey first we want the encyclopaedia article about the novel, before you start posting the novel itself?
Also maybe novels should in any case be in a separate collection, like wikipedia has books in some separate place not mixed right in with encyclopaedia articles?
I have not looked at Fuzzy's (was it?) 80,000 words from the previous round so don't know if we already have an entire novel started out of the blue without so much as an article about the novel, its author, its genre, what critics say about it and so on prior to encountering the actual text of the novel?
What I have been doing with my Galactic Milieu stuff is trying to put more and more relatively normal sized articles about more and more aspects of the backdrop before even really seriously thinking about dropping even some short stories set on one of the worlds let alone any of the novels I have started over the years that are set in one or more of the worlds.
As it is, starting out into that diary I had no idea who the protagonist is, that should be clickable to the page about that character, explaining who the character is, what works the character appears in, who the author was (linked to the article about the author, when they were born, whether they have died, what works they have written and so on...)
But hey, I have not myself yet posted a page about Dra the Lion and a page about Ezekiel Homo Draconis D'Or, yet I posted two short pieces of story about them recently. Short though, not novel-length (some novels are only 50,000 words or less, right?)
-MarkM-
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