Finally, you can take Fictionaut into the bathtub: we’ve added an option that lets you easily download and print any story as PDF file.

To access the print view, simply click “download as PDF” on the story page’s sidebar. As always, please let us know in the help forum if you have suggestions or experience any problems. Happy printing!

Grappa and beans, love and marriage, Van Halen, bad perms, hurricanes, and pregnant sex — already, there’s an amazing range of stories, flash fiction, creative non-fiction, novel excerpts, humor, and poetry on Fictionaut. One way to keep track of it all are tags.

The most popular tags are listed on the front page, and we’ll soon offer additional ways to navigate the site by tag. Just like comments, tags can be added to a story by anybody, but only the author can delete them — so feel free to generously tag away. You never know when somebody might be looking for a story about waterbeds.

We’re thrilled to announce that Alex Glass, literary agent with the Trident Media Group in New York, has joined the illustrious Fictionaut Board of Advisors.

With Alex’s sharp eye for talent, experience in the industry, and outstanding track record, the Board now boasts a potent mix of writers, agents, teachers, editors, bloggers, publicists, and critics who will help guide Fictionaut’s continuing development — plus, they’re a really good-lookin’ bunch. On behalf of Carson and myself, I’d like to welcome Alex and thank the Board for their invaluable support.

For the October issue of Mississippi Review, Jane Armstrong is looking for ekphrastic prose and poetry. The deadline is Sept. 15, and Jane cautions that she’s already received a lot of poetry about Edward Hopper.

Please see the call for more information.

“It’s a Boy!” is currently the most-read piece on Fictionaut, but Laurel Snyder has even bigger things to celebrate: her first novel for kids, Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, comes out today. Congrats, Laurel!

While we continue to work on improvements behind the scenes, some news from our members: Maud Casey shares her summer playlist with the NYT’s Paper Cuts, and Myfanwy Collins guest-blogs at Mumpsimus about her contribution to Best of the Web 2008.

To give us a place to talk about the site, we have added a help forum to Fictionaut. Please stop by if you have questions, technical difficulties, or ideas for additional features. You can always reach the forum from the question mark on top or the link in the footer.

Fictionaut is steadily growing as we’re sending out more invitations, and I’m thrilled with the great writing already on display.

We’re working on adding a community help forum and improvements to the front and story pages, and Carson has already whipped up a new page with controls that make Fictionaut easier to use. (You can reach it by clicking on your name in the top menu.)

Fictionaut is a shared experiment, and until the forum is working, please don’t hesitate to email me with any questions, problems, or splendid ideas on how to make the site work better for everybody. Thank you all for your participation and enthusiasm.

Because I’m German, you see? At any rate, yes, we’re now more or less ready for beta testing. There’s still the wee issue of automated invite emails throwing themselves, lemming-like, into the recipient’s spam box and the occasional 500 server error rearing its ugly head, but most buttons should now perform as promised. We’re grateful for every brave soul adventurous enough to join and participate, so please do enjoy Fictionaut and let us know if anything’s broken or doesn’t work like it should. Much more to come!

Thanks for stopping by — you must be one of the six people who have been invited to join so far. Carson is still feverishly adding features and eradicating bugs on our way to what we like to call Milestone 2. At that point, we’ll be ready to invite more people to begin exploring the possibilities of the site.

In the meantime, feel free to poke around, push buttons, leave comments, upload stories if you’ve got ‘em, see what works and what doesn’t — and please do let us know if you have any ideas on how to improve this thing. Dankeschön!