Tag: eNovelist

Serial Fiction – As Old As Printing / As New As Your Smart Phone

Serial Fiction may have begun when the first person telling a story around a camp fire late at night got the idea

Serial Fiction may have begun when the first person telling a story around a camp fire late at night got the idea to leave his or her audience at the edge of their seats until the next night with a cliff hanger ending and a “to be continued.” If we had a time machine we could go back an listen.

Printed serial fiction got started in the 17th Century with the introduction of moveable type. In the 18th Century, Dickens’ Pickwick Papers started an avalanche of serial novels. Wilkie Collins, the so-called father of the detective novel, published serial novels. In France, Alexander Dumas, author of The Count of Monte Cristo, published serial novels. Gustave Flaubert’s, Madame Bovary; Leo Tolstoy’s, Anna Karenina, and Dostoevsky’s, Brothers Karamazov were all published as serials.

American authors, Henry James, Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe all published serial fiction. Perhaps America’s most influential novel – Uncle Tom’s Cabin – was published as a serial.

Check out this entry at Wikipedia – Serial (Literature) to find out more.

Reynold

 

 

 

 

 

Leaking Water Line Twitter Hiatus–Part One

I was teaching myself how to use Twitter and other social networking when I got my water bill for the previous two months. The bill was much larger than I expected. I hadn’t been doing any watering this winter, and yet the bill was nearly $40 more than the same period the previous year.

I called the water company. They would send someone out the next day to check the meter. It rained all day, and I had jury duty. I wasn’t called to be on a panel, but I was butt-tired from sitting in a large room with all those other potential jurors where I saw lots of iPads, iPods, Kindles and laptops as I sat reading my old-fashioned, analog paperback book.

I got home just as two men from the water company arrived to inspect my water valve. “Wow!” they said, “You’re using about a gallon of water every 10 seconds!” No water was running in the house at the time. “Wow!” they said, “You’ve got a major water leak. Do you want us to turn off your water?”

What an option – no running water in the house until I could have the leak found some where along 50 feet of line and fixed.

So the water stayed on. With my under-water, jury-duty-addled brain, what other choice could I make?

I called the plumber I’ve used for other problems next and told him the story so far. He said I needed to hire a leak-finder and gave me the names of two. “Do they fix the leak?” I asked, in my naivety. “No,” the plumber said. “They just find the leak and then we come and fix it.”

So I called the first leak-finder; he said he’d come on Saturday.

You’ll find out what happened next in my next post.

Reynold Akison
@ReynoldAkison
www.reynoldakison.com