Whose Fault Is That

Joshua Allen is probably best known as the man behind the Twitter account Fireland which, in rare moments of new-media clarity, publications like the Washington Post and the New York Times have been fawning over as the stupidly funny thing it is. He was also responsible for House of Wigs, a blog about his old job that pretty much blew everyone else’s crummy “blog about their job” out of the water. He’s also written lots of other stuff.

More recently, though, Josh has begun work on Chokeville, a bizarre, serialized, sort-of-cubist account of a seaside town that has already taken the form of a series of short stories, a Twitter account, a Tumblr, a handcrafted RSS feed, and an email listserv. It’s shaping up to be one of the more interesting creative projects on the internet that we’ve seen in a good long while, and he apparently hasn’t even gotten into the music or fake corporate logos yet.

Whose Fault Is That: According to Fireland.com, you’ve been writing online since 1995, which is pretty well before such things gained widespread acceptance. What prompted you to store your writing online back then?

Joshua Allen: I actually launched it fifteen years ago this week, which is alarming to think about. I’d just gotten out of college and was trying to figure out what I wanted to write, and saw the web as a way to have people read my stuff, even though there were only like 12 people back then. I don’t know, Once I realized how easy HTML was, I wanted to make my own site, and all I had were these little stories, so that’s what I used it for.

WFIT: Was there a point when you realized that your writing had started to gain some sort of relative notoriety?

JA: Well, pretty early on I knew there were people reading it — people beyond my mom and two friends. But notoriety is pretty relative considering how small the web was back then. You’d think you were hot shit because fifty people came to your site.

These little communities would form, as they always do, and for a long stretch, maybe up until the turn of the century, it was all about just trying stuff out in your little community, collaborating on projects, trying out new ideas, and seeing what the response was from your little corner of the internet. Within those groups, I had some notoriety, but again, that was a little ghetto over in the corner. most people were at Yahoo, I guess.

WFIT: How would you say things have changed since then?

JA: It’s hugely different, just because nowadays everyone is online and people finally figured out how to make money online, so the culture and attitude is different. That being said, I feel like you can see a return to the wild west days here and there, because the barrier to entry is so low, and tools exist that make it really easy to put up a site or whatnot, so you get a wide range of people just throwing stuff out there and seeing if it sticks, which is how it was when I got started.

WFIT: What are some ways you think your writing has changed or improved since then?

JA: I think overall, working online (and as a copywriter) has made my writing much more concise and casual. which is maybe a bad thing, but it’s how the internet has shaped my style.

WFIT: Would you say that trend in your writing is what led you to Twitter as a medium?

JA: Yep. That was the whole thing that drew me to Twitter — the character count limitation. I didn’t care about the social aspect of it, I just liked working within that little box. I deal with word counts all the time at work, so I felt right at home.

WFIT: I remember being particularly interested in your post-MaxFunCon “end of side one” tweet, and its accompanying blog post. I was wondering if you’d go into that thought process a little bit more.

JA: Part of it was Twitter-related. At MaxFunCon there was this thing where you could do standup comedy in front of a little audience, and I’d never done it before but am a huge standup fan. So, I basically just took a bunch of my twitter posts and performed them. It went okay, but I realized I was tired of my sick jokes. Performing them out loud really drove that home. One guy there said “Oh yeah, you’re the ‘throw the baby down the well’” guy.

I wanted to take a break from that, and figured I’d stop with the Twitter for a while and then start up Side 2 with something new. which I didn’t, really.

The other part was that agents and editors and whatnot had approached me because of Twitter, and for a year or so I was pitching ideas for comedy books and the like, and they were all corny and didn’t go anywhere and it was kind of bleak, so I decided to just ditch all that and work on Chokeville, which was my long-in-the-tooth novel that’d been gathering dust for a couple of years.

WFIT: Aside from actually getting the ball rolling on it, what effect would you say the “end of side one” era had on what would eventually become Chokeville?

JA: The main thing was that I decided to not think of it as a novel, and not think of it as something to get published. I was tired of trying to give publishers what I thought they wanted, which was usually wrong, and just do my own little thing exactly how I wanted to do it. and of course that meant online since that’s how I’ve always done these things, for better or worse.

WFIT: What would you say is the difference between “something to get published” by a proper publisher and “something to get published” online?

JA: Just the hoops you have to jump through. I feel something like Chokeville, which kind of meanders through different genres, would be a hard sell to publishers, and maybe the end result wouldn’t be what I had in mind.

I decided that if Chokeville ever actually got published, assuming I ever actually finished it, it wouldn’t be a huge money maker and it wouldn’t have a huge audience. I figured if I put up a site, I’d probably get more readers than if it was sitting in a bookstore. and by that point, I’d stopped thinking of it as a novel and more as an ongoing, organic concern. All this is null and void if someone offers me a book deal tomorrow, of course.

WFIT: Ha. I was about to ask you to what extent you’re interested in taking your writing offline in general.

JA: The thing is, every single thing I’ve written in the past fifteen years has been online. It’s basically all I know. I have some vague plans of carving off little chunks of Chokeville into print versions someday, or some kind of deluxxxe version with maps and diagrams and whatever, but I’m at a point where I can’t write something and NOT put it online. It’s like it doesn’t really exist until I put it out there somewhere. I actually wrote the initial draft of the book online, on a little password-protected site, because I was incapable of working in isolation.

WFIT: What were some other projects or works you had in mind when you were conceiving the form that Chokeville (as it exists now) was going to take?

JA: One really cheez-ball influence was The Wire. the whole idea of telling the story of a city by zooming in on different people and institutions, and then seeing how they interconnect. That kind of helped me just toss the idea of one single narrative about one main character. As far as the stories themselves, though, it’s really just a mishmash of a lot of genre fiction. taking the bits of noir or fantasy or action movies I like and putting them together. Although I’m not a Joss Whedon superfan, I really look to his stuff as a model for how to create characters that are real and funny and interesting, while in the midst of crazy genre action.

WFIT: So, in spite of it being told serially, would you say Chokeville is an experiment in something with broader scope? Had you ever written anything like that before?

JA: Not as one big thing, no. Although I’m starting to think of Chokeville as a platform, where I can do the things I’ve been doing for years — random little stories, plays, dialogue, podcasts, creepy music, fake logos for fake companies, blah blah — and just shove them all into this world. I’ve been very scattered for a while now, and the whole “Side 2″ thing was saying: Okay, dude, seriously, find a project and stick with it. So, I’m trying to make this thing a big box where just about anything can go in it.

WFIT: Do you foresee leaving yourself much time for shorter, one-off pieces in between chipping away at Chokeville?

JA: No. I think if I come up with some random piece I’ll see if I can shove it into that site somehow. I was actually thinking I might start using Tumblr like a normal human being and just write about actual non-fiction things, since my Fiction Quota will be met with Chokeville.

WFIT: What type of non-fiction interests you? Would it be like going back to the House of Wigs days, or something like that?

JA: Yeah, exactly. Just the usual blog stuff. Maybe get past my crippling fear of saying anything honest or true. I think the internet needs more people talking about their day.

WFIT: You might be the first person who’s ever said that.

JA: Yeah, I forgot to put a wink at the end.

WFIT: Gotcha. Speaking of chronicling your day-to-day life now versus, say, House of Wigs, at what point did anonymity stop being a concern for you with your writing online?

JA: Ha, yeah, I wonder about that myself. I was really freaked out about anyone connecting House of Wigs to me. I didn’t say anything terrible, but I’d feel bad if someone read something where I was making fun of them or whatever. Anyway, at that time I was very secretive at work about all my online goings-on, I just didn’t want those two worlds to meet, but some point in the last couple years I just stopped worrying about it. I’ve been online way too long to hide my tracks, and anyway everyone’s online now so there’s a lot of noise to hide in. My boss follows me on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Tumblr, so there’s no point in being coy.

WFIT: I guess that’s sort of the tradeoff for the tight-knit communities you mentioned before.

JA: Yeah. I have some friends who still use Livejournal (!) because you can block people from accessing it and just have a little group like the old days.

WFIT: That’s pretty funny. It’s like privacy online goes hand in hand with “the old days” in cases like that.

JA: Yeah. I wonder if you’ll see more and more closed-off communities as a response to that, or if everyone will just get used to the idea that everyone knows everything about everybody.

WFIT: I’d like to think there’ll end up being a happy medium. I think Tumblr is a pretty good example of that.

JA: I think Tumblr is what we all wanted in 1995. Or what I wanted, anyway.

WFIT: In that case, what do you envision the online writing community looking like ten or fifteen years down the road?

JA: Jesus, I dunno. I’m pretty sure the online writing community will BE the writing community. that’s where all writing and reading will happen. And then you can download a story to read later onto a cyber-suppository or whatever we’ll be using then. Probably zero barrier between writer and reader. Probably fanfiction, mostly.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Joshua Allen in October 2010. Chokeville can be found here, Josh’s Twitter is here, and links to the rest of his work can be found here.