These are just a few of the organizations that are easier to join that Fictionaut. How does one become a new member? Can I sell my membership on EBAY?
I traded my lifetime season ticket to Lambeau Field for my membership.
I literally laughed at the title of this thread.
I feel like we will have to start marrying cousins soon.
You mean you're still single?
We need more members. Right now it's just the same small group of people faving each other's poems, I mean you don't have to look at the poem, just the name and you know roughly how many favs its going to get. It's depressingly predictable.
If Fictionaut were Las Vegas I'd be very very rich.
There are many many many many more members than you realize. Most are members in name only, rarely if ever posting. http://fictionaut.com/users/sort?by=newest
I just mean that we need more people participating.
Perils of the internet, no? What is "institutional" online is the internet apparatus itself: sites come, sites go, traffic is always moving. (Two thriving internet sites I started on in my first five years of flash have folded, another one closed its archives almost as long ago. Don't ask me about any online sites that've been around for more than five years or ten years: but even if they should still be around, how fresh are they deemed today, how staid?)
Let us appreciate the investments of time and effort that Jurgen, et al., have put in here to get this place going and to keep it going for this long: has Fictionaut lived up to the vision that started it? why or not? We'd have to ask Jurgen or he'd have to say: what level of participation did the advertised Board of Advisors ever achieve? I have seen a few signs of it, but I've not seen many more signs of their participation.
Wasn't there a spike in Fictionaut invitations sometime in the past two years? That seems to've heralded the retreat in participation we've seen here since. What could activate the present membership? What really keeps invited guests from participating?
Does Fictionaut need some advertised, well-advertised, or better advertised "guiding principle(s)"? some "critical attitude" to model? (Even the universities fail to tell us these days just where we and our beloved literature stand historically in this transitional moment. What are WE telling anyone?)
Keep in mind Dr. Johnson's words of warning: "The best advice to authors would be, that they should keep out of the way of one another" and "the reciprocal civility of authors is one of the most risible scenes in the farce of life". While writing is our common enterprise, I do hope we each and all appreciate that our approaches remain highly individual and idiosyncratic. We contribute different perspectives, we derive varying rewards from our efforts.
To one and all, I say keep up all good work.