"The weather outside was frightful."

Shya Scanlon's online novel serialization project is so cool. He explains it on the FORECAST 42 PROJECT site, but the basic idea is that twice a week he publishes a chapter from his novel Forecast on a different literary journal or blog, and we follow the links and read the chapters and thus his novel, for free, all over the place. What's the word I'm thinking of, that this is? Brave? Hip? Maybe. Yes. That and other things. Newfangled.

Is Forecast good? I think so. But honestly I haven't read it yet. I want to read the whole thing at once, so I might wait for most of the chapters to go live before I start--which is probably disrupting the point of the whole thing. Someone is disappointed in me. Sorry. I still think it's a great idea!

I don't know if other people feel this way or if I'm just an odd duck, but I don't really like skipping around and switching between writers' voices when I'm reading. I would feel weird reading Shya Scanlon's book every now and then and not continuously. Coming back to it every few weeks, I would always be like, Who is this again? What do they want? What's going on?

In fact, I don't particularly enjoy reading literary journals for this same reason. Wait wait wait I will explain. I do read them. I love them. I was editor of one in college. I've been in them. I borrow them and carry them around in my bag and trade them and shelve them nicely. They are awesome, but I also like being with one good writer for awhile, even if it's a 100 stories that are only 10 words each and it takes 20 minutes, I want to pause and eat a snack before I move on. Skipping around between writers quickly kind of feels like going to a buffet, and a buffet--let's face it--is no one's friend once it's said and done. It's like, I want to eat this gazpacho and please let me be until it's gone, get those chicken wings out of here. I want to understand it's gazpacho-ness and learn from it and love it and then hate it a little then make some judgment and come to terms with the gazpacho, then go onto something else--poached cod perhaps. I think I learn more from a writer when I'm with them for awhile at once. Oh man, I feel like I just confessed to something incriminating. Is anyone else like this?